This might be too niche for anyone here, but Ronny Dahl.

He used to make good videos on four wheel driving in Australia, with good gear tips and longer form camping trips with his friends. Well, either he started editing his videos alone or stopped taking his meds or something, but now every video is quick cuts, stupid voice effects, stories that build into nothingburgers or intermingled stories that have nothing to do with each other and just get confusing. I also notice those friends he used to camp with aren’t in his videos any more, so that’s probably saying something.

At least I still have the 4WD 24/7 guys (although I don’t really like the “next generation” they’re trying to bring in).

Do you guys remember Ray William Johnson? Last time I looked he was doing like super weird clickbait-y non news story naration. I don’t know if anyone understands what I tried to say there.

SMG4 is one that comes to mind, having watched his channel since its early days. His older videos, while clearly lacking polish and obviously made by a teenager, were actually funny and memorable. As time went on though, his content started to slip. Sure, the production quality improved as he started Glitchy Boy and later Glitch Productions, but the humour ended up becoming secondary as he switched from self-contained episodes to various “seasons” with ongoing storylines. It meant you had to keep up with every episode to know wtf was going on (the same mistake South Park made), and his attempt at making the series more of a drama than a comedy meant that the humour was more of a distraction that made it hard to take the drama seriously. Why should I believe Mario will die this time if I’ve seen him survive being blown up, set on fire and shot dozens of times before? Some of the best characters (Bowser, Toad, etc) ended up taking a backseat to his numerous OCs as well, and the voice acting sucked compared to back when everyone spoke with various meme clips and subtitles.

SMG4 was at its best when it was a bunch of multicoloured Marios just doing random funny shit, and didn’t take itself seriously one bit. It’s pretty clear Luke’s passion is with Glitch’s other productions, hence why SMG4 finally ended.

Everything on YouTube apart from niche special interest content creators has gone to shit because all these high viewership channels got bought out by private equity.

Braille Skateboarding. Dude shut it down without letting his team know beforehand because he’d fallen deep into Scientology.

I still like Skallagrim. He still gave helpful reviews about blacksmiths and historical weapons that I’m interested in. And IMO, his channel was always more entertainment than scholarship. But HEMA is a martial art that develops slowly, way slower than YouTube algorithm’s demand. There are not many new stuffs to talk about. If there has to be fillers to get his channel going, I’m okay with that.

Edit: Back to the topic. There are not many channels that I care about degraded to the point that I can’t bare. What made me a little sad is that from time to time, channels stop publishing videos. Especially after Covid, people found better things to do, so they hibernated their YouTube channels.

Cinemassacre, for a couple reasons:

1. The character of the AVGN is based on Mike Matei, not James Rolfe. James is mainly a horror movie nerd, and Mike is the gamer. As toxic as Matei can be about gaming, When Mike left, part of the Nerd left with him.

2. They expanded to more recent games. It was inevitable, but it really killed the last personal touch the series had. The AVGN Earthbound episode is a great outlier, because you can tell that James wanted to make it and had at least some connection to the game. Most of the episodes now, he’s reviewing games he has no connection to, using a script written by someone else.

Game Grumps, for similar reasons. Dan stopped being familiar with the games they played, so he stopped offering as much input. During Covid especially, he would order in food and just eat for half of the episode. They pivoted to not really marking the number of an episode in a series, thus making it harder to follow a series. Then they started releasing longer episodes and doing stuff like the 10 Minute Power Hour. I originally was drawn to the fact that you could watch an episode of GG or play it as background noise and still get some good laughs or vibes. That kinda went out the window, and so did I.

Pretty much all the old gaming YTers I used to watch I barely have time for because of how long the videos are. Most of this is down to streaming, and how long and plodding VODS are.

Also, ditto anytime they transition to doing it full-time. I remember YT in the 2000’s when people basically just did it as a hobby.

Most of them to be honest, not through their fault but the ever tightening squeeze of ABC Corp. on what is “acceptable” content and language. To the point some are giving up or deplatforming from Youtube to elsewhere. Stephanie Sterling if I had to say one but that’s because they even acknowledged it’s just the same thing over and over again. So they do less videos unless it’s something particularly poignant.

Let people explore their creativity 😢 The unsubscribe button is always there if you lose interest. That’s what YouTube was about back in the day. You. Not how many you can please for likes and shares and enfuckment. Post what you want, and interact with people who like your content.

I watched a channel called- Escape the dream restoring a French chateau. I watched it religiously for likr 5 plus years and it helped distract we through covid. Within the last year as they became more popular the ads and selling amped up so much that I couldnt stand watching anymore. Before it felt relaxing and fun to watch now it feels like they are always trying to make money off everything to the detriment of their actual content. Full videos that are only ads, lots of content locked behind patron and now also YouTube membership too and the obnoxious in video sponsorships

FilmRiot

Used to be a fun channel about DIY filmmaking. They would replicated a number of things using DIY gear (how to make a dolly track, etc…)

After a while, it became entirely about replicating digital effects in After Effects and stuff like that, and when they do talk about hardware, it’s sponsored content about gear that is far out of any amateur filmmaker’s budget.

Pretty much any channel once they make it big. I have watched so many channels that just starts out as a person in their basement, or bedroom and make great but simple content. Then they catch on, get a lot of subs and starts making content for the algorithm instead of their existing viewers. They go full time, hire an editor, a cameraman etc. And the content moves further and further away from what made it good to begin with.

A turning point is usually when they quit their dayjob and go full time, that’s when the pressure to perform well really begins.

Some exceptions of course, like LGR and Explaining Computers, who just keep chugging along solo. And I still enjoy them because of it.

Ashens, but I can understand why, he’s been on youtube for 19 Earth years. He’s doing the same schtick he’s been doing since there was hope in the world, there’s basically no object that fits on a sofa he hasn’t snarked about. An entire registered voter’s life ago, he would do some quite edgy content, but it’s faded to snark. I wish him all the best, he seems to be an okay guy.

The Modern Rogue face planted hard. I think Brushwood tried growing the business bigger and faster than it could, while making a few obvious mistakes.

Not sure if this counts, but CGP Grey. The frequency of the videos was always a joke, but the most recent video is a 3 month old paywalled vid of an early preview for a video still unreleased publicly. I still enjoy the videos when they’re released, so it’s not the quality, but the channel is clearly on autopilot. I hope everything’s ok with him and maybe he’s just using YouTube as passive income now that he hit it big?