And why did you stop watching them?
TotalBiscuit
Still miss him
My interest in gaming plummeted after he passed.
I was also in this position, there is so much gaming content out there but the whole state of journalism seems to have really fallen off.
Last year I discovered MinnMax though and some of my faith has been restored. They are a community funded group of journalists and enthusiasts who run a weekly ~3 hour podcast about games and the industry. They are mature, lucid, insightful, and also pretty funny. They’ve also been doing a yearly best-of list for a long time which is a good jumping off point if you want to dip your toe in. Definitely recommend for anyone interested in gaming and the industry.
Same here, friend. Still hits me every now and then when I see a Steam game with a recommendation from his curator page. Doesn’t happen too often these days, but still the occasional older game I haven’t picked up yet goes on sale.
Especially this week.
… Fuck
A big loss. I’m still wondering what happened to his family since then. I heard they got out of the USA?
I’ve understood the dogs got new owners, Genna moved to South Korea.
What about the kid?
I can’t remember hearing anything about him, I also couldn’t find anything with a quick search yesterday.
:(
Guy was a legend, I bought Terraria because of him. His voice and style was amazing. Rest in piece!
This one hits hard. “Gaming YouTube” isn’t the same without him, I don’t watch many gaming videos nowadays
I’ll never forget him for introducing me to dungeons of dredmor, the game is the bad roguelike, but I don’t know if I ever would have gotten into roguelikes without it
I’ve never heard anyone else mention Dungeons of Dredmor! That’s the game that taught me how much I loathe total randomness in roguelikes. Without it I wouldn’t have discovered Dwarf Fortress, Cataclysm, and a host of others where your skill actually matters, so even though I hated DoD I’m glad I picked it up after TB’s video.
(And the artist of Dredmor later ended up on the development team of my literal favorite game ever, Starsector. Weird how things turn out.)
Aw man.
Veritasium. Over time I realized his content is mostly about flashy half baked “sciencey” content like Discovery Channel. It’s meant to get an audience and nothing more. It lacks quality control, and fact checking. I only realized how many errors his videos have when he covered a topic I know more about. Also, the whole electricity thing and self driving car debacle only reinforced my views on his content.
What happened with the electricity thing an self driving cars?
Not sure about the self-driving, but he had a video challenging the idea that electrons in wires that carry electricity. Basically arguing that it was the electric fields themselves that carried the power, which is largely outside of the actual wires.
Not sure if that’s the same one where he asked what would happen if you used a light switch connected to a lamp by two wires. Apart from some truly egregious mistaken units (1s/c as unit of time), I vaguely recall thinking it was basically a huge clusterfuck of misunderstandings about what an electrical circuit diagram even is (stuff like real vs idealized components, parasitic capacitance / inductance etc.)
They’re the kind of ‘Well actually’ half true factoids that you never hope to encounter in the wild if you actually understand the stuff. For someone claiming to be enthusiastic about science communication he did one heck of a job poisoning concepts with subtly wrong/misleading explanations that make it a lot harder to explain stuff to anyone with the misfortune to encounter his version first.
electricity works by making the electrons jump through hoops. that video was pretty damn stupid and got ripped apart by every serious EE guy on youtube.
That’s a bummer, I still watch him from time to time but accept it as factual. Didn’t think I needed to fact check him.
I stopped watching after the Head & Shoulders commercial
His shit got waaaay too long too.
I’ll end with haemmoroids if I watch his feature lengtj vids when I take a shit.
Damn algorithm really pushed good creators to ramble and add fluff.
LTT and their other channels. I only watch because of Emily/Anthony. Now that she’s not active in videos anymore, I just lost interest and realised that Linus and those two hosts of Techquickie annoys the hell out of me.
I actually still like some LTT videos. I just find the thumbnails off-putting … so unless the topic interests me I don’t typically watch anymore.
I really enjoyed the Emily/Anthony bits too.
I just use DeArrow so I don’t know what the original thumbnails are. Thank God.
Every time I open YT on my tablet I am extremely confused what the shit titles and thumbnails are. DeArrow is one heck of an essential extension.
+1 for DeArrow, sometimes I reveal the original just to see how atrocious the channel will be with clickbait thumbnails.
Anthony was great and so full of super geeky information, hopefully Emily will make an appearance at some point but i fully understand if she doesn’t. Internet can be a ruthless place.
I always found the fact that he thinks Nebula is not a viable business and only exists to sell out and get a big payoff says a lot about Linus and his way of thinking.
