If you're into bread tube / left tube, I highly recommend Innuendo Studios. In particular, Innuendo Studios's playlist, "the Alt-Right Playbook." It helps make sense of internet discourse.
Sampson Boat Co. - British man and friends rebuild wooden sailing boat. If you have any interest in boats or craftsmanship you'll enjoy. Watch from the very beginning to see their incredible progress.
Beau Miles - Charming and slightly rough Australian man has strange adventures and philosophizes along the way. He gets excited about particularly useful/edible bits of trash along the highway.
Primitive Technology - Silent man with blue shorts exists alone in the jungle and has been working his way up to iron tools. He is freakishly fast at making fire with only two sticks. Watch in order to see his progression and turn on captions to see his commentary.
Spirit Of The Law - Extremely thorough Age of Empires II science and analysis. If you thought this 24 year old video game was dead, think again.
Settled - Old School RuneScape player plays the game with extra restrictions that create surprisingly compelling storytelling. "Swampletics", his Morytania-locked Ultimate Iron Man is legendary.
DIY Perks - British guy makes mostly brass/wooden PCs and other tech. His creations aren't always the most practical but they are always interesting. His slim PlayStation 5 was neat.
There's a handful of sustainable farming channels that I like: No-Till Growers, Richard Perkins, and Josh Sattin Farming. If your interests include food or growing stuff then these are for you.
TheRussianBadger - gaming with good humor and editing
Max0r - gaming with good humor, voice acting, and insane editing
Scott the Woz - for that old YouTube feel
RTGame - funny Irish gaming man
Call Me Kevin - funny Irish gaming man
Indeimaus - mostly horror and Metroidvania gaming
Game Apologist - good Sonic content
RadKing - Fallout content
Iron Pineapple - From Software enthusiast
MuYe - BeamNG content
The Orpheon - good Metroid content
Tech Stuffs
Louis Rossman - disgruntled business tech repair man
Gamers Nexus - pc tech review
Linus Tech Tips (and its other channels) - LMG has been making some very good changes since their first response to their recent controversies. If they actually deliver with them, then all of these channels should be good to watch. Mac Address should be fine to watch as it has been stated that the channel and group affiliated are kept somewhat separated from the rest of LMG for various reasons.
Hardware Unboxed - Australian pc tech review
Monitors Unboxed - Hardware Unboxed for Monitors
Dave's Garage - cool Windows tricks from the guy who made the Task Manager
The Cherno - good Australian C++ channel
Open Source Stuffs
Nicco Loves Linux - good KDE and GNOME stuff
The Linux Experiment - Linux and open source news
unfa🇺🇦 - open source audio solutions
Mental Outlaw - the libre man
Royal Skies - free and open 2d and 3d content and assets
Animation
TerminalMontage - great animations
Noodle - great story animator
Practical Experiments
The Slow Mo Guys - slow motion videos of pretty cool stuff
Hacksmith Industries - cool Sci-Fi irl building channel
Shadiversity - medieval weapon and armour experimentation
ElectroBOOM - shocking experiments
Major Hardware - 3d printing and fan design showdown
Donut - good car content
Music
SilvaGunner - wacky game music
Eurobeat Gems - great if you like Eurobeat music
Education
Audio University - how your sound system works
Kyle Hill - science with nerd Thor
LockPickingLawyer - you will never look at locks the same way
Miscellaneous
No Text To Speech - cool for Discord users
Fact Fiend - miscellaneous facts and British banter
Bosnian Ape Society - If you've seen Nvidia Bread, then you'll understand.
High Boi - movie summaries
There's more that I could # recommend, but I couldn't figure out how to describe them.
