Kurzgesagt. If you have any interest in science, this is a must watch.

mapreadingcompany - navigation plus funny wierd facts

explainingcomputers - explains computers

paulsellers - hand tool woodworking

robwords - english language

citynerd - deadpan humour and sarcasm about cities

astonishingglasgow - local hisory about places in Glasgow

Andy Cooks - amazing chef, easy to follow recipes (he uses metric first), but also a nice, down to earth, no-nonsense guy.

Lockpicking Lawyer

Short videos. Reminder that no lock is impenetrable. Also, April Fool’s Day videos are very special.

Kaptain Kristian

Video essays. No longer in production, high-quality reviews of some cultural artifacts. He’s moved his operation to Curiosity Stream. Made me realize it’s worth it to pay creators directly for their work rather than having advertisers and platforms like YouTube. Now, if only I had money to pay these creators. Aye, there’s the rub.

Every Frame a Painting

Expert film analysis. If it’s not, it sure looks like it is.

CGP Grey

Snarky educational. Fun! The best damn flag contest, best takedown of first-past the post voting, and best reflection on how to go forward after hitting YouTube fame. I still want to know if he and Roman Mars have talked flags.

Kutiman ‐ Thru You

Classic YouTube. 15 years ago, mans took a bunch of other YouTube videos and remixed them into each other, producing meta tracks.

Stumpt

They’re a group of 4 people who play games together, but aren’t the super energetic and annoying type of content creators. You know the type I’m talking about. Plus, Stumpt usually seems to play a lot more indie games or every once in a long while anymore they may go back to m!neceraft for a mod pack.

I’m a big fan of Emily the Engineer. She’s a similar chaotic energy as early Michael Reeves but less directly focused on “offensive ideas” or “things to hurt your friends”. The creativity behind both the projects and the videos is top notch.

I’ll second a couple of other things that people have mentioned, like SmarterEveryDay and CGP Grey.

Hmm. What would I consistently watch new material on?

• MontemayorChannel

General-audience military history. It’s not especially flashy, and you’ll see typos and such, but it consistently shows maps, which is somewhere that I think a lot of military history stuff falls over. And the guy has read the material for the stuff he covers, at least the stuff that I’m reasonably familiar with. There are much larger military history channels out there, and much blingier ones, but I’d rate this well for actually helping someone accurately understand the material covered. He does a good job of highlighting what I think decent books on the subject matter consider the important, salient bits. I’d say that he’s probably reading – and understanding – the major recommended books on a battle prior to doing a video on it.

There are other military history channels that I do watch, but I think that of them, that’s probably the one I’d recommend being worthwhile as a watch the most.

Drachinifel – does naval history, especially gun-era stuff and British stuff – but while Drachinifel is pretty prolific, I wouldn’t rank his output as highly; he’s basically taking some high-level stuff from a quick read and putting it in video format. He’s not doing all that much reading per video. But he’s got a lot of stuff.

The Operations Room also favors maps, but I feel like they tend to pull more of their material from personal accounts from individuals than I’d like.

Kings And Generals has covered a lot of different conflicts, is flashier, also puts stuff on maps, but I’ve definitely seen stuff on there that I’d call erroneous. I’d watch something from them due to the scope of their material, but take it with a grain of salt.

Hmm.

I don’t really follow channels much, repeatedly intentionally come back to anyone. Like, to have a Web analogy, there are websites out there that I like, but very few to which I’d subscribe to an RSS feed, because even for places that have good content, I rarely want to watch a high proportion of anything that they’ve done.

I can’t think of anyone that does software that I’d recommend watching (or, honestly, in general, video for that). I haven’t been all that blown away by video for international affairs stuff, not to the point that I’d explicitly recommend someone.

• theslowmoguys does a lot of well-filmed very slow motion stuff. I wouldn’t go back to see something just because they’ve put it out, but they’ve got some of the better slow-motion footage of different things that I’ve seen. Fun watch.

• Oh, forgottenweapons. This is pretty well-known in the firearms world, so it’s probably not a huge surprise to people who are interested in firearms. It originally focused on unusual firearms mechanisms, but I think that they’ve done a video on darn near every firearm out there now, so it’s kind of a nice place to get a video overview from an informed person of most firearms, short bit history, highlights unusual mechanisms of the thing. I definitely would not go out and try to watch through this whole thing unless you are some kind of absolutely rabid firearms mechanism person, but it consistently has good-quality, informed material. There’s a !forgottenweapons@lemmy.world community on the Threadiverse.

