Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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From a light survey of some playlists, extremely and mournfully inexhaustive, within the spirit though not quite the letter of your small-channels exercise:
Jeffrey the Librarian (100k subs)
Early American history (Mayflower through Civil War) via maps and surprisingly effective hand-drawn crude graphics
Bosgoed Animal Paradise (70k subs)
Cute animal videos from a dutch dad who keeps like 200 small animals on his modest property in a non-sloppy way, a little garden of eden; don't miss Kobus, the crow who was raised by chickens
Type 56: The Story of China's Army (60k subs)
Interesting tales from the development of the PLA (often through the lens of weapons procurement; occasional collabs with the premiere historical firearms channel Forgotten Weapons (3.2M subs)
RojoFern (50k subs)
Tornadoes and nuclear weapons, elaborately produced in a very entertaining style; an indictment of the algorithm that he isn't much, much more popular (also has a prehistory of other videos I'm not interested in)
Point Blank Science (50k subs)
Veteran in Idaho who, as an exercise/for fun, practices doing covert surveillance on small towns and chip fabs
Marshall Bruner (50k subs)
Radar, more than you every thought there was to know, explained in absurdly high quality and quantity with original animations and simulations
lunarmodule5 (45k subs)
Real-time replays of historical American space missions with the original audio
Armageddon '41-'45 (formerly StalData) (40k subs)
Some original-in-english archival research on mostly primary documents from and the aftermath of The Battle of Stalingrad; sometimes collaborator sometimes antagonist in TIK's (430k subs) true masterpiece series Battlestorm: Stalingrad (51 eps, ~40 hours, 2 nervous breakdowns)
Mike’s Videos of Beavers (40k subs)
A guy in Saskatoon who goes down to the river and films the beavers from perhaps irresponsibly close up
TNMoC (25k subs)
Talks and demos from a historical computer museum
康康 Kang (14k subs)
A newly-minted chinese factory worker's daily life (attn @DaseindustriesLtd)
The Warshipologist (6k subs)
High-quality well-organized WWII naval infographics, artifacts, and original research, a natural supplement in the Drachinifel (600k subs) basin, yet he seems to have been punished horribly by the algorithm for some reason
valerobowie (650 subs)
Exactly 2 topics: Yorktown-class aircraft carriers and The Alamo, explored in high autism mode through original 3D models
If I stretched the exercise much past 100k subs I'd be here all week. There are many bigger channels that are very good. The problem is not channel sub count, it's letting your algorithm stay tuned to normie slop. You want to get to a place where sub-count is a neutral heuristic.
Timely, possibly-related investigation as to how RedLetterMedia maintains its viewership with seemingly little to no algorithmic attuning: https://plainenglish.io/web-scraping/i-analyzed-2-500-youtube-videos-to-understand-why-redlettermedia-are-internet-darlings#1
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Thanks. Great stuff. Particular RojoFern and his Mushroom Cloud video. I find it very interesting and cool that there are creators out there that can put together better documentary style videos than big television production studios.
I’ve always been a fan of nuclear weapons content. When I was a kid I got a copy of The Effects of Thermonuclear Weapons from a local university library. Loved it. I have a DVD somewhere that has most of the good public videos of famous Nuke tests.
But I can’t imagine a video like this being made professionally for Tv. It would be too niche. But somehow some random guy is able to do it. There are likely millions of examples of this on YouTube. That’s exactly what I’m trying to find.
Bro if you want nuclear weapons content:
Higgsino physics (100k subs)
Particularly Nuclear Fission Visually Explained; physics simulations of eg Chernobyl
Atomic Tests Channel (250k subs)
Self explanatory historical footage
atomcentral (200k subs)
Similar, also old documentaries
Dr. Jorge S. Diaz (70k subs)
General physics history videos, with several on nuclear weapons
Scott Manley's (1.8M subs) subset of nuclear content and his primary nuclear weapons history series
If you are not familiar with Scott Manley then you have a much more fundamental problem with how you are tuning your Youtube algorithm
... actually I feel like I'm missing some other good ones besides these, but I'm coming up blank; sorry
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