Very niche/specific interest Youtube channels - Documentaries, fandoms, hobbies, history, academic, professional, etc

Man vs persistent rat

Man vs persistent rat

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Can we list some YT channels which take a very particular subject and describe it with enough passion and clarity to entertain somebody without an existing or vested interest in the subject? I've found myself following a lot of channels that I have no interest in pursuing the discipline that they promote, but somehow enjoy passively learning a little about the subject. Ideally choose a representative video that shows the channel at its best. A few of mine:

This government safety channel posts well-produced breakdowns of industrial accidents in a curiously engaging narrative manner:

Many of you will have heard of Primitive Technology, but for those who have not, this is an amateur trying to reconstruct... primitive technology in the wild, with only demonstration and no voice-over:

Historical womens fashion shitposting:

An archive of quaint old Welsh local news clips, plenty in English:

Development of language:

Relaxing strolls around dying or dead malls in the US:

A cute mix of mythology and palaeontology/anthropology content:

This is a channel mainly aimed at historical martial arts with European swords, but it has a ridiculous depth of interesting videos on historical warfare, arms laws, pedantic details, etc. Surprisingly useful for historical fiction writing, improving roleplaying settings.

A good channel focusing on practical technology:

A rough and ready, and engaging palaeontology channel;:
 
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here are some of my personal favorites:

Joseph Carter the Mink Man (trained mink are used to hunt muskrats and river/lake creatures)

Townsends (focuses on 18th century cooking, clothing, architecture, etc.)

Shawn Woods (reviews of mousetraps, ranging from primitive traps to modern traps)

Fisherman's Life (basically a guy going around catching and cooking fish and other creatures on the beach, river, etc.)

Atomic Shrimp (English guy who reviews weird food, calls scammers, and delves into other strange but interesting hobbies)

Life in Jars? (guy creates ecospheres. Very simplistic videos, but they are very relaxing and I often watch them to fall asleep)
 
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A history channel making very concise and hand illustrated videos on various topics. Talks about bronze age Mediterranean history, central asia and the far east. Educational and easy to digest


Another history channel, also educational but more humoristic and glib. Great sense of humor and short form
 
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The profession is niche, but this guy's YT isn't. He pulls +million views a vid for showing how he professionally restores art. He goes step-by-step of how he's going to solve the issues and I think the hook is the "before and after" of seeing a trashed painting becoming normal.

 
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The mouse trap channel is absolutely the peak of this type of material, thanks. A sneaky few others to get around my 10 embeds limit:

A blind person describes how he plays video games and uses the internet:

I kind of left this as a gimmie, but will mention it. I have minimal interest in guns, and yet this channel makes them intriguing:

I don't know how a channel about people making themselves objectively unattractive and ruining their health has become so fascinating to me, I guess it is the competition/drama/human struggle element:

Two guys who lived in China for a long time talking about specific cultural differences, upsides/downsides to society:

A constantly-embattled guy fighting for the Right to Repair against Apple, and getting mad at bad/overpriced repair work done by enclosed-ecosystem companies:

Two old-English/Norse language channels:

A guy who is autistically fixated on medieval armour:

A guy who both makes informative reviews Scotch whisky, but is also knowledgable and interesting regarding the spirits industry in general:

Title says it all
 
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I'm a fan of ARG and amatuer horror so I like to use Nexpo's channel for recommendations. He's essentially a speculation channel that looks at various weird/creepy works and events from around the internet. His own content is pretty basic (Overview of whatever he's looking at, followed by theories) but it's a good gateway into some of the lesser known creepy stuff.
 
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There are a lot of beekeeping channels on Youtube, but I find Vino's Farm the most informative. I don't even keep bees or plan to, but danged if it isn't a fascinating hobby. It seems just the kind of thing a person into "resource management/strategy" games would like, since all you do all day is rearrange frames in hiveboxes for maximum efficiency.


Bonus: If you like watching just how much havoc bees can wreak in the Deep South by entering every little crawl space in every ramshackle house and setting up shop, watch JP the Bee Man. (He's a bee removal expert.)

