I occasionally watch some travel videos and lately I've been getting a lot of videos of middle east countries on YouTube, I'm just curious why. I know there have been some new developments like the shebara resort and Ain Dubai. but is that the only reason?

Some background here - I have a niche YouTube channel, mostly doing longform (often 3+ hour) commentaries on a board game with a friend. We're both very skilled at the game and are apparently entertaining to listen to, but it's all very amateur - I don't really know anything about videomaking except what I've picked up as I go.

That had never really been an issue, because the topic is so niche that only people really interested in the game watch, and they didn't really mind. But last year we got a shout-out from a big YouTuber and the subscriber count has gone up a lot since, to the point where it feels like I really should figure out how to make it a little less amateurish.

I want to start with audio, because that's 90% of what we do. But I don't even know where to start with it.

I got Blue Yetis for both of us a few years ago because I was vaguely aware that was a good mic, but if anything it made it slightly worse than just using headsets (quite a bit more echoey) - I don't know if that was a mistake, and if there are better mics to go for?

I'm also aware that you're supposed to have some kind of padding on the walls to stop the echoing, but that isn't really feasible for me both because I rent, and because all the rooms of the apartment I'm in are absolutely massive. I've heard that you can throw a blanket over your head, which I've tried for a short video but I absolutely couldn't handle for a three hour one. I'm lost on how to solve that too.

If anyone here knows much about it, I'd love either direct advice about it or a recommendation for how/where to learn about this stuff. It's super appreciated!

I don't know if you know Destin Sandlin. He has a youtube channel named "SmarterEveryDay." I believe he would self-describe his channel as "a red-neck doing sciencey stuff."

The guy has everything, from the southern accent to videos about seemingly-dumb red-neck things that involve a significant amount of engineering and the opportunity to teach about science. If you don't know him, some (not all) of what I consider his best videos are:

• How Does A Carburator Work
• Why Snatch Blocks are AWESOME
• Bullets HITTING Bullets in Slow Motion
• World's Longest Home Run

The large part of his content is like this. Maybe not of this quality, but the theme is often some, what he calls, "redneck" thing turned into an engineering challenge. And overall, the quality of his videos is quite high.

Sometimes he will just tag along with some expert explaining their fields. These are also entertaining and IMHO educational pieces of content. If you want examples, there are:

• This is Music On An Oscilloscope
• How Carburetors are Made
• His 3 parts series on how photographic film is manufactured: Part #1, Part #2 and Part #3
• Everything About Grain Bins

And more rarely, he will post weird, life advice or motivational content. Usually this is wholesome or harmless, but it feels disconnected from the rest. Examples are:

• Marriage Advice
• What's it like to become a father?

I've always like Destin. This is not a university class, and in the past he has taken some shortcuts with safety. But overall, I think he is an honest content creator, and he is entertaining and educational. He also has increase the safety of his experiments, and been educational about (see the video linked above about bullets hitting bullets) I feel that he has kept the clickbait as low as he could get away with Youtube's algorithm, and that's rare in this day and age, therefore I respect him for that. Overall his content is, IMHO, humble and wholesome.

I think this contrasts with Veritasium which has become way too clickbaity, and Mark Rober who reminds you every 5 minutes that he quit his job at NASA to do Youtube. By the way, did you know Mark Rober used to work at NASA?

Of course, Destin is not perfect. He has taken, what I consider to be, bad sponsorship in the past, such as NordVPN which is just a shady VPN (just use Mullvad or Mozilla VPN if you want to circumvent geoblocking), HelloFresh which is overpriced food delivered by a Roach Motel company, or Casper Mattress which AFAIK is a dropshipping company selling products with some health concerns. But many other Youtubers took these sponsorship, so I won't criticise him too much for that. Also his quest to make something 100% in the USA is very laudable, at least to me.

There are some weird stuff though. I'm trying to not be too much parasocial, but most of his content that is not science related feels... weird. It's often about family, helping the poor, being a good member of the community, which I think are good values to have, but it has this weird religious semi-conservative undertone that I can't really pinpoint, it's more like an uncomfortable feeling.

Most of his videos used to finishes with a reference to a bible verse in gray over a black screen. This has disappeared most likely as the Youtube algorithm started asking him to link to his other videos at the end of his videos. I also always find weird the videos with his kids because they address him as "sir". I don't know if it's cultural, but in France (where I'm from and where I live) this is usually associated with radical Catholics (aka "traditionalists")

I've pro-actively tried to avoid judging him on the last part, because I believe people can live their life as they wish as long as they don't hurt anybody.

But now, I'm torn... He has recently made more and more references to the bible for historical and biological facts. The two videos, I have in mind are:

• Nature's Incredible ROTATING MOTOR where at 27:25 he hints at creationism.
• More recently, in Pompeii Changed How I Think About The Roman Empire, the video uses the bible as some kind of historical reference, for example at 12:36.

And this is starting to bother me. I don't mind the past "I have some belief I want you to know, but unrelated to that, I put it aside, here is some engineering/science video." However, I do mind the recent "I'm talking about science, and let me tell you how it matches my made up beliefs based on a book made up by people 1000s of years ago."

I know that Destin owes me nothing. And the counter point should be "hey... if you're not happy just stop watching him." But I just feel that I'm watching a guy who spend more than a decades building his brand and audience just tearing it appart, and it was a good brand and audience. I'm just sad about it, but maybe I'm overreacting.

What's your opinion?

They all released videos at almost the exact same time, so even though I don’t care, I was made to care. Therefore, I’m inflicting that same pain on you. You’re welcome.

Mrwhosetheboss made a good point saying that the target audience for this thing are rich people who want phones that look flashy and can pay for them, but don’t care that they have worse specs than the less flashy ones at a similar price.