I fell off LTT once I fell into his massive pile of rich people problems videos. Like, there was one where he was complaining because his WiFi didn’t reach to the gate of his mansion.
Yeah, tech quickie is full of great info but they are just trying wayyyyy too hard to be fun and quirky.
Anthony was great, always loved how in depth they were on whatever tech they were talking about.
I like Jake’s videos on networking too. I love how nonchalant he is when it comes to certain things that would just never fly where I work. Makes for good entertainment.
Other than them, I like tech linked and game linked to stay up to date on tech and game news.
Wait, Anthony is Emily now? I guess I missed that one. Anyways, everyone seems to talk about them in the past tense which is concerning. Are they no longer doing videos?
She has a video on YT on her own channel about that. Pretty sure the problem is the… negativity against her. She appeared in one or two LTT videos for a brief moment though. And there is at least one video by her on floatplane. But I am not following anything actively so that is the only info I have.
i still enjoy some of them every once in a while, for entertainment value and the crazy stuff they do.
but that whole overworking and treating his workers like shit debacle turned me off the channel by quite a lot.
The 8 bit guy. I loved his retro computing channel and then one day, he acquired a rare IBM computer and promptly destroyed the power supply by sticking a screwdriver into it (if I remember correctly).
For some reason, I googled about this and discovered he’s a gun nut. They’re videos of him going grocery shopping with his rifle on his back which apparently he does this knowing it will annoy people.
Unsubscribed from the channel and never looked back.
I love guns, but… Bro… Don’t do that.
Too bad about him, his passion for old electronics made me interested when I don’t have any particular interest of my own.
but it is his right!!!
lol
No one argued that?
When somebody carries a gun into a public space like that… That is what is being said.
wasnt this guy found to be a nazi too?
Do you have a source for that? I have never heard this.
no thats why i asked. i remember something about it back when i found out about the guns thing.
and honestly whats the chance of a dude having that kind of attitude towards guns not being a fascist?
Oh, fair enough.
I mean with that kind of attitude, he almost definitely is a conservative, whether he’s gone full Nazi, I don’t know.
Demo ranch. Started making comments about the George Floyd protests and I was out
AvE started praising the trucker convoys
Shadiversity got super homo/transphobic and also is just an arrogant douche since his book.
Oh it gets worse with Shadiversity. Huge AI art guy, his brother’s an actual artist too so it’s hard seeing Shad brag to him. Very “anti-woke” and paints his conservative Mormon beliefs on everything.
The worst unforgivable part is the end of his book has impregnated rape victims step up to defend the rapist protagonist because he “gave them” a child, while the ones that didn’t get pregnant were jealous.
He loves to bring up that the book is supposed to explore this immoral character. But this isn’t the protagonist’s viewpoint this is just how Shad thinks the world works. This is how Shad believes rape victims think.
Very sad to see, I followed him for swords and castles but Jesus Christ.
His brother (Jezza) is a great artist and while I don’t know much about him I don’t think he’s anything like shad. I regularly see him cooperate on a warhammer channel called tabletop time and they have videos about women in the warhammer scene (made by one of their female members). So I highly doubt those two have much in common.
Oh yeah, Jezza seems great, from what I know he actively left the Mormon faith and was ostracized by most his family. He uses this experience to be a more empathetic and better person.
All the more sad when Shad tries to claim he’s just as good an artist and Jezza doesn’t have the heart to call him out on it.
Yeah AvE was a punch in the nuts
Same deal with ave. It’s fine, his content also started going downhill.
Shad is constantly trying to get one over on his co-hosts to the point where it’s difficult to watch. Always has to win. I liked learning about how castles worked a hundred times more.
i watched demo ranch for a while but figured it would only be a matter of time before that guy would dissapoint me with blatant fascism apologia. guess i wasnt wrong.
I watched Linus Tech Tips, and NCIX Tech Tips before that. My wife and I were discussing how the level of information was tanking but the production quality was great, then GN released their video a few weeks after we stored watching LTT and I unsubsidized.
NCIX Tech Tips: Special Victims Unit
AvE after he went full crazy
Yeah, wanted to comment exactly that. You could literally watch him become crazier with every upload. At first I did overlook the odd comment, but he eventually went full nutjob and I had to unsubscribe.
Yeahhhhhh, I used to recommend his channel to young engineers and techs because of how thorough he was at explaining the how and why of mechanisms. I don’t anymore which is a shame because he was knowledgeable.