The History Guy is one of the better history channels, if only because of the relative obscurity of the events he covers. (Plus, he looks like the Platonic Ideal of every History Teacher that everyone has ever had, ever.)


Shadiversity is more of a history Debunker, reviewing castles and weapons from major Hollywood movies and showing just how much they fall short of real life examples. There are a lot of channels like this on YT, (like Lindybeige,) but Shad seems to go more in depth. He'll use sketchup or Conan: Age of War to design a "realistic" movie castle from scratch and spend an hour or so documenting every detail of it (but do it in a way that makes you feel that you've learned something afterwards.)


Historia Civillis is the opposite of Shadiversity. Instead of going into in-depth detail visually, he breaks historical battles and events down into abstract shapes, like squares and rectangles on a battle map. You would be surprised, though, how illuminating this is. Somehow, it's a lot easier to understand how everything in a historical event relates to each other, when everything (even people) have been reduced to featureless shapes.

Defunctland is a history channel devoted solely to old, vanished amusement parks and rides. I got into it after seeing their expose on Action Park, the deadliest, "fly by the seat of your pants, I can't believe this was even legal" family amusement park to ever exist:


There are a TON of restoration channels on Youtube, (where people film themselves restoring old garbage,) but this is one of the best. There's no music, no voiceover, just sandblasting, enamelling, and reassembling stuff (usually toys) that you thought were beyond saving:


And now for something completely different: a True Crime channel that explores interrogation videos from various murder cases, examining how the police interrogators featured in them managed to guide some of the world's scariest criminals into confessing/ revealing their connection to a crime. What makes it especially tense is the knowledge that any of the criminals could break off the questioning and request a lawyer at any time. The police can't FORCE anybody to confess. But what they can do is butter you up, show false sympathy, and use every psychological tool in the book to get you to admit your connection - or complicity - to a crime.


This channel is a bit more niche than the usual, showing a man (a former TV Presenter) sailing the British canal system on a Narrow Boat. He narrates his adventures, and gives advice on how to maintain and sail one of these curious little crafts. A nice, relaxing, pastoral experience, especially when he lets the camera run during a trek down one of the canals.


This channel will probably appeal only to train autists, but it features train cab footage of Norway, one of the most beautiful and savage places on the planet. (The Stormy Weather video is worth a watch, if only so that you can see how crazy the conditions on the railway in winter are:)

 
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Sorry for spamming these, but your great suggestions reminded me of a few others.

Brave Dave is a travel channel that focuses on freight-hopping, i.e. climbing on board a long-distance freight train and remaining camped out on it for up to several days at once. He is notable for freight-hopping across Canada, and subsequently being banned from the country when the found out (There's another channel called hobestobe of maybe the most renowned person for doing this, who died in an accident related to it):

Similarly, this fella crosses Wales in as straight of a line as he can manage, regardless of the obstacles:

This is a fascinating antique gun restoration series:

There is a curiously active community of people in the UK who do 'magnet fishing', where they find metal objects in rivers and canals. The 'spice' of this genre is the ridiculous ways they find to hype up and clickbait the mundane shit they find (it's really hard to remember the difference between these channels, much less remember the best videos, sadly):

A good metalwork/forging channel:

There is a community of people who make elaborate racetracks for things like Hotwheels, and sometimes they do neat first person GoPro videos:

Amongst fishing channels, there's a good amount of clickbait for the parasite-effected fish that you can find in nasty rivers:

People making their own Robot Wars-style competition using RC trucks and forklifts.

This is a subseries of a video game-centric channel, but LGR's thrifts series sees him browsing Goodwill stores wherever he can find them:
 
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edboy said:
Shawn Woods (reviews of mousetraps, ranging from primitive traps to modern traps)
Click to expand...

Same! I have a paralyzing fear of rats and mice, so finding his channel actually helped me to cope with it and get to a point where I can see a mouse or a rat and not lose my damn mind.

Also, it made for good research on what traps to use.
 
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Clickspring is pretty amazing.
These are un-narrated overviews of what Chris does, but his in-depth, narrated videos are the shit. The Antikythera Mechanism series is awesome.
 
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