MKBHD called it the “S25 Ultra Lite”, which I thought was funny. He also brought up the issue of cooling. He additionally said that no one is asking for thin phones, although it seems that Apple has also bought into the idea that people want this, since it’s rumored that they want to release a thin iPhone this year.

Dave2D said that he tested the heat dissipation capacity of the phone and that it can handle itself well. Apparently it still somehow has a vapor chamber inside of it, as well as a wireless charger. Apparently it also has the smallest battery in the lineup, even though it doesn’t have the silicon carbon tech that is all the rage now. He made a good point though, namely that this could just be Samsung starting the trend so that the technology matures in a few years’ time.

All three of them mentioned that everyone uses cases these days, which immediately kills the whole purpose of buying a thin phone and losing out on better specs.

If you somehow have not gotten enough of tech YouTubers acting confused over Samsung launching a product that no one asked for, there’s also Techaltar and Tech Spurt. I recommend the latter for dirty British humor.

If you are like me then you are kinda over hearing about AI all the time; I get it, believe me. I've written about jobs on here before: my day job is absolutely infested with AI jargon, most of it pretty meaningless (flashbacks to "The Cloud"), and it's a constant everywhere else too, so yeah it's a lot and it's largely unimpressive. Image gen has gotten pretty ridiculous in the last 6-12 months, and video gen seems to be taking off next, and I've successfully wrangled various chatbots into helping with coding projects, etc.

Probably none of this is news to you, but I just found out that I can get AI to edit video. I've done a lot of short-form editing, and recently picked up some side work that is much lengthier, without realizing that the time I would spend hunkered over going through it would be exponentially more lengthy. Painfully so. Cue signing up for a trial of AutoCut, and hot damn it's like living in the future. I am as we speak watching it delete gaps, cut to speakers, add captions that are mostly correct & even formatted & unbelievably also do the VHS singalong/Tiktok "highlight the word being spoken" thing that all the cool kids are doing these days. It's not perfect, it's kinda finicky—I'm having to use a V1 when V2 is supposedly much better, and I'm having to chunk these beastly premiere timelines to get it to do anything at all, but wow—if this is your day job, are you worried? Cause it's a game changer for me but no one is going to replace me because no one else would bother messing with it lol, but on a corporate scale do people know about this stuff yet? I'm thinking our jobs may not be replaced by AI, our jobs will probably just become AI babysitting.

Do you have any favourite videos / playlists (or the rare cases of writing with screenshots) where someone plays through a whole game while supplying their own commentary in an entertaining and/or informative way?

Not sure if this is the best place to post this, but I wondered about this recently. I took three seemingly-solo Youtubers as examples at different scales.

Penguinz0 has 16 mil subscribers, and as far as I know his uploads are just him talking into the camera, giving his opinion about recent things in games and pop culture (I could be very wrong about that, I don't know why he's popular). Looks like he uploads at least a few times a week, so that could be manageable.

Videogamedunkey has 7.5 mil subscribers, and he used to do weekly uploads until very recently, I think. Given that his humor and editing style is a big part of his content, I'd be surprised if he's got anyone else working on his vids.

Northernlion has just over 1 mil subscribers and uploads multiple videos daily, and (in)famously refuses to do any editing. He just basically streams on Twitch all day and uploads clips from that.

I would imagine the day-to-day running of the business, i.e. answering emails and phone calls, would be where having help is most advantageous as you grow, but it also probably depends a lot on what kind of content you make. How big can you get before it's too much for a solo operation?

Recently I just came across this channel Ilya Varlamov , great quality video content related to travel. Thought I should share this channel.
I also watch Not Just Bikes , it's more related to Urban planning, but you get to explore a lot about the countries.
Then is series called Scam City , It gives great info about native people trying to scam tourist's.
Series called Deadliest Roads , Shows the tough life of the native people with bad Road networks.

What all Youtube channels/Series you watch related to travel?

hi tildes,

i’m an audio/video editor and want to work with youtubers (for free, probably). does anyone have any suggestions on where i can find people who either already have a channel and need help or folks who want to start a channel?

i found a subreddit for new youtubers (and their discord server) but it seems to be largely populated with folks who just want to do gaming-related things. to be clear, i’m not 100% against that or anything — i’ve watched some fun gaming stuff before — but i’m more interested in long-form content or even experimental/arthouse stuff.

one suggestion i’ve read was to search youtube itself for this but i struggled finding anything recent and in the realm of things i would be interested in doing.

has anyone noticed anywhere around the web people asking for editors/collaborators for non-gaming content? or does anyone here want help? i think i recall at least one tildes user posting one of their long-form history-related videos.

I like to listen to mostly horror let’s plays throughout the day and at bedtime because they are good background noise for me.

I just want to find more chill options that don’t do any over the top screaming. Preferably some that need a boost and are lesser known.

I’ll contribute my own to get started. Her name is Hula Noob and she’s very chill, lots of dialogue and commentary which I like.

I do know about Gab too. Though she’s a little more diversified. Which is fine.

Every now and then, I need, or at least am drawn to, something to turn my brain off for a bit. For some reason, this is often political content for me, which probably isn't healthy. Was wondering if you guys had any recommendations for content creators that upload fairly regularly about non-political, not-super-deep stuff.

I have a project where I interview people on my twitch live, as if it were a talk show. I mainly focus on people in the gaming world, so if you would like to be interviewed about your hobby for 30-40 minutes let me know!

I interviewed speedrunners, gaming musicians, challenge runners, and tournament hosters before, but I'm open to anyone that is interested and in the gaming sphere. I don't have many viewers or influence it's simply because I love to do it. If you would like to collaborate on something like this, let me know! Thanks!