wikipedia

UnHerd interviews Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, who explains why he no longer trusts the site he helped create. He argues that it has become biased and is no longer a neutral, open platform.

A short news segment from Arutz Sheva about a course on pro-Israel editing of Wikipedia.

A five-minute SuperMemo demo of incremental reading: importing a Wikipedia article on nutrition, extracting passages, making cloze deletions and finishing the item. It lists the keyboard shortcuts used.

Innuendo Studios uses Phil Fish, creator of the game Fez, as a case study in internet celebrity. The essay argues that fame online works differently from traditional fame, and shows how audiences turn on the people they have elevated.

Tom Scott's long explainer on YouTube's copyright system, Content ID and the DMCA. He argues the platform's system is a workaround for a broader copyright system that does not fit the modern world.

Veritasium's Derek Muller argues that Facebook's business model works against pages and creators, because it charges them to reach the audiences they built. He explains how filtering and paid promotion undermine the value of likes.

Folding Ideas uses the rise and fall of the YouTube competitor VidMe to examine why platforms are not friends to creators. It argues that alternatives to big platforms tend to attract the users banned from the original and lack a core vision.

Dan Olson's long Folding Ideas video on the GameStop meme stock phenomenon, its online community and the conspiracy thinking around it. It runs over two hours.

The first part of Innuendo Studios' six-part video essay series on the online hostility around Anita Sarkeesian and GamerGate. It lays out the history and the motivations of the people involved.

ContraPoints' 35-minute video essay on incels, examining the community, its worldview and how people get radicalized. It is delivered with theatrical style and an empathetic tone.

Darius Kazemi's XOXO 2014 talk on releasing 72 weird internet side projects in a year. Framed as 'How I Won the Lottery,' it argues that success needs both luck and buying many tickets.

Finnish YouTuber Saara improvises gibberish that mimics how various languages sound to people who do not speak them. The sentences are mostly made up, and the clip went viral.

CGP Grey explains how ideas spread like germs, and why content that triggers outrage spreads fastest, using a study on what makes online content viral. He argues that opposing outrage-driven memes feed each other.

A long video essay by Natalie Wynn of ContraPoints on cancel culture, drawing on her own experience of being pile-on targeted by other leftists. It is theatrical and discursive, mixing argument with performance.

A mashup that plays a Miles Davis improvisation video alongside an LCD Soundsystem clip with no editing, so the two seem to perform together. It also became known for an affectionate mouse cursor moving along.

Kurzgesagt argues that Facebook's claimed 8 billion daily video views are inflated by freebooting, meaning re-uploads of creators' videos. It describes how this harms independent creators.

Veritasium explains why clickbait titles and thumbnails work, how he tests them, and why educational creators feel pushed to use them. He classifies types of clickbait and discusses the trade-offs.

Veritasium argues that Facebook's ad revenue relies partly on fake likes, after paying to promote his page and gaining tens of thousands of followers in developing countries who never engaged. He shares his experiment and cites other cases.

hbomberguy investigates the modern flat earth movement and why people come to believe it. The video treats the community with a measured, humorous tone and looks at the social causes behind the belief.

The first episode of Jason Scott's eight-part BBS documentary, covering the predecessors and beginnings of the dial-up bulletin board system. It includes interviews with pioneers such as Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, who created the first dial-up BBS in 1978.

Jason Scott of textfiles.com tells the story at DEFCON 17 of being sued for two billion dollars by a scammer who plagued him and others for over a decade. The talk is tragic and funny, covering what he learned about misleading schemes.

Bo Burnham's song from his special Inside, a satirical take on internet culture, attention and extremism.

Jason Scott of Archive Team describes how a loose band of volunteers rushes to copy sites like Geocities, Friendster and Yahoo Video before their owners delete them. The talk covers the tactics they use and the argument that this data is history worth saving.

Alamo Drafthouse posted an angry voicemail from a customer who was kicked out for texting in the theater. The theater turned it into a humorous in-house preview.

A three-minute video from Derek Sivers, based on his book Anything You Want, about remembering that the people you deal with online are real people. It contrasts how we treat people face to face with how we treat them online.

Coffee Break analyzes about 40,000 videos from seven months of YouTube's trending tab. It examines whether trending is biased toward mainstream media and late-night shows.

Tom Nicholas critiques Veritasium's sponsored video on driverless cars, using it to examine YouTube sponsorships, science-channel credibility and how statistics and misinformation can be used in branded content.

Tom Scott and Matt Gray talk at Electromagnetic Field about making Emojli, an emoji-only messenger that began as a joke, how it was built and why they never want to do it again.

A 69-minute documentary on the Polybius arcade-game legend. It examines visual, physical and anecdotal evidence, traces the story's source, and concludes the game never existed beyond one website entry.

A video essay from lawyer-turned-YouTuber Moon Channel on the South Korean gender war, tracing its historical roots and modern origins through the lens of a gacha game controversy. It is the first part of a two-part series.

Part 1 of Smarter Every Day's three-part series on manipulating the YouTube algorithm. It features Renee DiResta and examples of how social media platforms can be manipulated.

Michael Wesch's five-minute video about Web 2.0, showing how the read/write web, XML and user-generated content change how people create and share information.

An Innuendo Studios video essay from the Alt-Right Playbook series that uses the Seinfeld 'the card says moops' scene to explain bad-faith argument tactics. It describes how reactionaries use sincerity and irony as shields in online debate.

A short Ze Frank piece from his 2006 show about "brain crack", the rush of exciting new ideas that feel great but tend to fall apart once you start executing them.

People Make Games explores VRChat, the social virtual world that many consider the metaverse people actually like, interviewing users and covering its communities and uncertain future.

The Game Theorists analyze how PewDiePie rose to become the most subscribed channel on YouTube. The video looks at why let's plays and gaming channels thrive on the platform.

Benn Jordan examines the role of bots and propaganda accounts on X and other social platforms, including the platform's decline and the influence of Russian operations. It covers more than bots, discussing bias and how the platform changed.

An update from the Strange Parts YouTuber on his recovery from a brain injury caused by a metal pipe while filming, and his plans for the channel.

A short English-subtitled clip of Shuzo Matsuoka, a retired Japanese tennis player turned motivational speaker, delivering a never-give-up pep talk. It is a well-known Japanese internet meme.

Folding Ideas examines weird, algorithm-gamed children's content on YouTube, from automated toddler videos and educational spam to exploitative prank channels. It looks at how autoplay and recommendation systems reward this material.