I love long-form videos that tell information and stories. Documentaries about most any topics, especially ones that last an hour or more, are my bread and butter. But when I’m using YouTube on my TV, I can’t tell from thumbnails what the quality of a channel is. Sometimes I find gold, but other times it’s obvious they’re using an AI voice over or AI imagery and I immediately turn it off. I’m so tired of trudging through the slop, even though it’s just beginning.

So for now, I figure I’ll check with y’all - do you have any preferred/recommended channels that make the sort of video I’m looking for, that are still human-made? I’d love to hear about them.

Joe Scott is good for this.

Depending on which language you speak I can recommend Arte, a French-German cooperation.

Usually not as long, but the PBS stuff and Dr Becky are pretty good for astrophysics.

Has his content gotten more accurate? I stopped watching him after he claimed that the cell signal meter on your phone doesn't measure the signal strength but actually the distance to the nearest tower

I mean, the easiest way would be to go for organizations over individuals...

Like PBS, or https://www.youtube.com/@TheInstituteOfArtAndIdeas/videos

If you're just watching random videos, there's gonna be a bunch of slop

A few channels I like that I think should fit. AFAIK none of them use AI whatsoever.

Stefan Milo (Prehistory/Archaeology)

Told in Stone (Ancient History)

World of Antiquity (Ancient History)

The Pharao Nerd (History)

Trey the Explainer (History and random topics)

Anton Petrov (Space and Science)

Big Joel (Culture/Media)

STRANGE ÆONS (Internet culture and random stuff)

Kyle Hill, Kurzgesagt - In a nutshell (they have channels in many languages) and fern come to mind

Not sure if these are what you're looking for, but:

• Dr. Becky [professional commentary on astronomy and astrophysics]

• Anton Petrov [professional commentary on astronomy and astrophysics]

• What's Going On With Shipping? [videos about the ins and outs of international maritime shipping]

• Not Just Bikes [focuses on the many ways urban infrastructure can be improved]

• Sampson Boat Co. [~seven years worth of videos where Leo rebuilds a 1910 gaff cutter from the keel up. Currently sailing it back to London to participate in race the same boat won a century ago]

• Primitive Technology [builds cool things with sticks, mud, water and pond scum]

• Bad Obsession Motorsport [bought an old mini-cooper and shoved an engine from a Celica GT-Four into it]

• Practical Engineering [a practical look at engineering projects that most people ignore, mostly because they're underground]

• B1M [videos focusing on large mega projects like tunnels and nuclear reactors]

• Jay and Mark [map guys that rightfully complain about Londons infrastructure]

• Florian Gadsby [skilled (practised) potter that makes really satisfying pieces]

There are also channels that are focused on the war in Ukraine and related international shenanigans (in order of avg. video length):

• Perun

• Denys Davydov

• Reporting from Ukraine

• Suchomimus (poor chap made a channel to nerd out about dinosaurs, then the Russians attacked...)

Also check out ytch.xyz; It serves videos from a curated list of channels such that it behaves like cable television.

Also also check out nebula.tv if you can afford it.

While not exactly what you are asking, check out Nebula as it has a lot of long form content that is not slop because they actively monitor it.

SmarterEveryDay is cool, it's a former NASA engineer just explaining cool shit. I'm a fan of his 'how do helicopters work' deep dive, and the world's greatest archer videos.

Veritassium is kinda the same thing, though I don't know his stuff quite as well.

Cathode Ray Dude he does 1 hour plus videos on the history of a niche product or technology. He just did one that is 2+ hours on how they film tvs for movies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qicQUvSUbPM

Historia Civilis https://youtube.com/@historiacivilis

Cambrian chronicles https://youtube.com/@cambrianchronicles

Type 56 https://youtube.com/@type56_ordnance_dept

Veritasium

Fren

Johnny Harris

Compterphile

3blue1brown

tldrNews (several channel each for different region)

RealLifeLore

Money and Macro (actual economist, not finance bro)

Tech Ingredients - DIY-ing machines that seem way more complicated than they actually are

AvE - tool teardowns with the kind of crude humour you only get from being a spannerjockey

Greenhill Forge - Chap that builds homesteading/self sufficiency/off-grid equipment, brilliant at explaining the underlying principles without any jargon

Maximus Ironthumper - An off-grid living guy that's currently building a portable pipe organ in an old Zil truck (and refurbishing said truck in the process)

Styropyro - Master of the question "How dangerous can I make this high voltage device/ Laser without dying?"

