Random Indian guy with one upload that explains the solution to a very specific problem I'm having with some software. Thank you my nameless friends.

They're a dying breed! Everyone is switching to AI voice-overs for explanations and I say that's a damn shame. Bring back the heavily accented English, it's draining all the magic and charm from my preferred method of solving tech issues. What a sad state, this world.

I would imagine many people here who watch Youtube are already familiar with Folding Ideas, at least from his video about NFTs. He is imo the best video essayist by a wide mile.

Then there's Jenny Nicholson, her videos are hit or miss in the sense that I really don't care about most topics she talks about, but I find even those videos engaging and when she does talk about an interesting topic it's an all-timer for me.

I'm amazed it's not been mentioned here yet - Luna oi! is a very cool socialist Vietnamese channel. Her videos are both fun and informative, and good for getting a non-western take on so many things.

Angela Collier has awesome videos, especially about physics and the experience of being a physicist. Appreciate her a ton, my best science professor. is definitely a bit lib but seems on the edge of communist in some cases.

Videogamedunkey is probably not a great person in political terms (idk, but he's american) but his videogame reviews are awesome even though I never play them lol. And he plays mario funny

3Blue1Brown

The current goat of youtube math education. I don't know what he is like on some of his streams (because I don't care about those). However, his mainline videos really helped me understand a lot of math concepts.

My spouses YouTube channel was very good and popular until she retired

i quite like Lily Simpson, she does analysis of trans episodes of shows mostly
fair warning, most of the shows she talks about are transphobic

Crime Pays, Botany Doesn't for sweary, amusing, but very informative stuff about nature and plants in particular. Always with lots of working class solidarity.

EVNautilus for submarine shenanigans and cool footage of rarely seen marine life, especially cute octopus.

LUXE37 hasn't uploaded in almost a decade but they made cool Japanese car chase movies with stop-motion, toy cars, and amazingly detailed models.

OgmiosZen does relaxed, zen-like commentary over his dashcam footage of having to drive around London for his job. Often amusing. The channel has grown a lot and now he's narrating other driving videos which I don't like as much.

People Make Games isn't specifically leftist or anything, but it's the only place I've found putting out actual investigative journalism into things like workers rights, bad industry practices, exploitative outsourcing to the 'developing world' and more in the video game industry. They also do some fun videos on more niche or elaborate non-video-game gaming like elaborate LARPs or tournaments of competitive Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet solving.

The Craft Beer Channel makes interesting videos and documentary series about beer - from ingredients growing to breweries to pubs - with lots of focus on history and the current actual people behind beer production.

YouSuckAtCooking makes slightly amusing little recipe videos with some willfully silly editing jokes, but without any pretension. Good for basic recipes, done in the most basic kitchen with very available ingredients. Also includes little songs and pets at the end of each video.

Farya Faraji! He got really popular with his video on Orientalist music vs actual Middle Eastern music: https://youtu.be/LR511iAedYU

Really funny, clever, passionate, dedicated to his craft (the intersection of music and anthropology). I almost never like video essays but his are actually good and actually engaging. His music is great too and i love just he includes detailed descriptions about them.

Man's channel deserves more love.

I still, unsurprisingly, like the kids in hololive and holostars. They're all a bunch of bright and talented, essentially, theater kids.

I also like false edge hema and dequitem because it's fun watching large adult children beat the shit out of each other with metal sticks fancily.

I also enjoy natural habitat, under studio hub, fire department chronicles, and some others

• a people's history of rome, that sort of stuff. i get the feeling they're marxists keeping it on the down-low, but who knows. - https://www.youtube.com/@tribunateSPQR
• some cool geology lectures about the west coast of north america - https://www.youtube.com/@GeologyNick
• she visits interesting houses - https://www.youtube.com/@kirstendirksen
• japanese man builds houses - https://www.youtube.com/@ShoyanJapaneseCarpenter
• history stuff, i think he's not bad - https://www.youtube.com/@premodernist_history
• they build houses in western north carolina (they're probably enormous chuds but they mostly keep it out of the videos. mostly) - https://www.youtube.com/@PerkinsBuilderBrothers
• various linguistics-related videos - https://www.youtube.com/@DrGeoffLindsey
• civil engineering stuff, with hand-built models and demostrations - https://www.youtube.com/@PracticalEngineeringChannel

Futakuchi Mana should be talked about more in online leftist spaces ngl

Grimbeard, Warlockracy and justbackgroundnoise for filthy G&ming content. The first two drop 1 per month and the last is about 1 weekly. Gaming content on youtube is a wasteland of either terrible politics or zoomer attention span, but these three are good on both of those from my experience.

Sellsword Arts for HEMA and sword content and blumineck for archery (and nothing else ) mostly shorts based, some 20 min vids infrequently.

Nicole Coenen for woodcutting (and definitely nothing else ) shorts that soothe the soul mostly.

LEMMiNO

Peak "quality over quantity" dude

Cathode Ray Dude- mentioned elsewhere as well, generally cool dude

Tech Tangents - haven’t seen mentioned, another old tech guy that stays in his lane politically and makes cool content

Technology Connections - my favorite “well technically” nerd

VWestlife - a gem of youtube, untarnished by advertisers or thr algorithm

Dr. Angela Collier - Smart Science Dr who makes cool commie adjacent videos

Ethoslab - my one parasocial relationship is this reclusive canadian minecrafter who uploads once a month and I mostly catch on other peoples server streams

Robot Cantina - old dude that’s making diesel electric batter vehicles out of his garage for cheap, really cool electrical and mechanical engineering going on with just one dude, fabrication as well.