Echoing some other suggestions surely, but here are a few that I regularly come back to:
GAMING:
CallMeKevin (really funny, wholesome Irish guy known for playing games kinda hilariously incorrectly )
GameGrumps (two best friends playing games and riffing. Usually very funny and wildly inappropriate. Feels like gaming with high school buddies)
Outside Xbox/Outside Xtra (small team of British friends with lots of quirky, easily digestible “7 things” lists over the years)
Dungeon Dudes (pretty broad and approachable dives into all things D&D)
Smooth McGroove (older channel with many delightful a cappella renditions of video game songs)
COOKING:
Babish Culinary Universe (super approachable, funny, and well-edited cooking tutorials with fun themes and lots of room to be wrong)
How to Cook That (Ann Reardon is a super knowledgeable, friendly, crazy talented baker, and she does a lot of good work to address and debunk dangerous & stupid trends on social media)
Joshua Weissman (similar vibes to Babish, but a little more overtly comedic. Does great recreations of fast food classics)
SCIENCE & TECH:
Technology Connections (deep dives that make mundane things in our lives seem super fascinating)
OzTalksHw (very wholesome, budget-friendly PC builds with an emphasis on self care.)
ZeFrank (excellent, accurate, and very funny short nature documentaries)
NetworkChuck (friendly, well-edited tutorials on lots of IT-related things)
ENTERTAINMENT AND OTHER/MISC:
Kitboga (fairly wholesome considering the content area. He exposes and confronts phone scammers with hilarious made up character voices and fake websites & accounts, and he teaches people what to look out for in the process. Lots of swearing and shouting from scammers that he regularly pisses off by wasting their time and getting their accounts closed)
Watcher (Ryan and Shane do a lot of different interesting things, and their banter and chemistry are infinitely watchable. Puppet History is a particular favorite)
Digging the Greats (really cool deep dives into the makings, origins, and fun facts about all things hip hop)
Up and Atom — an educational science channel. She gives plain-English explanations of all sorts of science topics, from quantum physics to computer science and even some philosophical puzzles from history.
TierZoo — a comedy/educational channel. In each video, he looks at animals as though they are playable classes in an MMO, explaining their strengths, weaknesses, and place in "the meta". It's comedy because it's video-game-themed, but it's also well-researched and based on real zoology. It's a riot.
Simone Giertz — you've probably seen clips of her shitty robots. She builds things for fun, profit, and just because. Most of her projects have an element of absurdity. Some of them work.
If you're interested in computer architecture/embedded systems, you gotta watch Ben Eater videos. His series of building a 6502 computer really helped computer architecture click for me.
Tasting History: Historical recipes re-created and the history behind them.
Accented Cinema: Video essays covering foreign (mainly Asian) films and actors.
ComicTropes: History of certain comic book runs, spin-offs, writers, artists, and tropes.
Game Sack: Deep dives into classic video game consoles and games.
Ordinary Sausage: A guy who makes sausage out of anything and everything.
Tried to hit multiple interests with this list. There’s so many smaller creators I’d love to recommend, but they all revolve around more specific topics / hobbies / interests.
The China Show. Latest Video shows the astonishing destruction from the floods in Beijing and how the CCP is doing their best to cover it up. Literally. No, actually literally. Timecode is about 7:20 if I remember correctly.
I've been binging their videos for 2 weeks, and learning so much about how China actually works.
Moon Channel, a lawyer who dives into some of the legal topics surrounding the gaming industry, most of them Nintendo related. Really well researched information about emulation legality, modding, even copyright infringement Nintendo themselves committed in the 90's (in the Mother 3 video), all sorts of stuff.
He also has a few other things, like a REALLY LONG video on JRPGs, or commentary on MMOs.
I was going to suggest the older "All Gas No Brakes" or "Channel 5 with Andrew Callaghan" but looks like there's been some controversy around him and no more videos since then.
Dude makes hour long (or longer) videos / (videoseries) about scientific topics, such as "America's missing supercollider" or "Man who tried to fake an element". And they are all done really well.
I think this thread is the first one to get my save button.
On topic, if you're into gardening (or just wanna watch something different) check out Hoocho. A guy building hydroponic systems and growing stuff. Great channel. Also no weed if that's the first thing that comes to mind from hydroponics.
Wristwatch Revival. I have never and will never own or repair an expensive non digital watch, but it's great content. Marshall is easy to listen to and it's actually very interesting.