Nilered /Nileblue - A mad scientist with the budget to do things like 'making a bacon flavoured apple' just for the hell of it

Dankpods - A channel with the widest variety of music tech and creator of the "Nugget dip" - a series about looking at second hand MP3/phone/early 00's tech that ended up in second hand stores

Alexander the ok - Highly researched and well written videos on topics such as "What is the dumbest nuclear bomb ever put into service?"

Just to name a few off the dome in a variety of Science/STEM topics

Scary Interesting does some horror documentary stuff about, idk, scary situations people have been stuck in. No AI images, which is saying something, cause he always has some kind of background or graphic going.

getting more and more turned off by smartereverydays increase in religious bullshit in the videos

I haven't watched much of his new stuff, so idk anything about that. I do know a lot of his fans were semi-upset about his increase in use of the slow-mo, high-speed camera footage.

Lots of good channels mentioned that I won't repeat, but didn't see Modern History TV yet.

If you like long, human-made, interesting but also a bit leftfield documentaries, you could do a lot worse than Jon Bois.

Example - a four part series about the history of the telegraph, told through an extended metaphor involving the two main characters in 90s sitcom, Home Improvement.

Highly recommended, as is his other stuff. He has a couple of deep dives into the weird histories of the Atlanta Falcons and the Minnesota Vikings that are also well worth watching

Check out Simon Whistler and his team’s channels. Tons of informative stuff and I think they make a sizable portion of all YouTube content lol

https://www.simonwhistler.com/

His stuff is great, there was a short time where he was using some AI generated content but the backlash was so severe that only lasted a handful of episodes

Even if you can't afford Nebula, I recommend browsing its explore section, because many of its high quality creators and videos are also on YouTube. The following are some of my favourite creators on YouTube.

30 minute animated documentary-style videos:
LEMMiNO, melodysheep, fern, Hoog, neo, PolyMatter, Imperial, Cipher, Real Engineering, Mustard

Shorter explainer videos:
Posy, Kurzgesagt, PBS Space Time, Sciencephile the AI, minutephysics, Steve Mould, Half as Interesting

Time Ghost's channels are, IMO, the gold standard for history content. Its very in-depth, but they've so-far covered WW1 on their The Great War channel, WW2 on their World War 2 channel, interwar periods, and their current focus is on the Korean War on their channel, The Forgotten War by Indy Neidell.

All of their channels focus on covering these time periods chronologically - usually one episode a week, covering that week's events. Most of these individual episodes are 10-20 minutes long, but again, they release a new one weekly, so it will take a long time to catch up. As well as these weekly episodes, they also create some specials covering specific topics, and they produce the occational long-form documentary, such as their 12 hour long video on Pearl Harbor or their 24 hour long video on D-Day.

IF you like warhammer 40k or want to get into the lore (it's god damn insanely deep and interesting) there are a few VERY good videos that are multiple hours long that pretty much come out on a weekly basis. https://www.youtube.com/@Luetin09 is my favourite. if I have nothing to do one a weekend afternoon i'll just put his vids on while I do some dev work or play around with my pc configs. each video is easily 2+ hours. and it's just lore.

I don't even know how to play WH40k, I don't own any of the minitures, but damn do I know all the lore because of his vids.

I like Matt Orchard Crime and Society (MOCaS). Like the name suggests, he does long format videos usually on crimes that are either bizarre or unusual for one reason or another. What makes the videos interesting is his sort of cynical take on it and the easy-to-follow dissection of whatever he's talking about. The focus is not on the gore or shock value, rather the morals involved, human behavior and often the law.

I had to scroll way too far to find Practical Engineering and still haven't seen Styropyro

History Time. His videos, especially the one on the Sea Peoples, is peak.

The Whistlerverse is just too full of inaccuracies to be a good source for infotainment

If you like car stuff, I got lots. Some plane stuff, too.

Eleanor Janega does great things on history, particularly the middle ages and adjacent.

History Hit does good stuff.

PBS Spacetime for serious physics and cosmology, much of which goes over my head.

Time Ghost is amazing. None of it based on Internet searches, all based on books, books and more books.

