Most history videos are digests of three Wikipedia pages taped together with SEO and 8-13 minutes of runtime. Why the hell is there no rigor?

European history is at least carried by lectures from boring academics, and there's a decent lecture out there for any boring and obscure topic from the Elizabethan pamphlet wars to the Defenestrations of Prague. There are some decent works from Crash Course as well that cover most things that would end up in an AP European History class. But anything else is just hell. I tried finding something on Malagasy culture, and 80% of the results are shitty travel videos. I tried finding good Incan videos, and there were only two National Geographic vids that popped up in a sea of bullshittery from college dropouts with ADHD.

I'm not making some boomer "nobody reads books" statement, there's value in short form works and short videos, not everyone has the time for obscure topics far from their interests. I want short form videos. I want them to be informative.

I've gotten more insight from the fucking YouTube comments under some of those videos than the vids themselves. There was a video on Hakka culture that said that the Hakka were pretty much the Jews of southern China, and it took a Hakka person in the comments to point out that it was a stupid comparison. Hakka people are simply ethnic Han folks with a unique recent history, and they rarely consider themselves to be ethnic minorities at all.

I've seen that repeated again by a different person who claimed to be Hakka under a similar video, but the perception of marginalization still persists as if the video creators think that the ethnic conflicts of the 19th century are somehow still relevant to modern internal ethnic relations of China. They keep adding noise and flavor language in full confidence without any kind of real knowledge of the matter. They're all filling videos with bullshit context gathered from who-knows-what sources, passing off their vibes from half-consciously reading Wikipedia as real historical details.

I think I'd really need to add "lecture" to everything just so I know I'm only getting boring stuff and not shit from nerds with no expertise or research abilities. I want content curation. I want a lot of people to start filling different roles in society than "history YouTube bullshitter". I know good stuff like Crash Course is out there, but even their significant fact finding and research effort runs the risk of losing views to some mildly humorous basement goblin putting "oversimplified" in all their video titles. end rant