Ask Lemmy

Not exactly the question, but there's no way I can enjoy Internet Historian now that we know he's a Nazi.

Linus Tech Tips.

They were pretty good in the beginning but the drive to create more and more output diminished the quality of the individual vids. Hence, the latest controversy.

Linus Tech Tips .....

Click baity as heck and most of the content are just ads or have misleading information.

Sabine Hossenfelder, used to love her takes on physics until she fell in the usual expert's trap of believing she can talk equally usefully about things OUTSIDE her expertise.

First trans care, which missed a few important nuances. Then autism, which had a decades-old perspective and was at best "not informative".

Then hoo boy Capitalism where she made a huge tangled MESS confusing and conflating markets with monetary systems and credit, all apparently based off half-remembered textbooks from 1950 using long-disproven historical claims.

A lot of criticism was sent her way. None was acknowledged, or apparently taken to heart. Repeatedly.

From skillfully presenting physics with a "explain it like I'm 5" style, she's now spouting any trending topic in a "explained by a 5 year old" style.

Mark Rober.

He got louder, flashier, less techy and more talky and is doing a gazillion reruns of the same general idea over and over. Can't really enjoy it anymore.

Cinema Sins. Used to be 5 minute videos pointing out continuity errors or over-use of something (Iron Man 2 Bird Bonus Round) but then bloated into 20 minutes of nit picky bull crap.

I used to watch iilluminaughtii several years ago, probably because I've been grabbing popcorn and enjoying watching someone dunking on multi-level marketing since, uh, 90s at least. Then I watched some video that was about some topic that I was kind of in middle of a deep dive, too (I can't remember which exactly. Elan School, probably?). And the video was bland as hell. And then I was like "yeah, most of these other videos are kind of forgettable shallow pap too".

...and this year we found out about the whole landlordy corporate town fancier backstabby financial abuser helicopter-CEO situation. And the content mill situation. And the plagiarism thing. Can't forget the plagiarism thing. ...I was like, "oh this all just makes sense now."

Veritasium. After he put that uncritical commercial for the self driving car company on his feed I couldn’t take any of his content seriously anymore.

AvE. Was cool until pandemic happened, then got extra "conservative". Couldn't watch anymore.

Penguinz0. His content was garbage when I discovered him so I just avoided him but one day I got recommended his old commercial parodies and it was pure gold. His videos about Kate cooking were also great too. Nowadays, he's a drama youtuber. He scroll Twitter, read about a random scandal, do the bare minimum research to not sound like a fool and then make a video about it.

Marques Brownlee (a.k.a. MKBHD).

A few weeks ago he posted a new episode of his podcast with him and a few others. They talked about Nothing Chats and Sunbird, the iPhone getting RCS and the usual OpenAI drama. At some point Marques mentions the fact that iMessage with RCS will still be "unencrypted". Following that they ponder over why RCS wouldn't have this fabled encryption, such a weird thing that RCS doesn't support encryption from the get-go, and after brainstorming for a bit someone adds the information that it indeed will be encrypted in-transit, but not end-to-end encrypted. And what comes next boggled my mind: Silence ensues. No-one says anything. You only see the faces of four grown-ass tech influencers that are stunlocked and completely unable to process what this neverheard difference between encryption methods might mean. It all just ends with "I've been trying so hard to figure out what that means. I can't." And then.......then they simply move on, not even addressing for a second this knowledge gap and solving it right there on the spot. You can watch it if you want. What hurts the most is that Marques' co-star, David, the guy that looks the most confused, made a 1+ hour history-lesson type video a few months ago about the history of the internet and the importance of HTTPS encryption.

Now, if we're talking about visual quality and overall visual production quality, his videos were insanely enjoyable to watch. I also don't want to shame anyone for not knowing something and I understand that this is in part the consequence of an ever growing company at this point. The channel is still growing and has reached 18 millions subs. Him (and his team) also cover a constantly growing tech sphere, from phones to laptops, from e-vehicles to supercars, from tech politics to tech blunders. But coming from a guy that has been a "tech influencer" on YouTube for 14 years, a guy that over the years had the chance to interview Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Sundar Pichai and surely had the chance to surround himself with experts on all sorts of topics, a guy that dedicated entire videos to Nothing Chats, the role of Quantum Computing in encryption or the dangers and potentials of the Metaverse, this kind of shocked me. I just couldn't take him seriously anymore and I hate myself for it. But it's like my grandma not knowing the difference between a normal call and a WhatsApp call, expect that he's been talking about tech for more than a decade.

VSauce. They used to be THE shit years and years ago. Their content now has been... Rather sparce and uninteresting.

I don't mind content that takes a long time. Ahoy and Lemmino are great. But VSauce just became... Feeling like a waste of time.

