Episode: 1800
Title: HPR1800: YouTube Video Subscriptions
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr1800/hpr1800.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-18 09:26:10

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This is HPR Episode 18800 and titled YouTube Video Subcription.
It is hosted by AYUKA and in about 15 minutes long, the summer is, how to subscribe to
and watch YouTube video series with suggestions.
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Hello, this is AYUKA, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and this is another exciting
episode, not part of any particular series in this particular case, but something that
came up actually when we were recording the last community news.
And it started with something that Seaprompt had done.
Seaprompt did a show a couple of weeks ago.
There was kind of like three different cool things he wanted to talk about and one of them
was Crash Course Astronomy and I said to Ken, yeah, I know all about Crash Course Astronomy
and all of the other Crash Course and we got to talking and so, as you know, if you
talk to Ken about almost anything, he'll say, I want to show.
So I said, yeah, okay, I can do that.
So I want to talk about YouTube video subscriptions, which is actually a big thing for me.
Because although my wife and I do have a cable TV subscription, I've maintained I could
give it up easily because so much of what I am interested in is online anyway.
Now for a lot of people that might mean something like Netflix or Hulu, but for me it means
stuff like YouTube and video podcasts and things like that.
This is the golden age of narrow casting as opposed to broadcasting.
Because YouTube gives so many creators the opportunity to find their own audience for
things that don't appeal to the masses.
A television show needs to reach millions of people to be economically viable to advertisers
who pay all of the production costs.
But with the rise of services like Patreon, a video series can be viable with just a few
thousand viewers, as long as they're willing to pay a small amount, often as little as
a dollar a month or a dollar per video to support the creators.
For less money than the salary of one Hollywood star, you can have an entire ecosystem of interesting
videos.
The ones I like might not appeal to you of course, but that is the point, a thousand
flowers can bloom in this environment.
Now Patreon is an important part of this.
I have a link in the show notes, but you've probably heard about P-A-T-R-E-O-N.
It's a subscription site that lets you pledge to support creators of content.
You give them a credit card they can charge and then make your pledges.
You could pledge in a variety of ways.
But for these videos, I typically pledge either per month or per video.
At the end of the month, my credit card is charged, and Patreon sends me an itemized statement
of what I've paid for.
Now to be fair, none of these videos is behind a paywall, so you could free ride on this,
but I'm sure no one I know would do a thing like that.
If I subscribe to a series, I'm willing to pay for it if they ask.
Now, there are a few that don't because they are well supported by advertising, at least
I assume that's what it is because I don't see them asking for donations.
But many of them do rely on that.
So what are some of the YouTube subscriptions in particular that I like?
Well, let's talk about YouTube subscriptions.
YouTube, you can do a video series, and if you have a video series and you watch the video
on YouTube, you'll see a button under it that says subscribe.
Now that doesn't do a whole lot.
It doesn't do nearly what I think it ought to do.
It does build stats for the creator, but for advertising supported series, building stats
actually does matter.
If you can go to advertisers and say, here's all the people that subscribe to my series,
maybe you can get a better rate for your ads.
One thing it does let you do is sign up to get an email when a new episode is released.
Now to activate this feature, log into YouTube with your Google account, and on the left
side, go all the way down to the bottom and you will see a button to manage subscriptions.
Click on that and you'll see that you can put a check mark to get email updates for pretty
much any subscription.
I like to do that, and then I have arranged to have the emails in a folder in my Gmail,
and then I can delete the email when I've watched the video.
Now what I would love to see happen, and maybe this will at some point, I'd love to see
some way that I could automatically when I subscribe to these things have, you know,
here's the videos you haven't watched yet, and you know, maybe have them show up on
TV or something like that, and just simplify my life a little bit more.
But YouTube has not done that yet, you know, what I would love would be something that
just says, here's all the videos for things you subscribe to that you haven't watched.
But meanwhile, I have to do it manually.
So on the YouTube subscriptions, first of all, there are a couple of major creators that
I really like to follow.
And the first one is two brothers that started off as the VLOG Brothers, VLOG, I guess.
And these brothers are Hank and John Green, and they have a pretty good collection of
videos here, and they started as far as I can tell by sending videos back and forth to
each other, and that continues.
But then they got serious and created a convention called VidCon, link in the show notes, that
showcases many of the video series creators in their work.
YouTube then got the idea to promote an expansion of videos and provided money to support new
work from folks like them.
This led to a group of videos under the heading Crash Course, which is not one series, but
a collection of them.
The first ones were World History, and Biology, and they added American History, Literature,
Ecology, Chemistry, Psychology, and so on.
And of course, the one that C. Prompt mentioned, which is Astronomy, which is hosted by Phil
Plate.
So there's a lot of content there.
They also have a series of science-related videos under the general heading of SciShow.
And so they have a SciShow Space, SciShow Talk Show, and then just general SciShow videos
that come along.
