Kind of a trend, the amount of youtubers who i had loved but their content became generic after gaining popularity is quite a bit, most drastic one being mrwhosetheboss, his uniqueness went down faster than MH27 MH17
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.
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.
Eh, I would have to disagree with this, I have been watching him for a while and as far as I can tell the quality is the same the only difference now days is that he mentions his tools in the videos while picking the locks, so the videos didn’t even really get longer.
He’s very much not liked in the lock picking community.
Not only does he push his overpriced tools a lot, most of them are very much not needed. He also puts a lot of focus on specialized car lock picking tools which are expensive at, made for each brand basically, and in a very dubious grey area which is a big no no in that “sport”.
From a purist side there are also a lot of complaints.
Feels like it’s mostly because there’s not much to talk about anyway, whatever needed to be said has already been said in one of his 1.5k video. I start follow his channel before he established his company, it’s mostly the same and it’s really just about how he defeat the lock. He sometimes still talk about unique lock he find interesting though.
Yeah, those unique locks are the highlights I remain subscribed for. He used to dismantle locks more often, but at this point it’d just be more of the same if he kept doing that.
Might be a good idea for him to change up his format a bit to make fewer videos but have them be more of a deep dive into whatever locks he’s focusing on, maybe do more of the old “now let’s see if we can open this with the leg of a Barbie™ doll and half of an M67 fragmentation grenade” stunt videos. I remember he used to get more experimental with his approaches when there was back-and-forth with Bosnian Bill.
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.
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.”
Illuminaughtii was getting pushed into my feed so hard right before everything went down that I’ve started to cast side-eye on anyone that the algorithm starts to push hard.
On the plus side, I found Cruel World Happy Mind because of all the awful stuff Illuminaughtii did to her.
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”.
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.
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.
This, JFC so much this. The trans care thing was a serious blow to my interest in her videos. That capitalism BS. That killed it dead. Didn’t finish that video, haven’t watched since. Byeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.
To be fair, I think her reputation might still be salvageable. But it would take sincere apologies, earnest corrections, and getting back in her ”lane” of experience. As a physicist she’s fine, but not so much as a physician or politician.
This was such a disappointment, I really liked her explanations of quantum physics.
She’s always been a weird nerdy lady, but endearing. Her videos were never professional, a bit tacky, but very informative. But I too dropped her channel because she started talking about nonsense she had no business giving opinions about.
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.
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.
Not exactly the question, but there’s no way I can enjoy Internet Historian now that we know he’s a Nazi.
Oh shit. He’s a Nazi? Fuuuuck. I thought he was just a plagiarizer.
Unfortunately not:
https://www.reddit.com/r/youtubedrama/comments/18dotzf/internet_historian_is_a_nazi/
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but yeah. Sorry for the reddit link but that’s where a lot of the info is aggregated.
Wow. Someone over there is defending him being a fan of the Proud Boys guy because he claims the Proud Boys aren’t a terrorist group (despite having been declared as such).
He says they’re “very extreme right at worst”, as if there’s some sort of sliding scale on the right wing that eventually gets to “extreme right”, “very extreme right”, “terrorist organization” just naturally…and he isn’t aware they crossed the line years ago.
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.
It was his video on IQ tests that set off alarm bells for me.
IQ tests are not some method of determining intelligence they are very much linked to relative education/socioeconomic standing. His complete lack of criticism and neutral/positive support of IQ tests make me think he likes the result of his score…
I stopped watching after the “speed of electricity in a wire” video. When I realised a video about something I knew about was bollocks, it made me question every other video that taught me about something I didn’t know.
Even if that had been a one off, how would I know? The trust is gone.What was wrong with that one?
Without getting into it too deeply the way he conflates induction and conductivity just to set up some kind of gotcha.
some recent ones have been interesting, but yeah that ad really was a scummy move
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.
Seems like they never recovered after the whole YouTube Red exclusive stuff they did. I was glad they came back, but you’re right, it just doesn’t hit the same.
I think Vsauce is a lot more grifty than he looks. If you look at the really early videos they were very different and he changed his content wildly in order to find something that makes the most money with the least work. The science education happened to be profitable but as the Meta started favouring more than 10+ min and science vids became mini documentaries he just dropped off and started reviewing science toys and do compilation videos. Right now he is doing a lot of shorts because they are being pushed by the algorithm.
I started watching VSauce well over 10 years ago, so I’ve experienced how his content changed first-hand. I feel VSauce dropped off when Michael became an internet meme, when VSauce made it “big”. They got their own studio, their own merch box, and I thought this was going to be an upgrade to the content between VSauce 1, 2 and 3. But then Michael made that YouTube Red series and that was basically a brick wall.
Only Jake Roper still made some good videos for some time, but that stopped eventually too. Mindblow stopped, Build It, Draw It, Play It stopped. Instead of seeing anything that would justify having a studio and a team to work with we basically got, like you said, Michael reviewing toys from their merch box, and Kevin doing some math philosophy once in a while.
Mindblow is technically back but… it lacks any energy or soul that the original Mindblow had. It’s sad…
Louis Rossman.
I enjoyed his board repairs, now he’s only rambling.
Yeah, just took at his more recent thumbnails and titles. It feels like just ragebait. He is just angry at everything.
I stopped watching his videos when he started to put some effort into making clickbait thumbnails, because I felt the videos became much worse.
I agree with a lot of Rossman says with regard to right to repair and stuff.
but hes just an insufferable cunt.
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.
For actual cooking stuff, I prefer Adam Ragusea. He dives more into the history and molecular gastronomy side of things, to explain how a dish came to be and why it works. Not quite as sciencey as Alton Brown, but I definitely see the influences. And for actual historical food stuff, you may want to check out Tasting History. He’s a creator who does deep dives into historical dishes, then tries to recreate them.
Both interesting in their own ways, but Adam’s stuff has helped be become a better cook simply by understanding the why, rather than the how. Because if you know why something works, (rather than simply knowing how to do it) you’ll be able to translate that to other situations where it will work, and be able to avoid/work around situations where it won’t. It took me from “following recipes” to “making my own recipes” if that makes sense.
Already subbed to both of those channels lol. I also like J. Kenji Lopez Alt and Brian Lagerstrom for similar reasons - their videos are more about how to cook than just following a particular recipe.