• PerunAU is also probably pretty well-known. Guy in defense economics, good for a level-headed, high-level look at the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Shows a series of Powerpoint slides. If he comes out with a new video, I’d watch it; he generally doesn’t waste viewer time, and insofar as my knowledge extends, the information he puts out is pretty solid. I don’t have the knowledge to evaluate the validity of his opinions, but he’s pretty good at explicitly stating that something is or is not his opinion. There’s been a lot of people making a lot of videos on the conflict, and I think that he’s one of the more-worthwhile people to pay attention to.

I feel kinda bad to heavily list military- or weapons- related stuff, as I certainly watch plenty of other stuff on YouTube, but honestly, while I watch other material, most of the cases where I think I’d watch new material from a particular individual falls into those categories. Like, there are channels spanning a wide range of things, that have put out great content, that I think is interesting, but they also put out a whole lot of other stuff that I’m not interested in. I might recommend a particular video, but not the whole channel.

History of the Universe is exactly what it sounds like. Amazing channel!

ScienceClic English is based on the German channel original, and covers in depth science topics, narrated by a truly stellar individual.

PBS Space Time is simply stunning science coverage that’ll melt your brain.

Not counting music, I assume - I have a gazilion artists I love if anyone’s interested.

As for actual Content with a capital C:

• PhilosophyTube Extremely interesting, well-researched and entertaining presentation of a wide range of philosophical and sociopolitical topics. From the UK.

• Shaun Ditto, though with a different angle and a Northern accent.

• Contrapoints Ditto, but American and quite a bit more… theatrical. Quite a strong focus on gender and transgender issues; check out her video on J. K. Rowling for one of the best treatments of the topic.

• Dr. Geoff Lindsey - Linguistics and phonology stuff, deep dives into pronunciation, fascinating as fuck.

• Middle Eats Really damn good middle-eastern cooking channel, no-nonsense presentation.

• Brian Lagerstrom - Baking / cooking - good recipes, sensible treatment.

• J. Kenji López-Alt of Serious Eats fame - damn good cook, nice guy.

• Tom Bates Creator of Nigel and Marmalade. Dumb, stoopid, awesome.

• Adam Millard - The Architect of Games - video essays on gaming

• Noodle - very funny animated video essays on gaming

• Ice Cream Sandwich - stoopid funny little cartoons about dumb shit.

• Jaiden Animations Animated little essays about stuff, she must be protected at all costs. See for instance Things about Relationships I wish someone told me about.

• Tom Scott has finished up his Things You Might Not Know series, but there’s like a decade of them and they’re amazing. Little investigative videos on everything from programming to wasp farming. You need to watch all of them.

• Taylor Tries Videos on juggling. I have the hugest talent-crush.

Brick Technology makes cool mechanisms out of Lego to solve some simple problems

Bobby Fingers

Irreverent movie prop maker who builds diorama’s with a dressing of Irish humour.

Primitive Technology

Makes houses, tools etc, starting from just his hands and natural resources. No knife. No axe. No rope. No tarps. No dialogue.

Kraut

Does videos on history and culture. Helped me understand why Russian culture is the way it is. In-depth, informative and interesting.

RedLetterMedia

Movie reviewers that like all sorts of movies. Great production quality.

Garand Thumb. Excellent humor, badass historical guns, and new badass guns, too. For example he dresses up as John Wick and has a rep from the company that made the custom guns for the movie bring in the guns, and they shoot them. Seeing a 12ga magazine fed shotgun shoot ~15 rounds in like 2 seconds is terrifying and awesome.

Saveitforparts

Guy hacks around with surplus hardware like consumer satellite dishes and such. Super laid back, intelligent, being himself.

I like watching him learn and his commentary.

Steve Wallis (Camping with Steve)

Guy goes camping in unique and interesting ways, again super chill laid back dude who is just being himself.

I watch them both because they are relaxing and easy to digest and I usually learn something. Mostly because they are relaxing to me.

Claire__ Saffitz x Dessert Person

Baker/ pastry chef that makes all sorts of tasty treats. Content is largely educational giving you tips and tricks on what she’s doing and why so you can replicate her recipe more easily.

Binging with Babish

Started out as one dude recreating food from films and shows and has expanded to having a dedicated anime food creator, doing fun food mashups for sports things, redoing episodes that he messed up on, and still doing food from films and shows.