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.

    • @Reucnalts@feddit.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      65 months ago

      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 :)

    • @pivot_root@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      595 months ago

      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.

      But first, today’s sponsor is Cubezone. Cubezone is the leader in website design and hosting. If you’re a small business owner looking to create a professional website or an independent contractor wanting to host an online portfolio, Cubezone has you covered. Choose from over 420 different premade JavaScript-required designs to make your website stand out among the competition. And I’ll tell you what guys—if you sign up within the next seven days with the code JTTCZ5, you can get 5% off your first 30 days. You gotta act fast though, as it’s limited to the first 10 new subscribers.

      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.

      • @GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        English
        215 months ago

        I really want to vote this down because it is textbook cancer youtube but I have to respect the precise craftsmanship.

      • maegul (he/they)
        link
        fedilink
        English
        10
        edit-2
        5 months ago

        Like all the other replies …

        • On one hand … fuck you, you awful person, why would you put me through that
        • On the other hand … you are a treasure and a master craftsperson and ought to be celebrated for the mirror you hold up to society

        … sometimes … fucking “modern hustle” youtube … just come on!

        EDIT: just to be clear, this was wonderful and thank you, I’m being mostly facetious here.

        • @Emerald@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          5
          edit-2
          5 months ago

          Yeah recipe sites are the worst. I get it if they truly want to share their personal story about the recipe, but I’m sure many just do it for SEO

      • @Sotuanduso@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        55 months ago

        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.

  • dactylotheca
    link
    fedilink
    English
    415 months ago

    And the text tutorials that we do get are either padded out with bullshit or written by a fucking LLM

    • @henfredemars@infosec.pub
      link
      fedilink
      English
      175 months ago

      I hate that BS so much. Despite the advancements in technology I feel like I can’t find anything anymore unless I know exactly what I’m looking for in advance and from whom.

    • @adam_y@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      85 months ago

      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…”

  • @trustnoone@lemmy.sdf.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    385 months ago

    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

    • @Tower@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      55 months ago

      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.

  • @Infynis@midwest.social
    link
    fedilink
    English
    295 months ago

    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

    • @Tyoda@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      75 months ago

      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.

  • @jjjalljs@ttrpg.network
    link
    fedilink
    English
    255 months ago

    This has come up a few times and I agree: I vastly prefer text in most cases.

    However! I learned that something like half of US adults cannot read at a 6th grade level.

    Everyone here, on a heavy text based forum, is probably able to read English. But for a lot of people who probably aren’t going to post here, reading can be stressful, frustrating, and embarrassing.

    So that sucks. We should probably be investing in education instead of whatever idiocy venture capital is setting on fire this week.

      • JustEnoughDucks
        link
        fedilink
        English
        35 months ago

        That is literally the intention of a large group of very rich people, it is going as intended.

    • @adam_y@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      8
      edit-2
      5 months ago

      Yes totally, but counter to that there are still an awful lot of places where internet is borderline dialup and access to information is still primarily text based. Furthermore, translating text under these conditions is considerably easy than translating audio.

      Investing in education on a global level, as opposed to a US level is a question of access and infrastructure.

    • @LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      4
      edit-2
      5 months ago

      Making it a video would just decrease the reading levels over time wouldn’t it? Also this may sound bad, but there isn’t much content out there a 6th grade reading level can’t decipher. Instructions aren’t about breaking down what meaning they really might have had. I don’t need to figure out the underlying meaning of animal farm during “loosen 6 10mm lugnuts” or “enter dsregcmd /status and check the provision status at the bottom.”. With each line being discussed I don’t need to examine the underlying text. Most everything in life is able to be done at a reading level of 6th grade.

      Wish it were higher, but that isn’t our biggest failure in education right now in my opinion.

  • maegul (he/they)
    link
    fedilink
    English
    18
    edit-2
    5 months ago

    Abso-fucking-lutely!!

    It’s another example of how modern tech is has forgotten how to be “humane” (Look up Bret Victor and his philosophies on tech if you’re keen on deep diving on this more) … that is, actually good for humans and not merely the best way to make profit. And so the promise of tech to help and solve problems, given how many resources are being poured into it, is often looking like a failure.

    • @Today@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      115 months ago

      I was complaining about this at work recently. I can skim an article in 2 minutes instead of watching a 15 minute video. Half of my co-workers were confused by someone choosing to read. Also, same with podcasts - i didn’t need jokes and stupid chit chat - just give me the facts and move on.

      • maegul (he/they)
        link
        fedilink
        English
        75 months ago

        Yep. I’ve reached the point of wanting all information on the internet in Wikipedia format.

    • @Reucnalts@feddit.de
      link
      fedilink
      English
      45 months ago

      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 :)

  • @tombruzzo@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    125 months ago

    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

    • 🐍🩶🐢
      link
      fedilink
      English
      55 months ago

      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.

        • 🐍🩶🐢
          link
          fedilink
          English
          15 months ago

          I may take a look, but I am doing everything in C#. I have a really hard time paying attention to videos, especially if it is a bunch of content/features/examples where only a small part pertains to what I am doing. I would also have to start and stop constantly to try and take notes and hope the auto caption works. ADHD woes. Hopefully they supply all of the source code and project files.

  • @henfredemars@infosec.pub
    link
    fedilink
    English
    115 months ago

    I think there’s something to be said for the difficulty in writing a good tutorial. I remember back in the day, before video game walk-throughs, even the text versions were often difficult to decipher.

    I also believe we have way more tutorials than we used to have, but the tools for locating good sources are focused more on making money than serving visitors.

    • @Empricorn@feddit.nl
      link
      fedilink
      English
      1
      edit-2
      5 months ago

      “Difficult to decipher”? I honestly don’t think I ever encountered this. At worst, text walkthroughs were too verbose, but that was just because they were passionate single-person projects. Can you elaborate, or do you have examples? Keep in mind I’m mostly thinking of GameFAQs-style text walkthroughs.

  • @0110010001100010@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    105 months ago

    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?!

  • @RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    7
    edit-2
    5 months ago

    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.

  • fmstrat
    link
    fedilink
    English
    75 months ago

    I have considered making an app that converts videos to core text and key screenshots.