Wait what did I miss?
Anti-vax, supported the trucker rallies, called Trudeau a Nazi
It’s interesting to see how much of Canada has bitten the American onion over the past few decades.
Very much same here.
It seems that it’s about 50/50 whether you stopped watching someone based on some allegations that came out, or you just outgrew their style.
One that I outgrew is probably Game Grumps. I watched them regularly for years, then one day just kinda stopped.
Shows like that rely a lot on real conversation & stories. Eventually, Dan & Arin had been doing game hrumps for so long they just sorta, ran out of both? At least, not to be able to support such a hellish release schedule of episodes. Too much time together, playing games, means they didn’t have anything to supplement it with anymore, so all that was left was the same jokes repeated for timekillers.
Occasionally broken by Arin being a music dork instead of a gaming dork, leading to magic like introducing him to Gen1 Pokemon designs.
… oh god that was nine years ago.
CGPGrey. I even listened to his podcasts.
For someone who tried to sell productivity tools at one point, he was very unproductive.
Also, given what happened with Standard and Nebula, I got to say I side with Nebula over him.
Yeah, it’s weird, CGPGrey videos used to be the most must-watch of all YouTube for me and I subscribed to his Patreon at one point. I listened to Hello Internet loyally and I was even unhurt about how it ended. I still think he’s an interesting guy and would follow his stuff again but he doesn’t seem to be doing anything of interest to me any more.
What happened with Standard/Nebula?
I responded to someone else, but there is a reason why Grey isn’t a part of Nebula.
his videos started getting sparse/boring
What happened? I’ve never heard of it
Him and Kurzgesagt were helping to build an organization for YouTubers with the current CEO. The first talent signed on was Wendover and Real Engineering.
Grey and Kurzgesagt were rather inactive partners when they should have been more active and were trying to build a much more exploitative company instead of what Nebula became. It is vague on how they left, but they left and the company became better for it.
Sorry, do you mean the current CEO of Nebula or of YouTube?
Nebula
So Nebula got rid of him (which would seem to coincide with his drop in output)?, Kurzgesagt seems to be doing just fine in comparison.
I didn’t like his take, “solving” traffic nescitates the use of self-driving cars. Can’t have traffic without cars, it’s as simple as that. We need public transport, not more shit to spend our increasingly scarce money on.
I still watch his main videos (when they actually happen…), but with a much higher degree of scepticism than I used to. And I stopped listening to his podcast (singular…).
My disillusionment with him started with a few issues with his videos. The blatantly ridiculous “royal family is good actually” video. The less obvious but no less egregious touting of Guns, Germs, and Steel. The AI techbroism of his automation video. Then he just killed off the podcast with no explanation, leaving his cohost Brady to put out a note saying “yeah we’re just on hiatus for now”. Over 4 years ago that was. There was the fact that he sided very vocally with Kurzgesagt in the CoffeeBreak drama, despite
CBKurzgesagt obviously being in the wrong at every step of the way.Then the final straw where I was no longer willing to say I was a fan of his was when he did a video about some missile silo in America, in which he used the name of a submarine-based missile instead of a land-based missile at some point. Shortly afterwards he put out a massive mea culpa video saying it was a “catastrophic” error that he could not live with himself for, and that he holds himself to too high a standard to let that stand. All while still not acknowledging the problems with those earlier videos. So one nitpicky detail gets a massive hullabaloo and a retraction, but fundamental flaws in the underlying thesis of the video gets nothing? Give me a break.
I only ever saw that Royal Family video of his, and it was enough for me never to seek out any more.
Have you seen this response video to Grey’s Royal Family one?
I haven’t, but I will definitely watch that, thanks! 👍
i love Shaun’s videos, but this is one of my favorites. the way he “negotiates” with the royal family is just chef’s kiss.
What drama, and if sided with Kurzgesagt when they were in the right as you say, what is the issue?
Oh whoops! My mistake! I’ll edit the above comment to fix that. It was Kurzgesagt who was in the wrong.
