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What do you watch on Nebula?
My Nebula subscription renewed recently, but I've realised I barely use it! I don't follow many creators and some of them post very infrequently. I want to know what the people of Tildes think (since I believe we have some Nebula subscribers here): which Nebula creators do you feel are worth watching? What do they make? Is their work exclusive to the platform?
Throwing out some that haven't been mentioned yet:
I wonder how channels like Captain Disillusion or Corridor Crew will adapt in the world of AI with their debunking/analyzing videos, like it's going to be so boring when they are showcasing something and say "yep, this is another AI video, nothing interesting going underneath, nobody had to think or create a novel way to make these visuals"
As someone who enjoys more knowing about the processes than results it sounds very depressing.
Because they aren’t all AI generated. Recently they had a few that were made with CGI. Balancing that will keep it interesting.
This is maybe not the place for this comment, but seeing as how you broke his name out specifically at the top of your comment:
Does anyone else get a strange vibe off of Captain Disillusion? I truly have nothing to support this but a gut feeling, and it's entirely possible–even likely–that I'm completely off-base, but that dude gives me the kind of feeling I've had a few times in the past about creators before the coin drops and you find out they're actually a colossal POS in their personal lives. I hope I'm wrong, since his work seems mostly to the good from what I can tell. Hell, it could be it's just the face paint thing tripping me up.
I'm just curious if anyone else got a strange vibe off the dude.
Outside of the usual answers you see here (Wendover/Jet Lag, Tom Scott):
Does he have exclusive stuff on nebula? I watch all his videos on YouTube.
Not that I can tell, but I watch them on Nebula anyways because then I can watch it on TV without ads
Bernadette’s larp video was an amazing recommendation! That was so cool! Thank you!
To add some new things to what's already listed:
*Tech Altar
*Mr.Mobile
*man carrying thing
*Lindsey Ellis
*Polyphonic
*Not Just Bikes
*City beautiful
*Climate Town and the climate Deier's playbook podcast
*Thomas Flight
*Philosophy tube
Some originals ive liked include:
*Scav
*Mad Kings
I quite enjoy nebula as it covers a lot of my watching needs/desires. Some have exclusive stuff, but even just the creators who i can more easily see they posted when its not competing for my youtube feed is nice.
Pretty much all the same as above (jetlag, wendover, lindsay ellis, climate town, tom scott, etc) but I'm also into science and engineering content, so:
edit - I wrote Mr Beast when I meant Mark Rober. I think that's funny and says a lot about Mark Rober in and of itself
“17 pages” was a really cool way to do a documentary. Don’t look it up too much - it’s a good experience blind!
Also, NileRed (chemistry), People Make Games (gaming documentaries?) and Sebastian Lague (coding/visualizations)
Oh! Just found Mustard (engineering) and Synthetic (music) too, which have both been fun!
Honestly, it’s been fun to explore nebula content - the ads on YouTube have just gotten so bad recently that I just want to watch something without too much disgust every ten minutes or so.
Oh my god, so many political ads!
The one good thing I have gotten about it is discovering that if I block the mid-roll political ads it tends to skip them altogether. It doesn't tend to work for the starting ones, though.
Fdsignifier has some stuff I like. Not all of it though.
Honestly, not as much as I should since I subscribe to a bunch of them over on YewChewb as well, buuuuuut (edited to categorize and editorialize; all opinions are my own, I may not be summing them up well at all.)
The OGs that got me to sign up that I still watch:
The ones I've watched since joining like 5 years ago when it was a bundle deal with that one documentary group on up to ones that I added like a few weeks ago:
Special Interests
(These are often too short to be considered an Essay. Or they're presented closer to a TV program in the case of Tom Scott's England.)
Essayists
(Releases content less often, but it's quite a bit longer than usual, usually an hour or more)
Explainers
(Not just writing an essay about things, but actually diving in to explain the details and nuance. Non-political.)
Gaming Stuff
(Stuff about game playing and game making)
Political Stuff
(American Politics, specifically)
Pretty much just Jet Lag. I kind of can't stand anything anything else Wendover related. Sam's constant smugness grates on me.
I've discovered many channels on Nebula that I didn't previously know about from youtube. Some of my favorites that I've enjoyed enough to spend a lot of time exploring their back catalogue (and that don't get mentioned nearly enough):
A couple I really like that I haven't seen in other replies:
I watch many of the things already listed, I'll add:
Curious: besides no ads, what do you like about nebula that you’re not getting on YouTube?
This is a very good question. To be honest, watching Jet Lag a week early was worth four bucks a month or something. Also thre are a few good creators who are doing nebula exclusive content. Not as much as their individual patreons, but it's something.
In general they seem to have better video quality than youtube but the volume equalization between videos is worse. I do like that Youtube recently added a "voice boost" button for badly mixed videos.
I think in the end it's an ideological choice to support them. They pay a lot more back to the creators since the platform is creator owned. On the other hand, since there are no ads, the creators are getting some percentage of my $4/mo, so I dunno how sustainable their business model is or how much more Lindsay Ellis is getting from her nebula-exclusive videos or whether she's also going all-in on this platform as an ideological stance.
I had a similar question myself. I mostly used Nebula to watch Jacob Geller's bonus videos there (which were removed recently for obvious reasons). With those gone, nearly all videos from people I follow are also free on YouTube.
I tried Nebula's explore page but it seems to mostly be current events and investment advice, with the same AI-generated and clickbait thumbnails I expect to see on YouTube.
I haven't had the chance to check out many of the recommendations in this thread yet though so I hope to find something I love! But if I'm just paying for Lindsay Ellis videos (as I am now) I'll probably cancel the subscription.
As someone who doesn’t have too much time, I subscribed to Nebula to watch Jet Lag. And while I don’t use it “to the max” I love being able to support that team. I hope I find other ways to support them!
I know about Nebula for quite a couple of years, every now and then I am looking for an excuse to start paying them since I like the way how they do stuff, but so far I haven't found much content that I am interested in to make the subscription. For example if Alec Steele or Gamers Nexus show up there, I am immediately in.
Related, does anyone know what happened to the bike guy (berm peak?)?
It's Probably Not Aliens is probably my favorite podcast right now, available ad-free through Nebula. Its hosts each have their own channels that I watch too, NerdSync (his occasional non-Scooby Doo related content is what appeals to me most), and Step Back (mostly very long and insightful rants about how history is repeating itself and we're all kinda screwed).
Other awesome podcasts that are currently active (ad-free and sometimes with bonus content) on Nebula:
edit---guess I should mention I mean actual audio podcasts, these aren't what YouTube culture refers to as podcasts where it's a video of people sitting around talking into microphones, you'd subscribe to these in an actual podcast player.
https://nebula.tv/jetlag/