ITube, YouTube, WeTube

Erik Bates | October 13, 2023
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Scott Hardie | October 19, 2023
Thanks for sharing those, Erik! I'll try each one. I watched a few Smarter Every Day videos earlier this year after Mark Rober recommended the channel a couple of times, but I had trouble getting into it. If you start from the beginning, the videos are too rough and amateurish. If you start from the most recent, they're a bit long; half an hour is not a small ask of my time. I will give the channel another try, because I trust that it's really interesting and well-done; the longevity and subscriber count prove that Destin Sandlin knows what he's doing.

I previously made some recommendations of YouTube channels that Kelly and I enjoy, but they kind of got lost in a larger discussion about something else. I wish that I had thought at the time to spin them off to a dedicated discussion, so thanks for starting one, Erik. Here's quoting what I wrote before:

For informative videos, we love The Tim Traveller, a Paris-based Brit who travels around Europe teaching about geography with gentle humor; Tom Scott, another Brit who has a gift for turning science topics that sound boring into really interesting videos; and I've previously mentioned Beryl Shereshewsky, a New Yorker who tries recipes that her viewers send her and learns a surprising amount about different cultures in the process. Beyond that, Pop Culture Detective does a great job of breaking down the misogyny that permeates pop culture. Vox tells neat stories about important things quietly happening in the news, and their producer Phil Edwards has his own good channel about neat overlooked topics. Also, Allen Tsai tells rapid-fire movie trivia, sometimes with a joke at the end. and Corridor Crew is a team of Hollywood VFX specialists who explain (and sometimes invent) amazing new technology.

For silly videos, we love Daily Dose of Internet, which collects clips of neat and weird and interesting videos from around the web; HiHo Kids, in which kids have funny reactions to new foods and experiences; and Southern-themed comedians It's a Southern Thing and the related channel Matt Mitchell (their former head writer). Joel Haver makes weekly skits but he's really hit-or-miss. The Graham Norton Show publishes many clips of their often-hilarious celebrity cross-talk. And there's a weird niche genre of editing pop-culture characters into video game footage; Pertinax and eli_handle_b.wav are my favorites.

Scott Hardie | November 4, 2023
So far, I'm really liking Up and Atom, Erik. Thanks for the suggestion! I'm looking forward to trying more.

I hesitate to mention them because the subject matter can occasionally feel bleak, but the awkwardly-named Kurzgesagt produces excellent animated science videos of a high quality. Their music is so good that they release it separately on Spotify.

Erik Bates | November 4, 2023
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Scott Hardie | November 30, 2023
Funeratic has lots of "game" people on it, so I hereby recommend Lateral with Tom Scott to you all. This channel hosts clips from a weekly podcast in which Tom Scott gets online with three other YouTubers and/or podcasters, and they take turns asking each other interesting questions about history and culture, and you try to figure out the solution faster than they do. The entire 45-minute first podcast episode is online if you want to see what a whole block is like, but otherwise the clips are all around 5 minutes, each one a perfect fun little dose of food for thought.

There must be something in the water lately, because two unrelated favorite channels of mine just released hour-long animated videos with little or no narration, and they're both excellent. Theme-park channel Defunctland released a musical depiction of how Epcot made it from Walt Disney's concept to opening day, and science channel Kurzgesagt released a recreation of Earth's entire history at the scale of 1.5 million years every second. I'm impressed at the creativity that it took to pull off each of these.

Speaking of Kurzgesagt, I love it when a video bends my mind and makes me consider the universe in new ways. And speaking of Tom Scott, his main channel continues to put out really interesting videos, and while he deserves his upcoming break, I hope that he's back at it before long.

Scott Hardie | May 16, 2024
As much as I've recommended YouTube in recent years, like in the above conversation and elsewhere, today I discovered one reason why not to use it: Your private viewing is linked to your public activity, and if YouTube decides that something you did publicly is a violation of their terms of service, you'll suddenly find all of your private activity deleted too.

Me, I'm not much of a public user. I've never written a single comment on YouTube. I've only ever uploaded two videos to my personal account, one a 30-second recording of a D&D game from the early 2000s, and the other a video thank-you to Steve West for his contribution to my 2019 Extra Life campaign, neither of which is available for public consumption. (I have a separate Funeratic account that is linked in the footer below, but I haven't uploaded anything to that since 2011.)

At 3am this morning, I received an email informing me that due to some kind of scam-related content on my account, it has been terminated. There was no further explanation except a link to the official guide to scams on YouTube, which is frustratingly generic. With this action by YouTube, all of my private activity was gone as well: Tens of playlists marked private because they're for personal use, hundreds of channel subscriptions, thousands upon thousands of hours in my watch history, all gone without further explanation. I nearly had a panic attack: YouTube makes up approximately 99% of the TV viewing that Kelly and I do, especially since we folded our Max and Paramount+ subscriptions into it, and I've cumulatively spent countless weeks curating those playlists to keep them organized. Rebuilding them from scratch was not just a daunting prospect, but it felt pointless; what would stop YouTube from deleting me again if they had no reason the first time?

I'm serious when I say that we're heavy users of the program. Here's a screenshot of my playlists. With the exception of the auto-generated "Liked Videos," every single one of those is a set of YouTube videos, TV episodes, or movies that I'm saving for us to watch later. We carefully organize our content by topic and channel, so that we can jump right into whatever we're in the mood to see at that moment. (The ones with a TV-static thumbnail are only for me, obscured because Kelly doesn't care about those. My "Watch Later" playlist recently hit the limit of 5000 videos and so I've started to break it down by year, which is obviously going to take me a while.) We spend a combined $58 a month on YouTube Premium to skip ads, Max and Paramount+ as embedded services, and YouTube Family so that Kelly can access my benefits, which, at the risk of sounding snooty, is a lot more than the $0 a month that most people spend watching the service.

YouTube offered me a link to the account-deletion appeal form, which allowed a measly 800 characters (about three sentences) for me to explain the situation. Since I hadn't posted any scams, I didn't know what to say, but I offered to let them delete all of my public content if they'd just let me keep my private data. A few hours later, they responded that a review had turned up no problems with my account after all, and that everything was fully restored. How quickly and arbitrarily they take it all away, and give it all back! I'm relieved but also rattled.

I guess the lesson is, don't put all of your eggs in one basket. Besides just YouTube, I use various Google services for a ton more in my life. What if this account deletion had been applied to ALL Google services across the board? Be very careful how much you come to rely on one service provider. And back up your data by exporting it as frequently as they'll let you!