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How do you guys remember the early days of the internet? What do you miss about it?
(tim.kicker.dev)
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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I miss written tutorials. I hate how every tutorial is a YouTube now. I don't want to watch 15 minutes and forget to pay attention for the second that has the detail that I am missing or it just doesn't show. Even short tutorials are 3 minutes when it could have been a ten second read. I want to skim a page and go directly to the point. Has writing really become that hard to do?
Video title: "How to unlock the demon door on the fourth level of Demon Smasher Elite"
"Hello, video game fans! Don't forget to like and subscribe! Last week I posted a video that isn't relevant to this video, but I need to drag out the time on this one to game the algorithm, so I'm going to rehash and plug that video. I'm going to shout out to my Patreon subscribers with ridiculous usernames I won't pronounce well. Now let's get to the part you've waiting for: I'm going to play through the entire thirty minutes worth of level four before you get to the demon door and I will stop to make useless commentary on the bad guys you encounter. Okay, now you've skipped forward to what looks like the area before the demon door part of the stage, but I'm going to talk about some unrelated anecdote about this game or maybe the game devs, and then plug my Patreon account and mention a completely different game that I'll be streaming next. Oh and here's the five seconds of the video you wanted to see when I tell you to click the right mouse button on the hidden lever next to the demon door in order to open it, except you aren't seeing it because you skipped forward too far and gave up. Don't forget to like and subscribe! This video has been brought to you by Nord VPN."
About a month ago, I'd gotten back to replaying Suikoden Tactics, and there's this whole quest-accepting mechanic that's the easiest way to rack up skill points. But one of them is a series of "go get X out of the murder death ruins for me."
That place is pure ass and permadeath is a thing, so I'm not just going to go jaunting down to the final floor because I'm bored. And for the life of me, I could not remember which floor whatever item was even on in order to know whether it was worth trying for right now.
This game is old enough that there are almost no discussions about it. I'm rooting through abandoned forums from 2005 looking for gems. God bless forums from 2005 btw.
Somehow, there is a single video on this subject. It is a series of videos as the youtuber fights through the entire dungeon in one go. There is commentary. There are no timestamps. He does not split the videos according to floor. The information I'm looking for is somewhere in here, but I have zero guarantee he's even treasure hunting, so he may not mention it.
I could have cried.
1996 is on the latter end of what I consider the early internet, but I really miss the Video Game FAQ Archive (GameFAQs) which was murdered by a thousand cuts culminating in the death of the gamefaqs.com domain. FAQs used to be so good, these days the same information is dispersed over 50 pages of an HTML "guide" that is more ads than information, and often for less complete information, if it's not just a YouTube video that's even worse and shows you things but doesn't explain them at all.
Same. I missed those days where you can just control F to the part of the page and get the info you wanted. Now it's wait for 2 ads to play, scroll through the intro and then a bunch of scrubbing to find it.
It's probably more to do with discoverability and monetization. I'm generalizing a ton, but I feel like there isn't even a ton of super useful YouTube tutorials outside of beginner content because that gets the most views.
YES, this is such a peeve for me!!! I've developed an aversion to viewing video content unless it's for something I truly need to see done. And even then, I'm more likely to check wikihow and endure their gifs than I am to watch someone's video. It's just so overdone.
@bstix
YES. And when you find a written version you have to scroll past a mile of backstory to get to the point.
Yeah, you could skim pages, or read thoroughly, search in the text, easily jump back to the previous paragraph to skim a bit again, google (or DDG) for terms you remember from an article to find it again, etc.
Not just tutorials, I enjoyed reading tech or product reviews, like the original Anandtech when Anand was there, that all seems to be going the way of obnoxious youtubers.
@bstix @Provider ππππ
I have resorted to going to the YouTube video page and reading the garbled bot translation underneath because it's still better than sitting through a video with a bunch of filler.
@bstix @Provider Strongly endorsed. For me, watching a video is possibly the least-effective way to learn how to do something. Learn to write or find someone to write for you if you want me to use your stuff.
This is one oft the longest Threads I've eher Seen in lemmy.
Yes. Unfortunately many comments are the same, because the mastodon users can't see each others replies. This comment somehow got trendy over there.
My inbox has about 200 replies telling me about video monetization and 100 just tagging my username.
The cynic in me says yes.
@bstix @Provider Iβm dyslexic and even I canβt stand these Youtube tutorials. The irony is probably that the script they write to make said tutorial is likely many times more useful than the tutorial itself, just because itβs a videoβ¦
Yeah I hate that shit. I think it has something to do with monetizing on YouTube, has to be a certain length or somesuch
@bstix π― embedded videos forced to fit into 256x256 pixels where you can't read shit.
@bstix @Provider sometimes I want a video to walk me through it and *still* get irritated by trying to drop it in exactly the right spot 50x to execute the steps. . . Give me written instructions any day. And link to the damn video.
@bstix @Provider This! I'm not sure who is more at fault. Is it that writers don't want to write or that readers don't want to read (causing writers to shift from writing)? Either way it is torture. I'm a fast reader. Videos go at their own agonizing pace. Who thought this was a good idea???
