Ask Lemmy

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.

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.

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.

CGP Grey. His last 114 or so videos were literally just a single round of rock paper scissors each.

Kidding. His videos are still great.

Louis Rossman.

I enjoyed his board repairs, now he's only rambling.

H3H3. As soon as they got notoriety for their defamation lawsuit against the cringe pickup artist guy, they abandoned making reaction videos and instead became a trashy podcast.

AAVE. He used to be a cool tool review channel who really got into the nitty gritty of how electric tools worked and what made them quality. Now he's an anti-vax spouting asshole who loves the truckers who blocked the bridge in Canada. Spiraled into the right-wing like a waterslide

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.

Marques Brownlee (a.k.a. MKBHD).

A few weeks ago he posted a new episode of his podcast with him and a few others. They talked about Nothing Chats and Sunbird, the iPhone getting RCS and the usual OpenAI drama. At some point Marques mentions the fact that iMessage with RCS will still be "unencrypted". Following that they ponder over why RCS wouldn't have this fabled encryption, such a weird thing that RCS doesn't support encryption from the get-go, and after brainstorming for a bit someone adds the information that it indeed will be encrypted in-transit, but not end-to-end encrypted. And what comes next boggled my mind: Silence ensues. No-one says anything. You only see the faces of four grown-ass tech influencers that are stunlocked and completely unable to process what this neverheard difference between encryption methods might mean. It all just ends with "I've been trying so hard to figure out what that means. I can't." And then.......then they simply move on, not even addressing for a second this knowledge gap and solving it right there on the spot. You can watch it if you want. What hurts the most is that Marques' co-star, David, the guy that looks the most confused, made a 1+ hour history-lesson type video a few months ago about the history of the internet and the importance of HTTPS encryption.

Now, if we're talking about visual quality and overall visual production quality, his videos were insanely enjoyable to watch. I also don't want to shame anyone for not knowing something and I understand that this is in part the consequence of an ever growing company at this point. The channel is still growing and has reached 18 millions subs. Him (and his team) also cover a constantly growing tech sphere, from phones to laptops, from e-vehicles to supercars, from tech politics to tech blunders. But coming from a guy that has been a "tech influencer" on YouTube for 14 years, a guy that over the years had the chance to interview Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Sundar Pichai and surely had the chance to surround himself with experts on all sorts of topics, a guy that dedicated entire videos to Nothing Chats, the role of Quantum Computing in encryption or the dangers and potentials of the Metaverse, this kind of shocked me. I just couldn't take him seriously anymore and I hate myself for it. But it's like my grandma not knowing the difference between a normal call and a WhatsApp call, expect that he's been talking about tech for more than a decade.

Possibly controversial but... Hot Ones.

I prefer the older videos with less/no post production effects. I tried watching the interview with Elijah Wood but the fading video overlapping, music, zoom ins/outs, the voice echoing, and I couldn't deal with these stupid transitions. Closed the video and haven't got back since. The channel has one job and that is to make people eat progressively hot wings but the stupid post production effects ruin the video quality and make the whole interview less engaging. COOL IT SEAN!

Their content is good but how it's presented is garbage.

Hate to say it, but Wintergatan and his Marblemachine X. In the earlier days his videos were an exciting mix of mad genius, cool music improv and crafting. Then he became obsessed with making the machine play tight, precise music to a level that is beyond what anybody in an audience would be able to hear, and it became obvious that the machine would never get finished because he was stuck in an improvement loop.

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."

Mark Rober with CrunchLabs. I feel like he's sold himself into a more corporate world and isn't producing the same caliber of content he used to.

Idubbbz. It's fine that he grew out of his edginess, I largely have too, but most of his videos now just feel like he needs to pay the bills and just cranks something out.

George Lucas

Less "downhill" and more "dropped into a sinkhole straight to the pits of hell," but Creepshow Art. I thought she was really fun to listen to, and it was interesting hearing tea spilling from a community I'm not privy to. At some point she opened up about a stalker who'd been following her for years, harassing her constantly, trying to get her fired from her job by sending compromising photos from her past to her boss, threatening her life... And then it turns out she was the stalker, and the victim was Emily Artful! She was the psychopath threatening someone's life and trying to get them fired and shit! And I was planning on donating to her patreon!

Joe Rogan.

Since nobody else is saying it.

I was a big fan of Illuminaughtii/ Blair Zon for a long time. Now she's so controversial, other creators make content on her.

H3H3

Smarter Every Day. Used to be just some amateur prettyboy nerd just geeking out and getting behind the scenes on cool stuff. Then it seems like he run out of cool ideas and money got involved. Last episode I watched, he was hocking some obviously awful aquarium game that he was involved with.

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.

Jimmy Dore. Started watching in 2015. He was consistently about progressivism and brought awareness to causes such as Medicare for All. As the channel grew, he slowly became more deranged. COVID came and he found a larger audience spouting anti-vax dog whistles. The channel is now tabloid anti-vax, pro-putin, hot garbage.

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.

SVSeeker. At first it seemed like a really inspirational channel about a guy building a giant boat in his backyard in Oklahoma that was going to be used as a free to anyone research vessel, but as time went on everyone slowly realized the dude had basically no idea what he was doing and was super hostile to anyone telling him otherwise. Now it's been two years since lunching the boat and he has done none of the things he promised to do with it (like even leave the coast) and it seems pretty clear everyone got duped into helping him build a retirement house boat instead of a research vessel.

two minute papers

AvE. Was cool until pandemic happened, then got extra "conservative". Couldn't watch anymore.

I used to watch Big Clive and supported him on Patreon.

Then he started going off on wild shit about weird conspiracy theories about vapes being harmless, and government just wanting to get rid of them and lying about the lung damage or something to that accord.. and of course, Covid had to come into it to, where he made wild claims about it just being a regular flu and the whole response was blown out of proportion and really dismissing it as a threat.

I dont know how far he's fallen since then since I cancelled my patreon and fucked off from viewing.

Jake Tran. His old videos were pretty cool. He went downhill ever since he tried to convince me that drinking soy milk turns people into femboys and losing sperm cells.

not a youtuber, but I genuinely enjoyed babylon bee and the daily bonnet for parody news about christian and mennonite culture. the humor was always inward. now its all propaganda

Rooster Teeth and Achievement Hunter - their fall from grace was slow at first. First yet another corporate sellout and Bernie leaving, then the employee scandals - especially Ryan. RvB outlived itself and it was their prime thing. RVBY went downhill after Monty died. The new talent wasn't as entertaining as the old, and then the pandemic really kicked their ass.

Used to like old MoistCritical, now it's all just drama, stream reactions and an occasional sex toy video. Also took up a gambling site sponsorship for one of the podcast episodes, so I stopped watching him and haven't seen the channel in like a year. Maybe he has changed though in that time.

The only two I ever watched where this has happened and not simply them just up and disappearing was JonTron and Onison.

And it's understandable why the quality went down. Not only did I grew up, they were both accused of and/or involved in grooming or some shit.