Cooking is a hobby of mine, and as a result I really enjoy watching food related YouTube channels. Some of the ones I like are

• Alex French Guy Cooking - A fun channel of a creative french amateur cook. I like this channel because I have similar taste in food to him (check out his instant ramen series!), but his solutions to problems in the kitchen are seriously creative. To give an example, he builds a dough sheeter in his croissant series in order to get the perfect thickness of dough, and he makes a makeshift dehydrator in the ramen series. Stuff I would never do in the kitchen, but it's fun to watch.

• Bon Appetit - I totally did not expect Bon Appetit to have such a well put together web presence (for some reason I considered them an old fashioned publication). In any case, check out the "It's Alive with Brad" series. It starts out as a series about all things related to fermentation (beer, hot sauce, kombucha, sourdough, etc), but expands a bit in scope.

• Binging with Babish - Perhaps the most well known of recent food related YouTubers, Babish recreates meals from movies and TV. He also has a nice series on cooking tutorials. I don't watch him as much as I used to, but he's still a lot of fun.

• Townsends - A bit different than the rest, and not exlusively food related. Townsends is a historical enthusiast focusing on the colonial era, and he has a lot of videos recreating recipes and techniques from the time period.

EDIT:

Forgot to include

• Jun's Kitchen - Some seriously therapeutic cooking videos featuring sushi and cats.

Youtube has a giant lead in the online video streaming market and in spite of many controversies (demonetization, click bait being promoted to peoples' front pages, etc.) there doesn't seem to be any indication that this is going to change. What do you think about the future of this industry? Which (if any) providers have a chance to become viable competitors to YouTube?

For those of you not in the loop, the Verge created a PC build guide back in September, and it was...bad, to put it lightly. They took down the original video after a storm of criticism, but this guy reuploaded it, if you want to see it.

Kyle (aka Bitwit) created a response video to it, which got copyright striked (which is more severe than a claim and has to be done by a human, unlike content ID claims), in addition to ReviewTechUSA. Ironically, the Verge published an article about abuse of the copyright system just 3 days ago (2 days when the videos were taken down yesterday).

The Verge should have taken more responsibility to begin with, now that the dust have settled they seem bent on reminding everyone how bad their video was.

Edit: Bauke pointed out Kyle's video is back up! This is not because the Verge retracted their claim, but because YouTube actually had a human review it and determine it was fair use (which usually isn't the case from what I've heard).

One of the things I've been doing recently is trawling Youtube for cover versions. I really like the less-produced versions, and the "authenticity" of someone just singing a song. I noticed that there are a bunch of covers that just sit there on Youtube with hardly any views.

So, in this thread it'd be nice if people could post links to the covers they enjoy, and probably also to the original.

Jesus and Mary Chain: Just Like Honey -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EgB__YratE

Cover by Rascalton (somewhat up-tempo) -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAqusW_B6rI

Cover by Ryan Barrington Cox (acoustic) -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9r4qLrqCWk8

If you've been following tech news somewhat recently, you've surely heard about Article 13- the one where the EU essentially requires all content hosts to have extremely strict copyright checking tools and have automated takedown of any potentially copyrighted works.

That got put on the backburner for a little bit, but now it's back with a vote being held in early 2019.

YouTube, being one of, if not the largest content hosts in the world, is greatly affected by this motion. In fact, they have a whole website designed to encourage their creators to talk about A13 in their videos. The page very subtly hints at massive service changes that will happen in the EU if this actually ends up passing.

The CEO of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki, has also written an op-ed for Financial times (linked to official YT blog since it's free there) about the issues facing YT if A13 passes.

I haven't heard anything from official sources, but I've heard on the rumor mill that YouTube will completely suspend creators in the EU, not allowing them to upload any content, and potentially even removing their existing content from YouTube.

What if this passes? YouTube is one of the biggest sources of free knowledge and entertainment we have today, and it's become engrained into the internet as it is today.

With all this, I simply ask, "what's next?"

There was a brief (an oh-so-brief) period in youtube history where all types of non-corporate content thrived. I'm referring, if memory serves, to the timespan from around 2011 - late 2014.

This was after youtube initially got big, but before Google decided that it wanted to step in and maintain the cultural status quo rather than redefine it. Ad revenue paid creators fairly-ish in most cases, and the talk of the town was machinima assfucking it's segment of poor souls that signed into it, rather than youtube pulling the same moves universally as it did a few years later.

(Suffice to say I have no love for the platform).

It's important to note that at this time, Youtube was a bit like a small-scale television enterprise, before it dreamed of deliberately becoming one. Youtube had everything from animations to product reviews, news to reality programming to VFX extravaganzas.

One of the most incredibly important innovations of the time, and one that's been all-but-lost, was the birth (and subsequent heat-death) of youtube news channels.

These channels mirrored cable news, but without the influence of corporate sponsors getting in the way, and without the ravenous need to appease political parties and harebrained cable tv viewers. They were biased - good god were some of them biased - and they weren't perfect, but they were set up in such a way that, had youtube not fucked it up (sigh...) they might've someday dethroned CNN, MSNBC and Fox.

With the next election coming up and shaping up to be a small-scale repeat of 2018s (you're kidding yourself if we're every going to go any other direction than further down at this point - after all, it works!) it's important to remember that there was, for a beautiful gleaming moment, a chance for not a corporation, but a community, to rise up and redefine the way people received news in a way that hadn't been seen since the conception of the newspaper.

Instead, youtube squandered it. Real events and engaging content don't generate views. People can't sit and watch hours of current events like they do for whatever-the-hell youtube trends nowadays (list videos and toy openings, I guess?), and why would they? If you get on youtube to watch today's news, you're not going to stick around for yesterday's. So youtube's 'algorythm', a word I've come to absolutely detest, doesn't favor them just like it doesn't favor basically anything else that once made youtube great.

The icing on the cake: rather than embrace even a tertiary aspect of the community, they went for the safe option and the ad revenue. No Phillip Defranco for you, we'll show you Jimmy Kimmel. No TYT, we'll fill trending with clips of CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. The only real survivor of the era was infowars.

Here's to you, youtube news. Dead and gone, but not forgotten.