Kiwi Farms

Let me preface this with I have never done an OP before, if you have anything you want me to add or change just let me know. I was suggested to post this thread here by someone in the EC thread. Feel free to post drama, weird tisms in this YouTube subgroup, whatever.

History centered channels on YouTube are an old phenomenon. They probably go back as far as the website itself, which makes sense as YouTube allows for the easy dissemination of information. However much like science, many history focused YouTube channels fall under pop history, and usually have an autistic bias or sperging from the host. I've broadly put history channels into a few categories, principally the following, but there is some crossover here and there.

Spergy channels - Spergy channels tend to be all over the place or autistically center on one specific thing like guns or swords. Usually these channels are mostly benign and huff their own farts.

High School Channels - Quite literally what it says, these are usually high school or wannabe high school history teachers who make videos on Apple's movie maker. They usually upload sanitized history approved for school and usually are meant specifically for their class.

Reddit/Pop History - These channels have gotten surprisingly popular in the last few years, they usually have upwards in the millions in views and subscribers and are usually left-wing and tend to overly sanitize history of the oppressed minorities.

Wank Off Channels - They aren't usually history wanks but tend to focus on a specific group or culture, usually try to maintain neutrel views but as a result of sources they use tend to end up looking as biased.

Generic Content Farms - These channels usually upload several videos a week and tend to fail to check said videos for any factual errors. The video length usually ranges from 3 minutes to 20.

Alt Hist - Alternative history channels are all over the place, from literal edge lords to mundane. They tend to be either loved or despised and usually have takes on regions that tend to piss people off.

Quality Control - These channels tend to have either studio backing or extensive funds and teams to work on videos, and tend to have far better fact checking than any of the above.

I'm going to post a few channels and where they fall on the arbitrarily designed categories I made.

Lindybeige, Shadiversity, and Skallagrim are perfect examples of spergy channels. Lindy goes all over the place with his fart huffing, while the latter two mostly sperg about medieval weapons and fortifications. There isn't really much to say about them beyond that as far as I know unless one of them said the N word on camera or some other gay drama I don't follow.

Mr. Beat is quite literally a history teacher who focuses on America and American politics, I've never watched many of his videos besides some of the presidential election ones so I don't really have any examples of dumb takes or other shit.

OSP is a shared channel and falls under the pop history category. I am more emphasizing on Blue as he is the wannabe pop historian and will sperg about historical states like Venice whenever given the chance. Red is an interesting character herself but focuses on literature. If you want an idea on what she is like take a shot every time she mentions racism in her Lovecraft video.

John Green/Crash Course is probably another pop channel those of you who went to public high school in America are familiar with. He probably has his own threads here that talking about him, but should be notorious for how poorly he hdes his left wing bias. There are numerous times in videos where he apologizes for how racist/sexist/misogynists/homophobic the world was X years ago and slobbers over feminist ideas like a crack whore over crack. My favorite bit has to be this segment in his Haiti video, where he glosses over the Haitian Massacres of the islands white and mixed race population in a few sentences. I remember seeing this guy in school and thinking about what a whiney faggot he is.

Basically any channel Simon Whistler (Biographics and it's associates) is involved in is a content farm. The several channels upload about a week's worth of content every week and these tend to be filled with errors that get unnoticed by whatever quality control they have.

Channels like Baz Battles or Kings and Generals aren't content farms per say and have production value but tend to sperg about battles. Kings and Generals has branched out into more biographical content however.

Invicta and Historia Civilis focus on Ancient Rome for the most part, they have some nice longform content with a fairly simple format, sometimes branching off to other areas, but mostly wank off Rome and related cultures.

Hikma History is a channel focused on the Islamic World, I've never really watched him but he does seem to remain as impartial as possible, much unlike the next person on this list.

Real Crusades History is a channel focused on the Crusader states and crusades. It religiously wanks off the Crusades which is a breath of fresh air from the generic crusades bad mantra but seems like it goes into the other direction sometimes.

EC - Extra History is a subsection of Extra Credits that tends to come off as very bad, most infamous in my perspective is their Suleiman and Genghis series, where they show two conquerors as nice guys with the excuses of 'It's their perspective'. They have a habit of sucking off and deifying historical figures that are brown and/or Muslim and at the end of every series have a Lies episode where they try to explain their decision making and lack of fact checking.

Potential History is the Reddit of HistoryTube, I'll quote @Cypher and @Übertroon respectively here since they put it far better than I ever could,

Potential History is just an arrogant redditor cunt that puts a bunch of conjectures filled with memes for his vids. He has no idea what the fuck he's talking about either (I.E. thinks Germany winning in France was a miracle, thinks the shitty spam tanks of the Soviets against Japan was some big ass defeat in Nomonhan, has a very retarded opinion of why Germany lost the war). His vids are just memes that shouldn't be taken under any consideration when he comes off as a butthurt anti-Wehraboo. There's actually a video out there of Ryan Faulk refuting one of his videos.

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I think his most retarded take was complaining that all the footage of the German armed forces during WW2 stems from wartime propaganda, and has therefore colored our view of the German military during the war. Like dude, all the footage of every army during the war comes from propaganda. In fact the Germans were better than a lot of the other warring sides to actually get footage from the front. The Soviets would actually film a lot of their footage after the war, as there was a wartime shortage of film crew equipment and not really a domestic market for war time propaganda films.

I'm sure it was annoying 10 years ago when Wehraboos would constantly proclaim the German army to be the best in every category and shit up every internet discussion about the war. But the pendulum swung so hard in the other direction that mouthbreathers like Potential History keeps coming up with these reddit tier takes.

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Monsieur Z is a /pol/ tier edge lord or possible neocon who focuses on alt-history and tends to sperg out from that point of view. He is fairly western centric and it tends to piss off Reddit and puts distance between him and HistoryTube. WhatIfAltHist is in a similar area, tends to have takes on pre-colonial and colonial Africa and Americas that a lo of people don't like and focuses on alt history.

AltHistHub is another alt history channel like the above but is far more tame. Not much to say on him beyond that.

TimeGhost and WW2 are two channels hosted by Indy Neidell and focus on WW2 and the Interwar era currently. They have high production and quality control with a team. The Great War exceeds this as they are part of some German based media company. Both produce high quality videos on a schedule.

Voices of the Past is hard to place categorically and reads texts from various journals, letters, and diaries. Not much to say and as they just read text from document there isn't any sucking off random nations or cultures.