Patreon is pretty great. The psychological reward from sponsoring someone who is doing something great is extremely rewarding at a low cost. 5$ a month per person is totally worth it.
A former pro (?) magic the gathering player who applies similar thought processes (optimization, skepticism of experts) to looking at various countries coronavirus and vaccine response.
Extremely opinionated and funny movie reviewer. More famous for deeply analysing failed movies than those that are good.
Curmudgeonly western guy with a Japanese wife, living in a rural area in Japan. He's a bit stuck in his own mindset, but is also pretty observant about Japanese cultural differences. Mainly he just documents daily occurrances (traffic, happenings, design, etc) with a video camera he always has with him.
Extremely idiosyncratic and particular American who works as a school teacher in the UK. He is very interested in systems and produces videos on things like voting, the precise differences between the UK/Britain/England, YouTube internals and UI, etc. He also has a podcast with the guy behind the Numberphile series. Very thoughtful and aware; there should be more people like him. He has a large following.
Creator of Slate Star Codex and thought leader in the rationality/economics/psychology sphere. Associated with less wrong, EA, and the rationality movement. Extremely good blog. Lately he's been working to increase the reach of the community and sponsoring meetups, where there are always interesting people. He also runs an annual large psychological survey and mines it for hypothesis. Amazingly productive in many areas.
Trying to restore realism to lefty caring thought, and resist cancel culture.
Amateur Geopolitics, worldwide with a focus on Central Asia. Similar to Wendover productions, hitting a certain type of political/human interaction on large, long time scales.
Crazily creative visual artist who is also a genius and goes to Stanford. His main thing is Anthropomorphizing EVERYTHING. As a teenager he produced humanized virtual marble run videos that have millions of views. Now he regularly produces videos feature a large cast of anthropomorphized characters based on letters, numbers, and everyday objects, exploring their personalities and interactions. He's also interested in community building; there is some kind of user group very intensely involved in his creations. I cannot overstate how anthropomorphization is his main focus in everything he does. Battle for Dream Island is one of his creations. His youtube has 460k subs. The Amazing Marble race is one of his older videos, and is the kind that first let me discover him - 1m views. Recently he's been producing ML learning videos with excellent (fit for humans - anthropomorphized) explanations.
DIY independent researcher into medicine/psychology/neotropics/darkweb/genetics/futurism. Super analytical and statistical. Similar role as Scott Alexander in trying to connect science to reality. He has an extensive website which experiments with new hypertext layouts, with hundreds of investigative pages on various subjects. Really big on A/B testing and self-experimentation. He also does useful literature surveys on things that affect the mind, similar to Scott Alexander.
Amazing visualizations and explanations of math concepts. Hints at a much better way to do education. Can explain hard Putnam-level problems visually such that they are almost understandable for normal people. You can't help but feel inspired, and sad at the failure of our education system to explain the geometric concepts behind math.
Outsider, formerly homeless, extreme person interested in CS and culture. Self-publishes a website with thousands of tutorial / opinion pages. Possibly similar to Sam Sloan - extremely productive, wide interests, obsessive, and pretty disagreeable.
Banned hundreds of times from Roblox, now produces trolly but really creative machinimata set in Roblox. Definitely juvenile/focused on irreverence. He explores an art style that few people can pull off, and some of them are really funny.
A Korean female professional go player who uses alphago to analyse and explain her games and go techniques.
Really empathetic psychologist who talks about totalism, black and white thinking, and his own journey out of controlling religions and ideologies. Great voice and engrossing production. This kind of post-religion but not fully leftist/nihilist person is really appealing to me.
Rational fiction writer of many good stories. Now writing "Worth The Candle", but slowly.
Hosted by an excommunicated Mormon; far from hating the church, he loves it and is trying to help it reform; to keep a lot of its value and resolve problems with in two main areas: its truth claims, and clerical abuse. He produces very long form (2-5 hour) interviews with people in the Mormon space (religion researchers, ex-Mormons, etc.). He has a nice way of asking questions of them and exploring their faith journeys. He's inspiring as a man who stands of for traditional good things, while rejecting its failures. So much of modern life is full of despair and alienation; I hope he succeeds in finding another way to go forward in the world between being controlled by a blind religion, and the despair of losing it all.
A chess player who plays blitz tournaments and streams them on youtube. He's a nice guy from Pennsylvania somewhere; my first Patreon sub.
Two guys who have dedicated their lives to exploring a new game format - living off donations (even pre-Patreon) and following their fantasy game creation dream. The game inspired lots of later versions with much smoother UIs. The main guy has given interesting talks about procedural generation of plots at the Roguelike conference.
In the isekai genre (normal person put into a fantasy world) adventure story. The main character is very analytical about figuring out how to min/max his power in that world, and also figure out how it works. 2.5$/month, totally worth it. 2/2020 there are ~90 chapters available.