The drama was (to copy/paste an earlier comment, because it’s rather lengthy):
It started when a YouTuber whose channel is called Coffee Break reached out to Philip of Kurzgesagt as part of a video he was doing into the flaws of popular science communication. Specifically, about some significant errors in K’s video on Addiction. Instead of agreeing to collaborate, or even giving a simple “not interested, sorry”, K took an instant accusatory tone, claiming CB must have been making a “gotcha” piece. CB and K agreed that they would talk more about the matter to try and assuage K’s concerns, but K kept stalling while working on a retraction video, at which time K took down the video that was the impetus for this discussion (shortly after, as one of those aforementioned stalling efforts, having said “I never could bring myself to take it down”, claiming it would be “cruel and unnecessary” to do so—funny, considering in his AMA attempting to spin the story, he said “I was really stressed out about the addiction and the refugee video for years. Being finally open about my mistakes and deleting them felt like weight leaving my body.”). The Refugee video was also taken down along with the Addiction one that CB was interested in.
K claims to be interested in science communication. But here, he decided to make the selfish decision to do what he thought would protect his own personal brand through duplicitous means. He got ahead of the story that falsely assumed was coming, and put up a pre-emptive response to that. Now, CB isn’t entirely blameless. In response to the above, CB put out a rather hot-headed reaction to the whole incident. He didn’t follow up with K to try to understand what had happened; he lashed out in anger at K’s self-righteous arse-covering video.
And then CB started getting harassed. K called out CB, and many of K’s friends (other very large, powerful YouTubers such as CGP Grey and Philip de Franco) made very public statements to their audiences attacking CB. It ended up forcing CB into taking down his video, deleting a whole heap of tweets explaining what happened, and putting out an apology. Perhaps it was an apology that CB should have indeed made, but the need for an apology from K was much, much greater. And one never came. K used his larger platform to spin the narrative so that his large audience, and now also the general public who becomes aware of this, almost all take his side.
Incidentally, here’s the video that CB was working on at the time. Hari, the scientist discussed in the video whom K worked with on his video discussed earlier, communicated very well with CB on it.
Thanks for the great breakdown, it sounds vaguely familiar. I remember K’s retraction bit and I follow Philip DeFranco. Disappointed he landed on the wrong side.
For what it’s worth, Philly D is someone I could have answered the original question with too. Not for any spectacular reason like the above—I had already stopped watching him before that occurred. For me it was just finding his focus was too much on sensationalist pop culture news rather than news reporting that interested me. He wasn’t doing anything wrong, it just wasn’t right for me.
Yeah he definitely can veer too much into that stuff for a time. I strongly dislike his thumbnails and titles but I feel he has to do that to compete but I do like his content, some days just less than others.
I found his video on FPTP Binary political systems video to be logically flawed and I think it ultimately caused more harm than good. It’s irritating to see people reference it in political discussions today. That eventually convinced me to stop giving him views.
Good Mythical Morning
At some point they got so popular that I just felt like they sold out. I felt like I was just watching 1 giant ad with all of their videos trying to get me to buy something. Also, some of their rants that they started going on got annoying. Seemed like at some point they lost the chemistry that they had together. I just enjoyed watching their banter and them doing goofy stuff.
Huge agree about pushing their merch! They’re shameless. I used to watch every day for years but stopped a long time ago; when every episode became a food episode. Their podcast (Ear Biscuits) is a bit better, it’s more them talking about things long form, just being 40+ year old fairly normal (if not very successful) guys. They’ve talked about quitting GMM, I think once their various kids are done with school they’ll pack it up (the main show at least). They both have other passions but it’s really difficult to stop when you’ve built a successful, working media company with your childhood best friend, even if they’re both ready to retire.
They actually bought Smosh and brought Ian and Anthony back, and then sold Smosh back to them a few years later. That was a really cool move to me and and got them a HUGE pass in my book, they’re stand-up guys.
Full disclosure: despite not watching much of their video content anymore I still went and saw them on their most recent tour (about a month ago, it was a gift) and had a great time. They did some of their games but modified them to be specific to my state, did a food ranking with some local-foods, and of course had a couple musical numbers.
Too many to list.
They all either:
Died
Got cancelled
Pandered to a younger audience of which I am not.
Total Biscuit, the cynical brit. He will always have a special place in my heart.
Didn’t ever watch his videos but ran into him at a local event where a game dev had invited 60 or so of us to play their game early. I remember him watching over my shoulder (there were only enough PCs for half of us to play at a time) as I went to play the game in my favorite way to play games: incorrectly. Flew a transport vtol and was using it to “boop” enemy vtol fighters half my size into the ground where they’d explode. We would both get a kick out of it every time I managed to pull it off. He was a fun guy to be around, I get why so many miss him.
