What are your favorite (Youtube) video's/documentaries of all time that you can watch again and again?

Thunder@lemm.ee to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 90 points –

For me: 1.) Cicada 3301 - Lemmino [17:53]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2O7blSSzpI

2.) Why gravity is NOT a force - Veritasium [17:33]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRr1kaXKBsU

3.) The cost of Concordia - Internet Historian [48:48]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh9KBwqGxTI

4.) Fast inverse square root - Nemean [20:08]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8u_k2LIZyo

5.) The dark side of the Silk road - Barely Sociable [1:14:45]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpMP6Nh3FvU

Sorry, i'm a nerd. If you are not: only watch no. 3; it's funny.

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Bill Wurtz's history of the entire world, i guess and its predecessor history of japan. They both blur the line of "documentary" a little, but are very good, and his music (beyond those videos) is also great.

Most any of Qxir's or Plainly Difficult's videos.

I could probably go on, but my nerd is showing maybe a little too much, and I watch way too much youtube.

Seconding Qxir. His humor + artstyle + accent combine into a really amusing end result, plus he actually does a fair bit of research into the topics he covers.

Along those lines, Sam O'Nella Academy is another channel of "amusing narration + semi-crude yet understandable illustrations + genuinely informative". I started with his video on Tarrare and chortled mightily throughout.

Hbomberguy's entire channel is a goldmine. It's hard to pick just one so instead here's three, in decreasing order of silliness

All of them are about 2 hours long each

Aside from that, Cathode Ray Dude's recent The Unholy Saga of Phoenix Hyperspace is quite good, though it's a really computer nerd-y topic.

And finally, if we're allowing conference talks, literally anything Deviant Ollam has his name attached to tends to be really good, though he does tend to repeat stuff between his talks. Here is four that's different enough from each other:

Defunctland's Disney's Fastpass: A Complicated History is a fantastic dive into the logistics of managing a giant crowd over several years, from approaching it as an engineering problem all the way to exploiting the system for profit. It's such a fascinating problem to me, and it's presented in an engaging and fun way. The rest of the channel is fantastic too!

I'll also recommend Fascinating Horror - these aren't fictional horror stories, these are real disasters told in an incredibly detailed but highly respectful way. They don't just explain the disaster and why/how it happened, but also the regulations that came afterwards to make sure these would never happen again. They're all high quality, but if you want a starting point the Nutty Butty Caves will give you a good idea what the channel is about.

Hey, I think this can be interesting to some of you

There is a Non-profit organisation based in Swiss, that aims to evaluate the quality of Youtube videos, and generates global recommendations from that: tournesol.app

Currently, there is about 25000 videos included (~50% are in French, ~40% in English, 10% other) at the top of English recommendations we can find Kurzgesagt, Science4All, John Oliver LastWeekTonight

If you like to give your opinion, please come by !

This works like that:

  • Paste the link to two youtube videos, one on the left, the other on the right

  • Move cursors from left (meaning you prefer the left video) to right (if you prefer the right one instead)

  • Confirm to update the global recommendations

Pros: The recommendation algorithm used, 100% Open sourced and developed by universities, said to be mathematically safe against a number of risks (strategic voting, bots attacks...) and "more representative to public opinion than commonly used polling methods"

Cons: The current low number of users (recommendations are pretty biased towards living healthly and reducing carbon footprint, for the moment, not a lot of entertainment yet)

Note that I'm not affiliated not part of the associative, I'm only a user of Tournesol, comparing videos from time to time to improve global rankings

Summoning Salt's The Quest to Beat Matt Turk. https://youtu.be/TBR9ypSOTGQ

It is one of Salt's greatest videos, and showcases some of the best editing and storytelling I've ever seen on YouTube. Probably the best part is that you can go in with no knowledge of the game, like I did, and come out fully understanding everything about the game.

I'm a huge fan of "The Alt Right Playbook", which breaks down the dirty tactics the alt right uses to recruit people.

Also a huge fan of "In search of a flat Earth", which looks at conspiracy theories, how they evolve, why people believe in them, and why "the shape of the Earth might actually be the least relevant part of the flat Earth conspiracy".

If you can get past the weird framing device, the Plinkett reviews of the Star Wars prequels are an excellent deep dive into the issues with those films: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxKtZmQgxrI&list=PL5919C8DE6F720A2D

Jenny Nicholson's videos are great, but her documentary on "The Last Bronycon" is special, as the realization dawns on you while watching that she has more connection to Brony culture than you might have guessed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fVOF2PiHnc

Facts in Motion vids about flood basalt volcanoes and extinction events:

https://youtu.be/st\_2C\_Wrw4A

https://youtu.be/NrbdYcNTo7Y

I really wish he were still making videos.

Similarly, Nick Zentner's lecture on the Flood Basalts of the Pacific Northwest. I can't tell you how many times I've watched this exact lecture (although all of Zentner's stuff is great):

https://youtu.be/VQhjkemEyUo

Vsauce's Which Way Is Down. Of all his videos, this is the one I keep going back to:

https://youtu.be/Xc4xYacTu-E

Anything by Richard Feldman. I'm binging all of the talks he has given for a third time now

Agree with 1 and 3. I haven't seen the other ones, they seem interesting.
The only one I can think of right now, because I've seen it like 3 times, is The Internet's Own Boy.

So this isn't on YouTube but the Ken Burns Vietnam War Series is absolutely phenomenal and hands down the best documentary I have ever seen, not even close. If you can find somewhere to watch it I recommend it endlessly.