When I use the internet to learn, I don’t want to have to spend 2 minutes watching an advert, then try to decipher an accent I can barely understand whilst a 15 year old speed runs the task whilst seemingly skipping crucial steps in a video.
I want the steps written down. Maybe with diagrams.
I’m old. Learning is hard enough.
And Discord is not a substitute for documentation.
I am always saying reddit and discord are killing the use of forums and therefore are killing a lot of content that would be accesible and readable for people in the future. Discord is my main problem with that. Back in the days games had their own forums and people would post guides and they could be sticked to the top. But in discord servers so often you just have long ass on going conversations that hardly give you any information. It is nice to have the option to chat and look for groups and the abillity to immediatly join a group voice chat with said people.
A friend send me a link from a reddit post with same topic but it was french and i dont use reddit anymore. But i miss the small communities for games like Dungeon Crawl by Stone Soup, some good old roguelike :)
It’s like anti-documentation
Ahh yes, the 15 min video that should have been 3 bullet points.
Hey guys, welcome to another of Johnny’s Tech Tutorials. I’m your guy Jim, and today we’re going to be covering how to prevent Slack from showing other users when you’re away from your computer.
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Ok, I don’t know about you guys, but back when I worked for a company, we used Slack for communication. Slack is great for most things, but they just don’t let you set your status to be permanently online. If you step away for a coffee or a washroom break and don’t come back fast enough, there’s a good chance your boss will see it. Unfortunately, not everyone has an understanding boss. And, if you’re one of those people with a minute-counting pencil pusher for a boss, you’ll know how bad it can be. Luckily for you, there is a way that you can bypass that pesky Slack snitching.
If this helps you, make sure to smash that like button and subscribe for more tech tutorials. So, here’s what you’re going to do: head on over to Amazon and search for a “USB mouse jiggler”. Any of them are going to work, but I highly recommend the “JigglePhysiks Pro 300” for its natural mouse movements. I’ll put a link to that in the video comments if any of you are interested and want to help out the channel. Once you get your mouse jiggler, you’re going to need to find a USB port to plug it into. If your computer doesn’t have any free ones, though, don’t worry about it. You can grab a USB hub from Amazon to get a few more ports. Or, if you have a Mac, make sure to grab a USB C to USB adapter. Once you have all those set up and plugged in, press the button on the device and walk away for your morning coffee. That’s it! No more away status.
Thanks for sticking with me guys. If you haven’t subscribed already, I post new vids every Tuesday and Saturday. And I would also like to thank my wonderful Patreon members for helping keep the channel going. I couldn’t do it without your generous donations.
This is so horrifyingly accurate it gave me a headache
I really want to vote this down because it is textbook cancer youtube but I have to respect the precise craftsmanship.
Read it faster than seeing it on video at 2.5x
10/10.
Pro tip: When you start a YouTube video and it’s seeming like this, push 3. It will skip you to 30% into the video, which is usually right around when the relevant part starts.
Here, going by character count, it puts you halfway through the last sentence of the sponsorship, which isn’t bad, though this example is particularly eregious and doesn’t start the real instructions until you’re about 59% through.
I even hate the sound of the voice my head made up to read this in
I remember downloading game walkthroughs and it came as a downloadable text file. Had sooo much content, awesome ascii art, and you could tell the person made it did so because they enjoyed it and wanted you too
Ah, the good old days of GameFAQs
Also back when IGN wasn’t a meme
At my first job, I printed out the ~85 page guide for GTA Vice City to have for reference while playing without having to get up and go to the computer.
while playing without having to get up and go to the computer
That took me a full minute to understand…
And the text tutorials that we do get are either padded out with bullshit or written by a fucking LLM
I blame cooking blogs for introducing this bloat.