@bstix @Provider yes, even written tutorials with a few photos.
Also, I cant remember coming across a written tutorial & abandoning it because of how it's written, but there's been multiple times I've left a video because I can't listen to that presenter any more.
@bstix A friend once said "videos are for marketing; text is for instruction" and it made it all make sense.
@bstix soon will be very hard to find written ones that arenβt done by AI and full of dubious info.
@bstix Yes. Also when you're blind, software tutorials in particular are either 15 minutes of nothing but music, or someone going "to do x thing, all you need to do is click this button, drag this slider to here, click this until it says this, type this into there, and you're done."
@x0 I love Whisper for this. Turns these videos into nice transcripts that I can search through.
@bstix @Provider
I find that very annoying too... The search engines are not like they used to be. They are all turning into clickbait sites.
@bstix @Provider Iβve been a programmer for over a decade. I inevitably spend part of every day searching the web for very specific or very general problems. Not once have I watched a video to find those answers. There is nothing more boring than watching someone else write a todo list app (seriously, stop making these) for exactly 10:01 minutes.
@bstix @Provider I was trying to work through an online class on Python, and every hour video included ten minutes of encouraging the viewer to keep at it, and five minutes of lame puns. The actual instruction was fine, but text would have been much easier.
@bstix @Provider
It seems so, and this is not good because many times written tutorials (including technical ones) are better.
@bstix
Worst I remember was a printer Manual that explains the error codes. As Slides, in a video. So you cannot even really google it.
@Provider
@bstix damn, I thought I was alone with this. Itβs incredibly frustrating that everything is a bloody YouTube. My theory is that people dream of those β¬β¬β¬s coming in from viewers.
@bstix
I know what you mean. β-site:youtube.comβ has become part of a lot of my Google searches.
@bstix @Provider hear hear. Fucking video tutorials... they always skip over the one tiny thing you need to know ...
@bstix @Provider video is better for certain things, but does not replace a written tutorial at all. If anything, they complement each other.
@bstix Is it due to a higher preponderance of visual learners? There should be both. Text, and video.π€@Provider
@bstix @Provider A 3 minute video where someone shows you how to change your car's headlights does tend to be better than a text description.
But it's no longer a 3 minute video. It's 25 minutes with a 5 minute sponsor segment, 15 minutes of faffing about, 3 minutes to plug pateron, 1 minute of intro and outro, and then 1 minute where they show the changing of the lightbulb but they cut away to a wide shot so the host can be shown clowning around and you can't tell what he did.
@bstix
And wondering why you need X or Y that doesnt relate to what youre doing only to find out it was a commercial π
@Provider @rhinocratic
@bstix @Provider I canβt see any of the responses (must be a mastodon thing) but I can tell you that this not the first time Iβve seen this complaint and it has had an impact: I had several tutorials to produce this summer and planned on doing them as videos. As the summer approached I saw comments like this and switched to blog posts instead. So, I just wanted to let you know youβre not shouting into the void.
This explains a lot. Most of the replies to this comment here on Lemmy are from Mastodon users stating the same thing about video monetization.
There's a few good comments from people who actually do need video tutorials for crafting, sports and DIY, or from being dyslexic, but most don't like the YouTube format.
One big hurdle for written blogs is to attract readers when Googles search engine has a preference for videos that makes them more money.
@bstix @Provider oh god I hate it when I try to look something up and the only thing I can find is some awkward person going "so uh, you uh, click on this and then, uh, type uh that." Like why can't they just type somewhere in a blog or forum or something "type X in a console"?
@bstix couldnβt agree more!
Most of my students preferred video, even if with very few exceptions slides + text was better for them (for the stuff we did).
Also *good* video takes forever to make, good text+image tutorials slightly less forever but the search is much easier!
@bstix @Provider I wish the videos would all simply have the written directions in the description so regardless of how a person absorbs best it's there.
@bstix @Provider Same. I hate video tutorials. I play a lot of video games and sometimes I need to look something up, which sometimes means I get lucky and someone has written a decent walkthrough down, but often times means I have to start and stop a damn video over and over and over to get the information at the pace I need.
@bstix Yea, searching is basically slow, and unsearchable.
However, a proper setup tutorial has the virtue of being complete. People will typically forget to write 'import random' in their python docs, or 'systemctl restart transmission', because they think it's obvious.
With video tutorials, you get the whole thing, and you can literally see where you're deviating from the script.
Of course that's possible with written text, but I seldom find it.
@bstix @Provider it really makes it hard to learn at your own pace. Rewinding the same part of a tutorial video over and over again to get what a particular section is saying is just tedious compared to a quick Alt+Tab to reread a paragraph.
@bstix @Provider
Totally agree, it's awful. I recently noticed that the YouTube android app seems to have built in auto-transcription that is often (but not always) searchable. I haven't been able to find this on the desktop webpage, only on the mobile app.
@bstix @Provider
They're awful if you are looking for something that requires you to type commands into a keyboard or code into an editor.
The video window needs to be large enough to read it, and even then, you can't copy/paste anything from a video.