Never would have called him a favorite of mine exactly, but a channel I used to watch was Shadiversity. Had some interesting videos on medieval life and castles. These days he seemingly only does "let's test this wacky weapon" videos and has a terrible second channel where he whines about "woke culture".

Joshua Weissman. He started out super chill, most of his recipes were pretty approachable, the editing wasn't over the top, the b-roll stuff at the end was tasteful.

Now it's like he's catering to a whole different crowd. The editing is over the top and jammed with memes, he's more idk, psychotic isn't quite the right word, but it's way less chill, he's constantly saying stuff like "if you don't use XYZ ingredient then what are you even making this recipe for?", his recipes are more over the top, and he has a much more elitist opinion of himself and his food. The change happened so quickly too, it was kind of shocking.

I have the opposite problem where Youtubers who I watch because I enjoy their unedited, off-the-cuff content keep deciding to put more effort into their channel and start producing videos that are scripted and edited well, which I find way less interesting and watchable than their stream-of-consciousness rambling was. WolfeyVGC is a big one. He theoretically has a second channel for low effort content but he rarely posts to it.

CinemaSins. They were always kind of bottom-of-the-barrel, but their early videos pretty much just amounted to narrating the IMDB trivia pages so it was harmless. I went back and checked in on their channel for the first time in 8+ years and holy shit they've gotten bad. Videos running a quarter the length of the movie they're doing with word-salad voice over that doesn't even make sense.

Also: "[female actor] isn't 18 in this scene" was just as fucked up in 2012 as it is in 2023.

Bon Appétit after the issues at their workplace were raised, they all make some decent content outside the BA brand though. Nice to see Sohla doing so much content too since she wasn't treated the best at BA.

A lot of tech YouTubers (such as Mr whose the boss). Just a hype man reading specs and hyping up shit.

Just look at him speaking about the Huawei Mate 60 pro. What a load of bullshit.

Pretty much every car repair channel starts off good, then quickly changes to fixing exotic cars that nobody can afford.

Sinfest. Used to be a charming and funny daily webcomic about an eclectic cast of colorful characters getting into surreal and philosophical situations. Then one day in 2011 it suddenly swerved hard into radical feminism. I'm not anti-feminist myself, but the comic became obsessed with it -- literally every strip was related to The Patriarchy in some way and it became extremely preachy and boring.

I checked out for the better part of a decade, and when I randomly revisited a couple years ago it turned out that the author had transited the TERF-to-fascist pipeline and turned into an extreme-right antivax conspiratorial fascist loon, of the "teachers are secret pedos" and "the war in Ukraine is a hoax" variety. Super sad to see.

Lock picking lawyer.

Used to be a channel about how locks works, how lock picking works, cool locks and shitty locks.

Now it's just a channel to sell his tools.

Less "downhill" and more "dropped into a sinkhole straight to the pits of hell," but Creepshow Art. I thought she was really fun to listen to, and it was interesting hearing tea spilling from a community I'm not privy to. At some point she opened up about a stalker who'd been following her for years, harassing her constantly, trying to get her fired from her job by sending compromising photos from her past to her boss, threatening her life... And then it turns out she was the stalker, and the victim was Emily Artful! She was the psychopath threatening someone's life and trying to get them fired and shit! And I was planning on donating to her patreon!

I didn't see anyone mention streamers. For me that has to be Asmongold. He is now just drama farmer and reacts to videos and reddit all day. I would even say he is slowly turning into another Andrew Tate.

Louis Rossman.

I enjoyed his board repairs, now he's only rambling.

Rooster Teeth

They have had so many issues back to back that I don't enjoy them anymore. From Ryan coming out to fucking fans when he has a wife, to the underpaid and crunch heavy work they put staff to, and then firing Matt who was one of the most beloved members.

When they sold their company to WB they sold their ethics at the same time.

CGP Grey. His last 114 or so videos were literally just a single round of rock paper scissors each.

Kidding. His videos are still great.

AAVE. He used to be a cool tool review channel who really got into the nitty gritty of how electric tools worked and what made them quality. Now he's an anti-vax spouting asshole who loves the truckers who blocked the bridge in Canada. Spiraled into the right-wing like a waterslide

H3H3. As soon as they got notoriety for their defamation lawsuit against the cringe pickup artist guy, they abandoned making reaction videos and instead became a trashy podcast.

Boogie. Not a favorite of mine and hated the Francis stuff, but I used to watch some of his gaming videos. He did his weight loss surgery about the same time as a relative so found that interesting. But good lord it's been a descent since then,all of it self inflicted. Be it saying something stupid, firing a gun within city limits while getting into a pissing match with some other YouTube idiot, or losing his money in crypto. It's hard to imagine someone that's fallen further than him.

Watched the documentary on him last month and then went through his channel and it was embarrassing.

Ethan Klein and H3. Before the Israel stuff happened in October, the silliness was enjoyable because it seemed like the guy had an earnest, intellectual curiosity underneath it all.