YouTube Rant
Warning: Rant incomming.
I've been thinking a lot recently about YouTube. Initially about whether or now I wanted to try to make YouTube content again. Long story short there, meh, I don't know.
But it got me thinking about the channels I follow and why, or more importantly, why I have stopped following them. At first I was thinking it's because I outgrew the channels, but after thinking about it, they outgrew me.
My baseline example is Steve Ramsey (Woodworking for Mere Mortals), who has been making videos for over 10 years, but I still watch religiously. The big thing is that despite his years, he hasn't changed his channel to something I can't appreciate anymore. His actual production values have gotten better, and he goes into a lot more detail than he did before, but he's still making videos based around projects that a home woodworker can do.
My extreme on the other end is April Wilkerson. She's managed to turn a small woodworking channel into a huge business. I 100% appreciate everything she's done, but now her videos seem to be based around what her business is doing. And when she is talking about projects, it's to sell the plans; but more often it's showing big projects that nobody else will ever do. It was cool to see the treehouse like deck for her new shop at her new commercial space, but multiple videos documenting building an excessive deck that is bigger than my entire back yard, that's starting to lose me.
April suffers from the same problem as Jonathan Katz-Moses, but he does it to a lesser extent. New machinery is cool, and showing us what it can do is fun, but dedicating multiple videos and your entire instangram feed to your 4x8 CNC machine (or laser cutter, or whatever super high end >$10k machine) that you got at a severe discount for promoting, is rather off-putting for me. I'm not using a CNC, nor am I probably ever going to. It's cool that you can do that, but don't rub it in my face.
In between the extremes is David Picciuto (Make Something). I just love this channel. Again, his production values have gotten better over time. And he's expanded way beyond just woodworking. But what he does is still completely relatable. I will probably never take up welding, just watching him do it and talk about it makes me think about trying it. Even when he uses different tools than normal, like a laser cutter or CNC, he's using a tabletop version that is readily available and he's talking about what's good and bad about it. I don't feel like I'm just watching him make something, he's showing me how get into it.
The last two I want to touch on, are I Like To Make Stuff, which goes back and forth between videos that I can keep up with, and stuff that I'll never even contemplate, and Travis from Shop Nation, who has made every video transparent and informative. Travis makes everything make sense and explains why he's doing everything and how to adjust it to make it useful to everyone else. Bob (ILTMS) makes cool stuff, but sometimes he's dependent on tools/materials that the rest of us just can't work with. But for the most part he's making things that we all can make. Travis always makes things we can all make, and focuses on things that help make shop life better.
I've spent the entire post talking about makers, but there are other channels I follow that aren't makers. But for the most part those channels are so niche that they are already either just for speculation or entertainment, or they're just staying in their lane but upping their production values. There isn't a retro-tech channel that has ever made me go, "Wow man, you've changed too much for me." So I haven't gotten into details there, but I will if people want me to.
/rant.