“First let me tell you a little about my relationshio with cinnamon… It all started 40 years ago whilst I was…”
I’ll spend 15 minutes scouring forums to avoid watching a 5 minute tutorial video. Having an actual written guide is so much more useful
The worst is when I had scoured all the forums and as a last resort I turn to videos, which turn out to just be reading the same forum post.
And I have to stop listening to my music :(
It’s not just gaming tutorials, nowadays even some programming documentation comes in video format 🤢
I feel this in my soul. I’m SOOOO fucking sick of a 20+ minutes video that could be like 2 paragraphs of text. I can’t tell you how many times I have to pause, rewind, watch again, pause some more, etc videos. I get it if there is something that has to be shown visually but if you are just running commands or something why do I have to watch it?!
Gamefaqs, but for life, please!
I’d like to learn the game engine Godot but all the lessons are videos. It’s much harder to learn in the livingroom and write code when you’re learning from a video
Oh. That is where all the useful information is. I have been struggling with it for weeks and finally managed to get something working. Is it done the right way? Who knows! Their documentation is sometimes rather less than helpful. If their website decides to behave. Sometimes it goes a little wonky, though it has been better the last couple weeks.
Preach. A rant I’ve made before. I hate YouTube. I hate having to pause, and rewind trying to catch a view of some lousy camera angle of the thing being done.
Yeah, you can find useful stuff, but 98% of even the useful stuff is i.e. a 15 minute video, which goes like: intro, talk about sponsors, talking about everything else they have on video. Talk about themselves. Talk about what they did last week. Make sure to visibly finger point at everything in frame (fuck, I hate this. It’s the unnecessary “red circle” around the no-shit-Sherlock I know what I’m supposed to be looking at thing). Introduce buddy, point at thing they’re working on. Bullshit with buddy, talk about what buddy does. Talk about thing they’re doing today. Talk about all the different ways to do thing that aren’t relevant to the thing you clicked on the video for. Show all the parts they’re using for thing and where they got them. Now grab camera and quickly do the two or three things needed to fix thing, takes less than 5 minutes, but it would have taken less than 60 seconds had fixer not stopped to bullshit with buddy and, repeat themselves, and point at more shit. Now they step away from the job, bullshit more, sponsors more, their videos more, camera at themselves more.
The main thing I think I despise is that I’m being talked at. And I mean that it isn’t someone teaching and explaining the how-to, why, and things to watch out for, it’s someone who wants their face in frame talking at me about stuff I don’t care about because the video is about them, not the thing I clicked to find the answer about.
Ad space rules, so longer videos = more ad space, makers get paid more for longer videos with ad space, therefore they make longer videos full of garbage to get pushed to the top by the search algorithm.
Gone are the text-posts-as-a-knowledge-service. In have come the videos as a profit for the maker that necessitate forcing the viewer to watch a 15 minute video for a 2 minute fix.
Does a low resolution desktop capture of someone slowly and sloppily typing messages for the viewer into notepad count as text-based?
How about a gigantic compressed image of mostly plain text attached to a post that requires an account to download files? Maybe also with a colored/patterned background to make trying to print the monstrosity even more fun.
Or maybe actual embedded text, but served via 300 MB of bloated libraries and fonts and a script that disables right-clicking and text selecting.
a script that disables right-clicking and text selecting.
I happen to have a script that disables JavaScript. Thanks uBlock Origin for making these idiotic and anti-accessibility sites better.
This was the video that caused me to post:
Yeah, I only made it 37 seconds in. Unless you’re live-streaming, edit your tutorials! People wouldn’t complain about the time/length of videos as much if they were short and to-the-point. But I guess that would affect ad revenue…
Off-topic: round keys on a keyboard just feel wrong to me, and I wouldn’t trust someone who uses them…
Seconded on round keys.
Honestly, I’m 21 years old and 95% of tutorials I consume are text-based. For really complex stuff or really niche stuff, sometimes only a video exists, but I think text is a big norm. That can be because I’m in software development though as most things are documented by text and most tutorials in that area are text-based.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
