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These 4 YouTube Channels Out-Buzzfeed Buzzfeed

Why watch BuzzFeed when you can watch someone driving a car through a sofa?
September 17, 2018
8 mins read

Once upon a time, BuzzFeed’s YouTube channel held my hand through countless procrastinations. I watched the BuzzFeed staff “try X for the first time,” or “do X for a week,” and it used to take me to a place that not even the stress of my unstarted paper could breach. However, for quite a few years I’ve found the quality of BuzzFeed’s videos to be mostly hit or miss, with an emphasis on miss.

BuzzFeed churns out a lot of content for its 17 million followers. Despite their best efforts at keeping things interesting by creating different channels and series, at one point their videos all started to look and sound the same.

Thus, I’ve found myself looking for new sources on YouTube to keep myself from facing my responsibilities, and I would like to share some of my new findings with you. 

In my viewing experience, these four channels create BuzzFeed-esque content, but with way more creativity and fun. 

1. Solfa

Solfa is a YouTube channel from Korea and it first caught my attention with videos like “Koreans Try Crazy American Shots,” “Koreans Take SAT Math Section” and “Korean Girls Try Tinder.” Basically, the channel was BuzzFeed Korea.

However, Solfa evolved from doing such generic videos and began to make more creative and thought-provoking content. 

In one recent video, “Rating People’s Looks,” Solfa invited four complete strangers, and one by one showed them a silenced video of the other three participants. Each was asked to rate the others’ looks, and their comments were recorded.

Solfa then invited all four into the same room, had them sit on the same couch, and showed everyone videos of what the others said about them. Not only did the participants look extremely uncomfortable, many viewers also commented on having second-hand embarrassment. Afterward, the participants had a heart to heart discussion about their lives, their self-image and what they learned through this experience. 

Another great video from Solfa is “How to Become Insta-Famous in Korea.” Two plain old Joes visited four types of Instagram stars — the beauty queen, the fashionista, the model and the bodybuilder — to inquire about the secret of achieving Instagram fame. Hilariousness and ridiculousness ensued as the two fumbled awkwardly to follow the stars’ coaching. At the end of the day, the two even went on the street with posters that read “follow me on Instagram.” 

Basically, Solfa is like a more original and interesting version of BuzzFeed. It’s perhaps perhaps BuzzFeed could’ve been if it had evolved past its cookie-cutter formula. Solfa is BuzzFeed upgraded. 

2. All Def

All Def has some interesting “for the first time” videos that took viewers into the experiences of different communities in America.  All Def produces videos like “Black People Celebrate Shabbat for the First Time,” “White People Get Grillz for the First Time” and “White People Go to a Black BBQ for the First Time.” 

A lot of the channel is dedicated to African-American culture, experience and perspective, as well as to promote inter-cultural understanding.    

All Def also has an “Is It True” series, in which blindfolds, full body suits and live polygraphs all come into play. In some videos, people are questioned by the host while taking a polygraph. A particularly enlightening video is “All Black People are Democrats,” which shows that the stereotype may not be true after all.  

Another video of the “Is It True” asks the question everyone wonders, “are black people the best twerker?” To answer this imperative question, the channel had two guests rank twerkers in colorful full body suits, and then revealed the identities of the twerkers. The faces of the dancers are completely covered, which results in some eerie dance scenes. 

In conclusion, check out All Def, it’s definitely all dat. 

3. Sushi Ramen

Riku from Sushi Ramen is a one-man Try Guys team who has the concentrated charm and guts of four (sorry, Zach, Ned, Keith and Eugene). 

Instead of trying scanty women’s clothing like the early Try Guys, Riku the 19-year-old has much more outrageous schemes in mind.   In one video, he took a “very relaxing drive,” by mounting a sofa onto a car, and attempting to drive the car from said sofa, navigating the steering wheel, brakes and pedal through a confusing mess of attached ropes. The result, as you can guess, is not as relaxing as Riku has hoped.  

In another video, Riku somehow got an industrial fan with 430 horsepower (if you don’t know how much that is, just know it’s a lot), turned it on and tried to run through the current. Did he get to the other side in one piece? Well, the title of the video is called “Flying in the air with an Umbrella.”  

4. Big Marvel

Big marvel is a Korean musician who first made his name by making music with the crappiest instruments. He played “Havana” on three calculators, “DNA” on a kid’s toy piano and made a rubber chicken singLet It Go.”  

Later on, he got into doing parodies on BuzzFeed’s “Worth It,” pitching cheap toy instruments he plays against the expensive real ones side by side. Other than rating instruments, he and his friends also rated some random and hilarious things. 

In one video, he and his friends inhaled two plastic bags of air labeled each as one-dollar air and 1000-dollar air. They collected the one-dollar air from a trashcan and the 1000-dollar air from a park.  

In another video, Big Marvel compared his “one-dollar angriness” to his friend Big Sky’s “1000-dollar angriness.” I won’t tell you how the whole thing works exactly, but it involved a lot of egg throwing. If you are tired of BuzzFeed and are looking for something new to waste your time on, check out these four YouTube channels. 

Vanessa Chen, Franklin and Marshall College

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Vanessa Chen

Franklin and Marshall College
Creative Writing

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