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Ask Lemmy @lemmy.world
acidbattery @lemm.ee

What are your favorite educational or informative YouTube channels?

Edit: Thank you for your responses! I’ll be sure to upvote and check out everyone’s annswers even if I don’t reply to each one individually.

52 comments

  • Most of my youtube subs are educational/informative in some way or another, so I'm gonna break it up by category a bit..

    General

    • Half as Interesting
    • Wendover Productions
    • Answer in Progress

    Religion/Philosophy

    • Religion for Breakfast
    • Esoterica
    • Bart D. Ehrman
    • PhilosophyTube
    • Wisecrack (though it's dead as of a month ago it still has tons of great content)
    • Michael Burns (the guy who did Wisecrack, now has his own channel, though it's more politically-oriented)
    • UsefulCharts (not exclusively religious content, but largely)
    • SatansGuide (I keep hoping they'll make more videos like their original 2, but it's been a year...)

    General Science:

    • Veritasium
    • Dr Ben Miles
    • Kyle Hill
    • Stand Up Maths
    • Primer

    Science Experimentation:

    • Nile Red
    • Thought Emporium
    • Styropyro
    • Tech Ingredients
    • Alpha Phoenix
    • Applied Science
    • BPS.Space

    Programming/AI:

    • Sebastian Lague (his Coding Adventure series is super fun and informative)
    • Emergent Garden
    • Code Bullet

    Engineering:

    • Practical Engineering
    • Real Engineering
    • SuperfastMatt (guy builds crazy cars for fun, love his sense of humor)

    History:

    • History Matters (great short videos on historical topics)
    • Miniminuteman/Milo Rossi (mostly archaeology and such)

    Geography:

    • Daniel Steiner
    • Map Nerd
    • Jay Foreman (Map Men is hilarious, and the rest of his stuff is pretty good too)

  • Crash Course! They have series on history, politics, games, psychology, philosophy, folk tales, and almost every host is very good.

  • Historia Civilis—excellent history videos. Primarily their story of the fall of the Roman Republic, which does a shockingly good job of making you feel emotions for a little coloured square with the channel's iconic simple animation style. Good if you're interested in the intricacies of the politics and culture of the time.

    Extra History—shorter historical overviews of a much wider range of topics than the above. Quite transparent about their process with their "Lies" episodes at the end of each series, where they explain any errors that slipped through, as well as aspects they left out for the sake of keeping the story focused within the time they had.

    ReligionForBreakfast—a scholarly, secular take on religion and religious practice. I think the first thing I saw was their series on American Civil Religion, which is the idea that Americans' attitude towards their country and its processes is similar to religion belief and practice.

    UsefulCharts—history and religion, told through charts. The ones that interest me the most are the ones that touch on the creator's PhD in religious studies, such as about the historicity of various aspects of the bible, and on his actual thesis topic on the Psychology of Atheism.

    And since you said "informative", I'll add some that I probably wouldn't have included solely under the "educational" category. Not Just Bikes, CityNerd, Radical Planning, Oh the Urbanity!, among others. Urbanist channels across a range of the political spectrum (from Oh the Urbanity which are relatively libertarian, to Radical Planning which is quite marxist). But all of them deal with the problems inherent to the way cities are designed especially in the anglosphere (and among that, especially in America) and how car-centric design creates miserable places while also being economically ruinous.

  • Not sure about favourite, but:

    Clint's Reptiles (zoology, not just reptiles) is nice! Not sure how I feel about the reaction content, but he does stuff like animals-as-pets reviews, animal phylogeny videos (evolutionary trees) and some other videos that might be more interesting/understandable to watch.

    Cleo Abram (various science and tech stuff) is fun, though I mostly see/watch the shorts. Similar with NileRed (chemistry), but his videos can be pretty long, haha

    There's also an official animated series of xkcd's "What If?"! The videos aren't long, but they're fun.

    • I've decided I don't like his pet review videos and these days I just skip them, but I'm a huge fan of Clint's phylogeny videos! And even though he's obviously a Mormon (he's never explicitly said it, but he's open about being a Christian, and he's based in Utah, so…), his videos debunking some of the worst of conservative Christian anti-science bullshit are great too.

  • I like Oversimplified and Extra History, both are quite entertaining and I think they are both putting in great effort to make their content accurate.

    I used to really enjoy CGPGrey but after too many flags and other things, I kinda just stopped watching that.

    Kurzgesagt is a bit of hit or miss for me, I love their space and science-y weird questions but the more political stuff feels sometimes a tad iffy.

    That's mu personal take anyway and I know many might disagree. If anyone could provide the links that would be great I hate to use the YouTube app and in the web-Browser it's a a bit of a pain.

52 comments