i only watch history videos that either 3+ years old or from a youtuber i have some basic level of trust
Dude my coworker keeps sending me AI astrophysics videos because we have arguments about “new discoveries” not being real. It’s going to make people dumb as hell. Tbf he already is
Ai voice or is just text to voice? Some people are adverse to having their voice online like that, but still want to participate in things.
Seemingly AI voice. There’s a really good Kyle Hill video about them.
That was supposed to be to OP, but thanks!
Its like they’re not even people anymore.
Idk about that, but certainly there is a very strong correlation between people like this and those who feel like they need to consult chatgpt or grok to filter out basic facts. Their willingness to give up their own thoughts and opinions bodes poorly for the future, especially of democracy.
give up their own thoughts and opinions, freely
But also
saying ‘its like they’re not people anymore’ is a bit much’
It’s valid critique, but I don’t like the precedence of being stupid also taking away your humanity. Education can fail us in deliberate ways from the top sometimes, I wouldn’t say folks with a bad education aren’t human. Even for folks who lean out of otherwise good education, or who don’t hone their critical thinking skills, I judge them as humans who suck. Being in the middle of a fascist regime and with mainstream news dehumanizing minorities, I think language around humanity is important.
The easiest way to get out of an argument with me is to send me a YouTube video. It has always been the worst source of information about everything, even worse than early Wikipedia. I will not watch your YouTube video.
And it’s slow as hell. They always think their point is both complicated and interesting. Text remains the best medium for communication.
Sorta depends for me. If I can connect the YouTuber back to something valid like an event where science is held in high esteem or collabs with people I do trust I’ll give it a shot. Basically every single time this is not the case, and in his case it’s literally never the case. Dude searches for his batshit view, clicks the first video without watching it, then sends it like I’m supposed to filter it for him. He’d believe in aliens if the video had 1 million views. He kinda does anyways since the why files is his favorite channel and it’s barely researched (by AI) slop, where whatever his agent can’t disprove becomes a “mystery”
One of the examples that comes to mind is the Navy UAP videos, where he looked at what was clearly a bird, wing flaps and all, locked on to by a fighter jet and said “that’s a craft and WOAH it disappeared (when the pilot lost autotarget)” as well as, “a fighter pilot on Fox said it’s a vehicle of some sort and he’s a lot smarter than you.” And got indignant and walked off when I said, “smarter and paid or a lot dumber than me, either way he’s wrong.”
I brought up the dumbass sheriff chasing Jupiter on a winding road too and he felt it wasn’t Jupiter because the sheriff was an expert witness for some reason. Dude’s cooked
I have stopped using the youtube frontpage and blocked the algorithmic recommendations from appearing.
Now I only browse my subscriptions.
My recommendations for food history: Tasting History with Max Miller + Townsends
For Military History: Lindybeige
For Medieval Clothing: Bernadette Banner
Medieval Life: V. Birchwood
General History: PremodernistMore recommendations:
Miniminuteman (history/debunking viral claims)
Ancient Americas (video essays about various pre-contact societies in the Americas)
Time Team (filming archaeologists as they excavate a site)
A Brush With Bekah (demonstrations of historical pigment use, plus education about why it’s toxic AF)
Google debunkers unite!
History in Taberna is also great.
And Stefan Milo.
And How to Drink, when the episodes are more history focused.
For food, Weird Fruit Explorer is awesome. It’s very niche, but high level he’s a contortionist who loves extremely rare fruit and travels the world on a mission to try every fruit there is, the rarer and weirder the better.
It’s a very fun show. Sort by most watched though since not all episodes are the most interesting IMO.
Seconding Max Miller. For history I would also like to recommend Timeghost. I suspect that most people interested in the world wars already know, but for those who don’t; they’ve done both WWI and WWII week by week, with deep dives into big events (including a 24-hour D-Day documentary) and a big focus on the human cost of war. I cannot recommend them enough to anyone interested in recent history!
For ancient history and prehistory, there are extraordinary riches:
History With Cy
Dan Davis History
Stefan Milo
Ancient Architects
World Of Antiquity
toldinstoneA good way to find more, pull that thread, is to see which other YouTube channels these channels follow.
For military history also Animarchy and if you like a touch of weirdness, Lazerpig.
You’re using Youtube wrong
You’re using Youtube
Youtube is more than just the website or the app. There is a ton of data that you can (or should be able to) use in different ways.
Youtube is full of fantastic history programs, what do you use it for?
I’m afraid
Avoid the youtube frontpage and “algortihm” like the plague. I solely use newpipe these days. Only watch subscribed channels. Find new channels through external recommendations, Youtube itself does not recommend what you want or like, it recommends what they want. No tinfoild head stuff, just economics.
I watch history videos to fall asleep, think I’ve found 10 channels now that isn’t ai slop. I’m always very skeptical when I click on a video from someone I don’t know. It’s annoying as hell
Recommend “The Rest is History” program on youtube, very good and a large catalog of videos, zero AI.
Usually when its ai voice you need to switch the audiochannel.
My YouTube feed is 9/10 in English and for some reason YouTube tries to force German ai voice on me :(
Possibly true.
Lately, Youtube decided it would be a great idea to automatically translate every video into every language, so that people can watch videos from other languages without any barrier. A good idea in theory, maybe, but they implemented it by replacing the original creator’s voice with an AI-voiced AI translation (without the creator’s consent, of course) … and the technology is far from good enough to accomplish that well.
Install the ‘YouTube No Translation’ extension to get rid of it, it’s so incredibly annoying. Insane that Google still can’t fathom bilingual people existing 🙄
The amount of extensions that I need to have to make YouTube a usable experience again istg
true, I currently have about 5 or 6 extensions to keep that crap usable.
Ublockorigin for ads, improve YouTube for misc enhancements (block shorts, delete button on playlists, codec options), hyperchat to optimize the slow chat on live streams, that no translation extension, sponsorblock to skip in-video ads and identify sponsored content. Theres also dearrow but I disable it for performance reasons.
On mobile it not better, but Morphe fixes all of those quirks too.
Just amazing how shitty a service can get, but shareholder value shall rise infinitely I guess
Unhook can be pretty useful too. Fixed my youtube experience, pretty much.
Just looked it up, seems like Improve YouTube already does pretty much the same things as unhook (hiding unwanted sections, redirecting home to another page)
They prolly took US-Americans as a standard lol
Last time I looked, if you clicked on the thumbs down a new button appeared with some label like “don’t show me more stuff like this”.
A button which Youtube’s algorithm will promptly ignore.
Note on shorts they removed the thumbs down button shortly after AI slop became a huge thing in shorts.
That seems to indicate a certain direction to me.
It’s gotten so bad.
I try to stick to my same subscribed to channels and even these days, the quality has dropped because their revenues are being affected by the AIpocalypse
It’s a bad time all round
you should look on fmhy.net (free media heck yea). It gathers all sorts of free internet content like linking to archives with history content or places to find recipes.
Worked better for me than a searchengine for starting with sourdough (my starters could be dead by now)Respect for using the “Le Me” format… It’s an older code but it checks out.
Yeah, but i got confused on the first panel and thought they had mangled Lemmy, before i remembered Le Me.
Lemmy was foretold… we just didn’t know… 🫣
If you want some good channel recomendation:
History:
More recent stuff:
Non-AI youtube history channels I like:
https://youtube.com/@historyofeverythingchannel
The channel Historia Civilis has made excelent videos about the military exploits of ancient Greece and Rome. I highly recommend.
I’m sick of all the extremely shitty formulaic “Sci slop” channels with illustration mas by Chatgpt
