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Comment by pests

2 years ago

That is my favorite era and genre of YT. Someone doing something they love and recording it.

I don't mind if the channel grows and gets better editing or whatnot. I just like the purity of it.

You still can find a lot of stuff today. The "culture" of YT has changed a bit but you can still people doing their passion.

I'm currently watching Andrew Caramata. He does heavy machinery / property restoration and was previously working on a container castle but now has a mountaintop in upstate NY and is currently using the exact same tools you showed off originally - crushing some rock to build out some roads. Now that I think of it, this autoplayed after your video! I've followed Caramata for years though so nice seeing him still making progress.

I had [a YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/howchoo) that hit 25k subscribers from only about 20-25 videos. I worked happily at it for a few years off and on, but the economics of YouTube didn’t make sense for the amount of time I was spending, despite loving doing it. Love is not enough; I love doing a lot of things but only have so many hours in the day. It would’ve been great if YouTube paid enough for me to do it full time without having to chase likes, subscribers, and sponsors. Then I would be at a few hundred videos. So yeah, screw YouTube.

But I learned a lot and got to invent a lot of cool stuff—like turning a Furby into an Amazon Echo, building a rugged arcade cabinet in a case, being the first to put a Raspberry Pi into an NES cartridge, etc. Hoping to return someday with a new channel once I can afford to not get paid anything to make the videos (albeit on a new channel; we sold Howchoo, and the channel was sold with it)