Now when the YouTube seed money ended, they switched to a crowdfunding model, and just
recently moved on to Patreon.
They also partner with PBS Online for some of their series, PBS for people outside the
United States, as the public broadcasting system.
So it's like the BBC, but an American version.
Now my favorite show from this group is one called Healthcare Triage.
This is a doctor who gives straight analysis based on actual studies.
He explains which studies are more reliable and why they are more reliable.
So I guess I'm a bit of a data geek, but that really appeals to me.
Plus, I have worked for a few hospitals in my career, and previously taught a little
about healthcare economics.
So this is something of interest.
So anything from the vlog brothers, you will probably enjoy.
Then there's a fellow called Brady Haren, and he's a video producer originally from Australia
who went to the United Kingdom, worked for the BBC for a while, and then decided to
become independent.
And he has a fascinating group of video series that I think a lot of geeks would like.
Computer file, which is about the history and underlying technology of computers.
If you ever wanted to know about flip flops, nan gates, and acorn computers, this show has
covered all of them.
Deep sky videos.
This is all about astronomy, including a detailed look at the telescopes at the European Southern
Observatory in Paranal Chili.
Number file, all about mathematics, and the unusual numbers that pop up.
What is the largest number described?
Well, they covered it.
Objectivity.
A look at objects from the history of science, and in particular the collection of the
Royal Society in England.
Periodic videos.
This is an award-winning series on chemistry, demonstrating some fun experiments.
Sir Martin Pollyakov is the host.
And then 60 symbols, the world of advanced physics, this covers everything from quantum
mechanics to relativity to string theory.
So Brady Haren is obviously doing a lot of good stuff, and if you just check that out,
the RADY, H-A-R-A-N on YouTube, you can see all of the stuff that he does.
Now in addition to that, those two big groups of things, there are a lot of YouTube series
that I love that I'm going to now mention, kind of miscellaneous a little bit, although mostly
science.
First is Alton Brown, who is famous as the host and creator of Good Eats on the Food Network.
He's known for a scientific approach to cooking and food, and I enjoy his videos.
He haven't been too many of late.
I think he's been on the road doing a traveling show.
BBC Earth Unplugged, which is science videos from the BBC.
Someone called Braincraft.
It's about the science of the brain, and it's produced by PBS Digital.
Brain stuff from how stuff works, now that's kind of a smaller collection of things.
So I have several things from how stuff works.
This particular one is a science-related one, they do some others.
There's a series from Candy Rat Records.
This is a label that specializes in guitar music, and a number of my favorite people record
for them.
They very sensibly publish videos on YouTube to promote their artists, and I have purchased
a number of CDs as a result, so that's a good thing.
Dan Carlin.
Dan Carlin is the host of Hardcore History and Common Sense, which are two of the audio
podcasts I subscribe to, but on this channel is the occasional video.
FW Thinking, FW for Forward I think, which is mostly about the future and how it will
be different, how stuff works, which is kind of a general knowledge show.
It's okay to be smart, another science show from PBS Digital.
So they just did one on Cloning, for instance.
Then another one called Kurt Skazacht, I've got to assume by the name that it comes from
Germany, although it's in English.
One video a month on a science-related topic.
Mental Floss, well, there's several different mental floss series, and they all have to do
with trivia in one way or another.
Just fun little stuff.
Then Minute Earth and Minute Physics, which present short science videos, she might guess
from the name Minute, they're not terribly long, you know, a lot of these things are like
two or three minutes long, so it's not going to chew up a ton of your life.
Then NASA Eclipse, which is videos from NASA, Nature Video, that's science videos that
come from Nature Magazine, which is one of the major journals in science.
Physics Girl, Physics Girl does really interesting experiments to illustrate concepts in physics.
Old higher and deeper, or also known as PhD comics, and that also, they do science videos.
No fixed schedule, just every once in a while, another one shows up.
Space Frontier Org, occasional videos on space-related topics, I don't see a lot of activity
there.
To K's take, yep, George to K has a video channel, so what's not to love there?
The Frugal Computer Guy, how-to videos, does a very good job, you know, if anyone likes
the Libra Office things that I've done, he has done some stuff on Libra Office Base and
their videos on YouTube and they're very well done.
Veritasium, which is another science-related series, then one called Vsauce, kind of hard
to describe, it's a very quirky look at odd topics.
And they're finally welcome to Night Vale.
Now welcome to Night Vale is an audio podcast that I subscribe to, but they also throw
up videos from time to time.
By the way, that podcast is one everyone should be listening to, it's pretty awesome.
So it is obvious that I subscribe to a lot of science-related channels, but that is
what I enjoy.
And with all of my subscriptions, I probably average six to seven new videos a day that
show up in my mailbox.
But with so much content now available on YouTube, the chances are that you will find lots
of things you like, so I would urge you to give it a try.
And so with that, this is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio, signing off, reminding everyone
to support FreeSoftware.
Bye-bye.
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