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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
209 points (98.2% liked)
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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?
Drives me crazy when I see this kind of format for things like programming. Nothing like pausing the video and trying to see what their code says.
I was all set to start bitching about the obligatory 10-15 minutes of "older, medicated suburban housewife shows off her whole yarn closet, every needle, which needle she likes (it's not better, it's just pretty), her fingernails, pushes her state-mandated store, and then finishes off with an internet recipe story about how her gramgram was fleeing the war and had to knit jasmine stitch backwards to survive......before fucking up the stitch and never editing that part out. But it's ok because her hands were in the way the whole time anyway."
But I think you've found the only thing that has me beat.
I will at least use this time to implore any knitting/crochet peeps on the fediverse that if you or someone you love is uploading how-to videos anywhere on the web.....SHOW ME THE DAMN STITCH SO I CAN LEAVE. I HAVE PROJECTS, I DO NOT CARE.
I'll usually go with the length of the video in cases like this. Anything above 5 minutes is a red flag!
YT algorithm favors videos that are at least 10 minutes (they fit more ads in) so those get recommended more. As a result, runtimes get padded with fluff so you get recommended to more viewers.
Thatβs disgusting.
I feel like relying on the algorithms completely misses the human elements.
If I need an answer to something, I want my top results to be short and sweet. If I want a documentary or dj set, I donβt want a 3-10 minute version.
@4am @swan_pr
Except now they're also pushing shorts (which is so stupid).
I still remember a video I found a year ago that was just barely over a whole minute. It was a guy doing one single really clear cable stitch in complete silence, and then the video cuts out.
I do not know who they are, but I will vouch for that man before god.
Doing a cursory search to see if I can find it again, the second video suggested to me is 26:44 long.
It probably disappeared into the ether because it was too short or lacked a backdrop of dried flowers and a cup of tea.
@swan_pr @Provider @bstix @Anders429 @Nepenthe
I generally don't view them all, just keep searching for a text-only explanation. Even those have a lot of blabbity blab to scroll past.
If I DO launch a vid, i jump through hoping to find the worthwhile part.
@Nepenthe @Provider @bstix @Anders429 I need a tutorial to show me how you added bolded text to your post!
Reading documentation is still king here.
@Anders429 @bstix and forget about copy and pasting code
@Anders429 @bstix
Or their screen looks like this, but blurrier.
@Anders429 @bstix for me its even not accessible then, because I can't see the Code in the Video on Screen, ocr is also not reliable there.
@Anders429 @bstix lol actually i watch videos for programming sometimes - what is really bad is getting a good look at that one knitting stitch that has a six letter abbreviation and only the worst text explanations WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH TAKING A PICTURE OF THIS
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.
Wikihow is pretty good. Most offer a written and illustrated article as well as a video
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.
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.
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.
Tons of interesting niche stuff exists, itβs good for minor car repairs for example, but I avoid it as much as possible anyway
@bstix soon will be very hard to find written ones that arenβt done by AI and full of dubious info.
The cynic in me says yes.
@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.
@bstix
YES. And when you find a written version you have to scroll past a mile of backstory to get to the point.
@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 @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.
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 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."
@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 @Provider @benjiweber
You also canβt βcopy and pasteβ code from their video screen.
@bstix @Provider Trying to copy snippets of code to try / adapt out of the video sucks as well. I often don't need/want to download an entire sample project from a link in the description.
Plus, given time constraints, I occasionally try to grab a few moments for tutorials while hanging out with family, sitting at a restaurant, or whatever else, so I'd have to watch videos muted as well.
Definitely always look for written form.
@bstix @Provider hear hear. Fucking video tutorials... they always skip over the one tiny thing you need to know ...
@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.
@x0 I love Whisper for this. Turns these videos into nice transcripts that I can search through.
@bstix
I know what you mean. β-site:youtube.comβ has become part of a lot of my Google searches.
@bstix The ones that annoy me are the youTube videos that are text on the video but just a music overlay... no verbal instructions at all and since Ic an't see the video period it is useless to me.
@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 drives me insane that I can't type text into a box and have an article come back to me. I've found videos that explained a thing beautifully, and then I can never find it again because the phrase I remember wasn't in the tags.