Technology Connections. I know nothing about that guy, but being able to watch someone with terrible hair talk about washing machines for an hour basically justifies the existence of YouTube imho

Ancient Americas is a really good channel that covers pre Columbian cultures in the Americas

Every single Clickspring video is a piece of art about making a piece of art which is also a fully functional piece of a clock. I know absolutely nothing about him other than that he is very very good at precision machining and that's the way I like it.

LGR and Angela Collier. I hardly use youtube except to watch jerma vods

Ze Frank makes funny documentaries. Technology connections is also good

I like Scaredy Cats. It's Thought Slime's other channel focused mostly on horror movies, from the high art ones to the cheesy, B horror ones. In fact, I'd probably say there's more of the latter than the former.

They try to keep is non-political, but every now and then anti-capitalist themes slip in to their movie reviews, which I'm just fine with.

i don't listen to Farya Faraji's music (i'm sure it's fine) but his talking about stuff is really good

Tom 7. Posts very infrequently but generally makes videos that complement his SIGBOVIK submissions which are the intersection of theory and impracticality. Example.

It's absolutely not my "thing" but somehow I got really into watching parkour videos a couple years ago. I haven't watched for a year or so, so hopefully they haven't done anything horrible in the meantime, but for a while I really loved the lads that make up Storror. Toby Segar especially gives off really cool, compassionate, laid-back-person-I-wish-I-knew sort of vibes. He can do some truly amazing feats but he's so genuinely humble about it.

Two best friends play

SuperGreatFriend is a fairly high effort gaming channel on the much more chill end. Covers a lot of obscure games as well as mainstream ones. Probably best known for his excellent Deadly Premonition LP from almost 15 years ago now, has moved more into doing blind playthroughs. He has a small (rarely get over 10k views) but very dedicated fan base.

Favourite series of his are Deadly Premonition, Illbleed, Life and Times of Bully Demise and Laser Lords.

Not really YouTubers much anymore. But I still follow DingDongVG and Julian who separated from OneyPlays half a decade back.

They started their own indie game company WanWan games and are working on a Domino Tetris thing (can't remember the name). Looks pretty good too. They mostly stream gameplay of old games now from time to time and the atmosphere is much more chill and less forcefully edgy which I like.

Also DingDong mostly just shitposts now on his channel lol.

Smight is mostly a twitch streamer, but he posts all his stuff to YouTube. He's the creator of the Arcade Pit, a internet gameshow where contestants play old games answer trivia and generally have fun with games.

Super friendly to the trans community, the pit crew recently hosted a marathon to raise money for trans causes, and many of the guests on the show are often trans as well, with the co-host being Emily Aster an awesome trans lady.

So tune in every Sunday evening at 8pm EST for the arcade pit live. Smight has not missed a show in over 15 years or something insane. His channel is twitch.tv/smight

I like Cathode Ray Dude too, he's a good talker who can make anything sound interesting and he has ”I hate capitalism and I'm not here to get sponsorships, I just want to share what I'm up to for your entertainment and education.” in his bio and that pride flag VHS case in the background of all his videos.

LGR makes similar content and at this point I appreciate every YouTube person who hasn't turned into a chud, started making algorithm pandering content or both.

Big cooking video person here

J Kenji Lopez Alt is my muse. I will not hear anything against him.

Chef John/Food Wishes - He makes some great old school recipe videos, just no bullshit 8-10 minute videos walking you through the recipe steps. Also has great puns.

America's Test Kitchen Has a bunch of filler videos, but I really like What's Eating Dan and Techniquely with Lan Lam, just very knowledgeable chefs.

MadelineJamesWorldbuilds a channel about in deep world building (featuring things like where various rock formations would be located)

Ugh as if! a podcast mostly about art. The hostess is an actual comrade.

Angela’s Symposium talks about various forms of mysticism.

Monstergarden an artist talking about his world-building process.

Zane Parker does reviews about horror classics with a very comedic twist.

historic_ly does long form podcasts reading several works of lenin.

Bringus studios is a super awesome dude

johnz makes some relaxing and chill videos about hiking and sewing your own gear

F.D Signifier is really cool but not exactly a hidden gem by now. He kind of blew up huh

I dont really care much for comdey on youtube but I do like "Man Carrying Thing". Skits that are usually just like a minute or so.

If I try to restrict to the smaller channels (some of these are quite big anyhow, but whatever):

Kaze Emanuar

Mario 64 modding focus, with coding deep dives

https://www.youtube.com/@KazeN64

Decino

Classic Doom content, with coding deep dives

https://www.youtube.com/@decino

Timbah.On.Toast

Music and culture focused video essays

https://www.youtube.com/@TimbahOnToast

José

Musings on historical sitcoms and conservative media

https://www.youtube.com/@JoseBird

Cass Eris

Scathing book reviews of pop psychology

https://www.youtube.com/@CassEris

Dr. Fatima

Astrophysics, Space, and Politics

https://www.youtube.com/@dr.fatima

Simon Roper

Linguistics and other stuff

https://www.youtube.com/@simonroper9218

Clickspring

Precision hand manufacturing

https://www.youtube.com/@Clickspring

Acorn to Arabella

Wooden sailboat build, and now sailing

https://www.youtube.com/@AcornToArabella