Yea, I think Nick bingo/Paul Cuffaro is entertaining and its good how they actually try to learn by having a biologist try to set up his pool/tank. They might do some stupid things but I think their hearts are in the right place.King of DIY is all ego. Did anyone see that video of him on (I think) YouTube or Instagram live, drunk and saying horribly inappropriate thing to some teen kid who he'd gone live with? It got removed by YouTube because I'm sure Joey reported it, but it was totally inappropriate, sexually-charged dialog aimed at a 15 or 16 year old. He also blatantly lies, like the video where he claimed to be making thousands of dollars a month off breeding discus, when even dedicated, seasoned discus breeders can't do that. And every discus Joey's ever shown has been... well, less than stellar. I doubt they live long, let alone breed.
His channel was the first one to blow up and then encourage all these other "LOOK AT ME!" fish channels. Views generate revenue, and you don't get views without doing stupid crap. It's not about the welfare of the animals. It's about getting eyes on your page. And to do that, you need to up your game constantly. At least Paul Cuffaro and Nick Bingo are young and learning -- Nick is still a teen -- whereas Joey is a grown man. On the surface it may look like he knows what he's doing, but how many Asian arowana has he killed now due to improperly housing them? How many times has he shown off obviously sick fish and seemed oblivious that anything was wrong, like that flowerhorn he had that slowly withered away from internal parasites? IMO his fish keeping is just as irresponsible.
One thing I have to commend Paul Cuffaro on is that he teamed up with an actual biologist recently to walk him through setting up a saltwater reef tank, and he's heavily featured the guy and gone on a field trip to ORA to learn about coral propagation and whatnot. Maybe having people like that guiding him will show him the correct way to do things. The same for Nick Bingo who set up that massive pool in his garage for his larger saltwater fish. It may not be enough for their eventual adult size but the effort and cost is still impressive, and most people wouldn't go to those lengths for their fish.
Predatory Fins is the vendor I side-eye... his channel is part-entertainment, part-seller. In the last few months he's brought in probably a hundred or more juvenile bumblebee grouper. This craze to have the biggest, rarest, monster fish seems to create excitement and FOMO syndrome, but I can't help but think tons of customers are buying that stuff up without knowing what they're really doing or getting into. I hope the grouper are being captive-bred, at least.
About bumblebee groupers. It turns out that most of them (at least the ones imported from asia) are captive bred for restaurants so morally raising it up to a certain size and then cooking it up it isn't too iffy if that was gonna be their fate anyway. They taste pretty good honestly.