Astonished to see a thread about YouTube and not see any mention of Dankpods. I sub to two patreons, and Wade's is one of them. It's because of him that I have an ever-growing collection of iPods.
Vlogbrothers has been a favourite for many years. They do so much good! And do lots of silly stuff too, like making a series of videos with titles taken from smash mouth’s rockstar 😀
Hacks into scammers' systems while they're scamming him and exposes them. Gives you a so satisfying sense of justice. And it's overall interesting to see how he's working, and educational too.
Most of mine have already been mentioned, but here are a few I didn't see:
Songs by Spencer A guy named Spencer makes songs. Relatively new channel, but the production quality is top notch. I think his day job is owner of a video production company.
Cheap Audio Man Reviews relatively cheap audio gear. Cheap is a pretty wide range in the audio world.
Awesome Open Source Talks about open source software. Usually runs through how to install and basic usage/features.
If you are interested in woodworking there are 2 channels.
Stumpy Nubs -- provides quick (usually < 15 min) how to videos on different techniques and tricks. He does a great job of explaining and demonstrating things
Bourbon Moth - a lot of full build videos (they tend to be > 30 minutes), but he does a great job of explaining the whole process from start to finish
fern is a relatively new channel covering various themes – like why french McDonalds is so much better or how a few german companies profited from Hitler and never took responsibility – in extremly high quality. Its a cooperation of two established dutch and a german channels. Really worth checking out.
I can't believe no one has mentioned Aging Wheels and Under Dunn, both by Robert Dunn.
The first is Robert's channel about his crazy car collection and the work he does on them. The second is his woodworking channel. His sense of humor and video editing skills are amazing and he seems like a really nice guy all around.
LOVE the Hopeless Romantic Society recently. Jahad has truly perfected the "man on the street" formula, gives grace to the interviewee, and has a punchy, hilarious editing style.
I really like Stevie videos. He plays this game called Rust that's a pvp based game. He's makes hours long videos that have a solid plot with a beginning, middle, and end. I've never played a minute of rust but I love his narrative style. Its art truly.
It's a korean guy on a fish farm that started vlogging 7 years ago, and he had a lot of stray cats that he helped out, made food for, made sleeping spots etc. I think he became pretty popular in korean (1mil + subs), and he is now building more and more cool stuff for his cats.
Mic The Snare is a great channel talking about music. He uploads "Deep Discog Dives" where he goes into the discography of artists and does commentary talking about hot topics in music. His most DDD is Prince which is nearly 2 hours long (don't worry, most of his DDDs are less than 40 minutes long) and it was amazing.
Vice Grip Garage
Rescues old forgotten cars and manages to drive them home. He has his own style and I think you either like it or not. You can't deny his skill and ability to resurrect classic cars.
Not many I follow too closely to be honest these days. I just did a big purge of a bunch of my subscriptions so there's only a handful now.
Gaming/Entertainment:
Nextlander: General gaming; comprised of three ex-members of Giant Bomb (Vinny, Alex, and Brad).
Mr. Samuel Streamer: Primarily focused on Rimworld and Crusader Kings, just an extremely witty guy that puts a lot of work into what he does. Often spends 8-9 hours in gameplay and editing to make a 30 minute episode, every day.
Nilaus: Factory/automation games, like Factorio and Dyson Sphere Program.
The Jimmy Dore Show: Semi-leftist, has liberal tendancies but is more political comedy than serious commentary, so I categorize him more as entertainment than political. I often don't agree with all of his takes, but the show can be good sometimes.
CryptTV: Mini-horror episodes, often with a few recurring monsters. Really well done effects work.
Politics:
Li Jingjing: China-based journalist, covers China and the global south as a whole. Does both serious stories and cultural/interest pieces. Great for somebody just interested in seeing more China without the anti-China rhetoric.
George Galloway: Left-leaning talk show host, some reactionary tendancies but he does have a pretty good range of guests from time to time, including the above. He's been around for ages, very well established.
The Deprogram: Leftist talk show and podcast.
That's kind of my entire subscription list at the moment, it has been cut down a lot recenty.