Thanks for sharing this
I was wondering if I would see this name here. It has been a while. Honorary mentions, I used to also watch Jesse Cox and Dodger/Dexbonus.
Both Mr. Beast and Mark Rober. They got too loud and shrill over time.
Edit: Oh and Guga Food / Sousvide Everything. They just do the same thing all over, with weirder ingredients every day, and then make shocked pickachu faces when stuff tastes shit. Ribeye dry aged for 180 days in engine oil? No shit it’s bad.
Every Mark Rober video is now an ad. They’re also loud and obnoxious, so I’ve stopped watching them.
I’ve actually never watched a Mr Beast video. They never came up in my feed.
Mark Rober is a massive fraud. Recently he started selling out to the military industrial complex too.
The mistakes in that stupid weather balloon video closed that door for me. What a pretentious greedy weirdo.
He always seemed nice, but all he really cares is squeezing as much money out of everything.
Binging with Babish - the content just drifted away. He started doing a show with another guy and I just didn’t watch those episodes. Then, the content went further and I stopped watching.
Joshua Weissman - he just became insufferable at some point. I liked his older content.
Shadiversity, Sabine Hossenfelder - they have positions that cause hurt to people and that I morally do not agree with and won’t give watch time or ad/sub money to. There are probably more here, but I don’t recall. They’re welcome to their opinions, but I’m not entitled to view them or fund them.
First we Feast - mostly watched it for Hot Ones (the Motz’s stuff was fantastic!) but I got tired of Hot Ones, didn’t know most of the guests for a long stretch (not living in the US or really consuming US media made me lose track of things). I also kinda got burnt out on the format.
Linus Tech Tips - to me, it just became the arrogant, egotistical Linus show. There was some other stuff that kinda put me off as well. Maybe it’s better now, but I haven’t watched in a long while at this point.
A number of creators I’m not thinking of - I hate when prescription meds are advertised (which isn’t even legal in the vast majority of countries) and how they just want to sell dick pills without a real, non-conflict-of-interest doctor involved when the cause may not even be physical. I worked in healthcare for a long time and that just rubbed me the wrong way, particularly when creators in countries where it would be illegal for them on TV do it (and it may not even be legal/available in their country but it is in the country of at least US-based audience members).
Edit: and the 8-bit guy now, based on others mentioning things, checking other sources, and even checking up a follow-up video he made a year ago. I’ll pass.
Shadiversity
Oh boy. I do HEMA, and let me tell you, he is not popular among people who actually have any understanding of historical fighting. The guy preaches his own opinion based on vague vibes and what seems right to him, and I think he’s even put out some videos saying how HEMA is terrible and wrong. Meanwhile, we read actual historical texts from people who were using these weapons and techniques at a time when it was actively being used, and we regularly train and fight people to prove to ourselves just how effective they are.
And that’s without even getting in to the very clear bigotry he demonstrates on his second channel, and which occasionally makes its way subtly into the main channel.
Anyway, as far as bigotry and people interested in swords are concerned, Jill Bearup. I haven’t watched her since she did the collab with Tom Scott and as a result her history of transphobia and refusal to denounce those beliefs became more widely known, leading to Tom Scott taking down the collab, and Nebula kicking her off their platform.
Oh boy Jill. I was crushed to learn about her transphobia. And also her cringe book.
Same! Such an utter disappointment.
Sabine Hossenfelder - they have positions that cause hurt to people
Can you elaborate on this? I haven’t really watched much of her content, so I am not quite sure how she’s causing hurt.
thanks, I see now. really well made response video.
You can search for her takes on trans people and that will probably, but basically against basic things like gender-affirming care and positing that trans is a social fad amongst youth.
Have dropped Joshua as well since he turned more and more annoying trying to capitalize on memes.
And Linus… well i think everyone that follows/ed him knows about the gamers nexus incident which was just the tipping point after, as you said, he got more and more arrogant
Boogie2988. I thought he seemed like a reasonable, unbiased person when I was watching around 2016. Kind of just moved on with my life after realising he was just following YouTube drama.
Have checked him out in the last year or so and it’s not looking good for him. The really sad thing is that he could have just taken his money and lived a chill life, but he seems to want a spotlight and to feel important even if it’s because people are shaming him for being a washed up b list youtuber.
Most recent thing i heard was that hes pushing crypto scams on his fans and feigning ignorance when confronted with the fact that his fans are losing money directly because of him
Gross. I heard he lost a hell of a lot of money on crypto and hookers, so that checks out.
