Now that I’m back to collecting stamps, and having a great time doing it, naturally, I looked over on YouTube for some channels that might be entertaining to watch. While I did find some, and I know there won’t be a ton, I noticed one thing about the overwhelming majority of them.

They all seem to be aimed at the uninitiated stamp collector.Now right up front, I want to point out that this isn’t really intended to be a complaint, just an observation, but most of the “big” stamp channels on there, they are very clearly very amateur collectors with very limited collections. That’s fine, of course, everyone has to start somewhere and 40+ years ago when I started, my collection looked much the same way. However, I’ve been having a really hard time finding anything that really speaks to those who have been doing this for a long time.

In fact, while I’m not going to mention any names or link to any specific channels because I don’t want to embarrass anyone, I’ve seen multiple channels fall for the most ridiculous scams out there and it certainly doesn’t look like they’re trying to teach anyone anything. I’ve seen people go off to eBay and quote the absurd asking price for common stamps as though it actually meant anything. Any idiot can throw up anything and ask any amount of money for it. That  doesn’t mean anyone with a brain will ever actually pay that much, nor that you could do the same thing and make a mint. The only thing that matters are completed sales and none of the million-dollar asks for 30 cent stamps are ever going to sell. Even playing make-believe doesn’t do anyone any good.

Then you get the people who just buy random stuff off of eBay and ask their viewers what they think. Now I wouldn’t say, that might be a decent way to get subscriber interaction and that’s all YouTube cares about anymore, but just listening to these people talk, it’s like they didn’t have the slightest clue what they were buying, it just  caught their fancy and they threw a credit card at it and are now trying to figure out what the heck to do with it. “It’s got pretty colors!” is not a good reason to buy a collectible. Does it actually fit into your collection? Do you have the slightest idea what you’re actually trying to collect? I’ve seen far too many really badly damaged stamps to by to think these people are serious, or that they even know what they’re doing.

Now like I said, that’s fine because we all learn by doing but now, these are people online trying to teach other people. I’d like to think that they had any kind of expertise whatsoever and for most channels I check out, they don’t.

Something else though, something that isn’t really related, but the overwhelming majority of channels that I’ve watched, they simply have no concept of making quality videos. They mostly do not editing at all. They do no sound processing. One video I watched, the guy just repeated the same sentence five times over because he kept making a mistake. Edit that out of the final product! Someone else, it’s hard to pay attention to because you can hear every wet smack he makes with his lips and he makes a lot of them. Even a free audio program can fix that but they’re not even trying. I get that they’re just trying to share their hobby but there’s a certain amount of quality that ought to be expected. This is YouTube 2010 YouTube, not something put up in 2021.

So I guess my real question is, where do you go for the content aimed at a higher end audience? For forums, as I’m sure we’re all aware, Reddit is a complete waste of time. It’s a bunch of people saying “I found some stamps in a drawer, how many millions of dollars can I sell them for?” There are specialty forums out there, most notably, I think, the Stamp Community Forum, or at least that’s my  current favorite. It’s reasonable active and there are lots of people on there who really know their stuff. We all try to help people out and that makes it a true community. If SCF was anything like Reddit though, I wouldn’t read it. Hell, I don’t know why I bother with Reddit most of the time. It’s just not aimed at people like me.

If anyone has any ideas where I can go for better, more entertaining, more intelligent content though, I’d love to hear about it. That seems to be the eternal question. Where do all of the people who take this stuff seriously go?

I’d really love to know.