ABSTRACT This paper aims to understand the perspectives of young people involved in online learning communities on what they consider valuable for their learning. We do this by bringing their experiences with online community pedagogies (OCPs) into conversation with their critiques of school pedagogies (SPs) to see whether we can understand this interaction as generative of ‘alternative’ pedagogies. Whereas previously alternative pedagogies were understood to arise from ‘new’ technologies, we argue that such pedagogies arise from needs created by youth’s experiences with navigating these different pedagogical contexts. We interviewed 37 community members from six learning communities on YouTube, Twitch and TikTok. We show that youth perceive school as controlling, imposing pressure to perform, and disconnected from what they think matters and qualifies expertise. Based on their online experiences, youth emphasised the importance of control, experimentation space, and being enabled to act on societal issues. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualisation of ‘desire’, and Appadurai’s ‘global imaginaries’, we interpret OPs dialoguing with youth’s alienating perspectives on schooling as ‘reimagined pedagogies’ that act as collective voices for global (re-)imaginaries of school. We conclude with the importance of taking youth’s experiences with alienation and OPs seriously as objects of thought for alternative pedagogic futures.