I’ve been on a bit of a video essay binge as of late, and most of the good shit has been from Britain, whereas American content creators are mostly reactionary.
What gives?
The British Overton window includes a bit of the left so I would expect the average Brit to be better than the average American, that being said you just might not have seen the American ones, some I recommend:
InRangeTV- pretty much the one non-chud gun channel, if you don’t want to see gun stuff he does have a couple of history videos (about labour/indigenous revolts)
Atun-Shei Films- history and short film guy, Checkmate Lincolnites! is a must watch series
Some more news- weekly single issue story, format got aped
byfrom John OliverAdam Connover/Adam Ruins Everything- I am less familiar with his YouTube output but “Adam Ruins Everything”, started as a webseries on college humor (now dropout) and got picked up as a TV show
College Humor/Dropout TV- it really started with Adams stint but the leftist outlook never really left, less long form essay and more general entertainment
Others I forgot:
Lindsey Ellis- early breadtuber, focuses on movies
Todd in the Shadows- music review channel, largely avoids politics but the few times he’s gotten political it’s been on the left
Behind the Bastards- podcast and short dive on historical figures focusing on their background before prominence
Second Thought- this might be the person you’re looking for, also has two collab projects with Hakim and YUGOPNIK- The Deprogram Podcast and First Thought
I have a feeling (And I’m in the tech field so it’s not like my feeling is uninformed, but I also don’t have a lot of data to back this up so sorry about) that because most people who watch YouTube are in the United States ( And because of how populous we are as a country as opposed to a conglomeration of countries. ), the algorithm sort of promotes them a little easier. Whereas people in other countries, Britain included, have to get more popular before they are shown to most of YouTube’s audience.
I saw a thing years ago about why PewDiePie was the most subscribed person. Although I think that information’s old. I don’t think he’s number one anymore. But it basically came down to “he moved throughout Europe a lot and then moved to the United States.” And because of that, they kept showing his stuff To new audiences based on the region he moved to, but then he kept his subscribers and his subscribers kept seeing his content over time. And once he ended up in the States, he had the biggest new audience of all, and since he already had a lot of subscribers, it just rolled up from there.
Now, to be fair, that was years ago, and the YouTube algorithm has probably changed many times since then. But I still bet that there’s some regional bias, and the fact that there is so many people in the United States, and that their content gets pushed so much more regularly, is probably just a product of that regional bias.
Now of course there’s like twice as many people in Europe as a whole compared to America, but borders matter to the algorithm. So with all the countries cut up a lot smaller and with states not having the same border rules as countries do, things in the United States just tend to spread faster, quality be damned, I think.
Because YouTube doesn’t publish their algorithm in any way, we will probably never know the real reason. But this is as close as I can get based on what I’ve heard about previous algorithm practices.
There are only three ways Britons have found to cope with ten months of rain a year. The first thing they tried was to enforce a globe-spanning business of colonial extraction through unspeakably brutal and yet exhaustingly frequent military holocausts, but that went out of fashion in the 1960s. Then they tried trainspotting, but this went to the dogs when they privatised the railways. The production of high-quality video content really was the final recourse of a population perpetually standing on a collective precipice of intrusive thoughts and year-round seasonal depression