I have some regulars, probably more mid length than long form but they all have the occasional longer piece every so often:

History with Kayleigh - Charming Dutch creator with a focus on pre-historical human and hominids

Extra History - Cartoonified History with a humorous style

Flight Formula - Aviation History

History Buffs - Historical Analysis of Movies and TV

Technology Connections - Ascerbic presentation of technology often delving into the historic context

Gavin the Medievalist - Dr of English who specialises in medieval literature

Four Keys Book Arts - Calm and Patient Book Binder, sidelines in paper marbling

Noah Caldwell-Gervais - Video game analysis, super in depth with a focus on games as narrative

Missing a heap but those are the channels that sprang to mind.

How so? Not doubting, I just hadn’t heard anything before.

Sad to see no love for one of the coolest dudes in Nebula, Grady from Practical Engineering.

If you like seeing how civil engineering projects happen, there's no better channel. It reminds me of PBS shows I watched as a kid

There is this super cool video series debunking some of the horse shit Destin has been saying about creationism in favor of evolution. Would recommend: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLInNVsmlBUlSjLSj9yGEKphF0RYRYBlXg

Agreed. I used to follow his channel until he spoke a hot a topic I actually knew about beforehand and realized bro isn't great at reaserxh or critical thinking. He just parrots whatever Google tells him.

Luetin, Arbitor Ian, Adeptus Ridiculous, The Remembrancer, Baldermort, many more......all making long form (30 min plus) videos put together solely with human effort. There's a lot of AI slop in the 40K space, but also a lot of really creative people making great stuff.

I missed those, I go through phases with him. I get it though, guy cranks out videos and probably gets old using the same cave diving stock videos lol.

Not quite documentaries, but Clabretro makes long videos where you sort of learn about old computer equipment along with him as he figures out how to use a new thing he got. He used to use LLMs to try to figure stuff out in his videos which was a little annoying but he doesn't seem to anymore.

plus he has a cute cat named chloe

lol I think that was exactly it, and it actually had a good long-term effect as I’ve noticed an increase of using actual footage/images from the topics being discussed when prior it was more stock image stuff. And also 100% with the phases. Gotta binge and purge that dopamine 😭😂

Well I discovered it when I saw there was so many channels of his that talked about the similar topics, it felt off somehow so I started to google some of the stuff he talked about. It wasn't necessarily wrong, but inaccurate enough that when you watch a lot of his stuff the image of what happened will be skewed. It has been years since I did it so I don't have exact details for you, but it shouldn't be too hard to replicate (if google/google.scholar hasn't degraded too much).

LEMMiNO is my favorite bi-annual creator.

Nexpo does some really good stuff too, but I think recently he's just been doing like Reddit deep dives, and that is only so interesting.

Look at the list of creators on nebula and check their videos out, I think most of them should fit the bill.

If you find something you like, you can get a nebula sub (or lifetime pass) and cut out all the YouTube nonsense from the experience too!

CRD and tech connections is all I watch really.

I'd be a little wary with Kurzgesagt. Tldw their funding can be traced to Bill Gates' many companies.

How Kurzgesagt Cooks Propaganda For Billionaires

I'm on a Nebula guest pass this week someone generously gave me when I talked about having a hard time finding AI things.

It's a very stark contrast scrolling through the 2 feeds next to each other!

Nebula has a more Fediverse feel. I don't believe it has any kind of real recommendation algorithm, it just has a few suggested categories, like this is Women's Month, so they highlight female creators. Less people contributing, but every video looks watchable even if it's not something I have interest in. The main issue I've had is getting used to a more Netflix looking system to find videos, and just the fact since everything looks interesting, I haven't actually watched much since it's stuff I want to watch when I can actually pay attention instead of it just being moreso background noise. For the $60 a year or whatever it is, it is looking quite tempting.

Scrolling YouTube next to it feels much more like looking at Facebook. Clear algorithm based feed. Lots of mental junk food type recommendations. Real content looks the same as AI. I'm on premium and still have to hear the in-video ad reads. Much more variety (almost no electronic music production or synth type stuff I could find on Nebula, not much on animation, for example) but you have to wade through a lot of crud to find the good stuff.

It's pretty funny that Sciencephile the AI can be recommended as a good non-AI source of info now that more capable AI is real and not just scifi.

LaurieWired

Does Veritasium not use AI elements? Even in the narrative animations?

I watch him on youtube, love his videos. Very straightforward and informative.