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this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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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.
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 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!
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.
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.
Reading documentation is still king here.
@Anders429 @bstix and forget about copy and pasting code
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.
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 damn, I thought I was alone with this. It’s incredibly frustrating that everything is a bloody YouTube. My theory is that people dream of those €€€s coming in from viewers.
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.
@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.
@bstix
YES. And when you find a written version you have to scroll past a mile of backstory to get to the point.
@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.
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.
The cynic in me says yes.
@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 @Provider 👏👏👏👏
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 soon will be very hard to find written ones that aren’t done by AI and full of dubious info.
@bstix @Provider @gvwilson writing is as hard as it ever was, but monetization of ad-hoc tutorial content is far easier and more lucrative on youtube. People are literally being paid to pollute your search results with video.
I’m actually optimistic; I think eventually youtube will face too much flak for this kind of garbage, it’ll start affecting viewership, they’ll tweak the algorithm or the partner program to punish bad tutorials and there’ll be a renaissance of the written stuff.
@bstix
OMFG this so much. Especially since most tutorials are ponderously slow and tedious. At the other extreme, are the ones with no subtitles and no sound where you are expected to follow a cursor flying around the screen clicking on things and are supposed to understand what happens. Those in particular should die in a fire.
@bstix Is it due to a higher preponderance of visual learners? There should be both. Text, and video.🤔@Provider
@bstix @TechEnthusiast 100% This is especially annoying when I’m trying to find out how to do something in Python or whatever programming language I happen to be playing with. I am blind and use a screen reader. If the text is written, I can review word by word, line by line, character by character, ETC. This is important when trying to learn programming.
@bstix @Provider
Well, we write detail rich, history filled, alternative versions presented tutorials and how tos all the time on CoffeeGeek.
They can be found here:
https://www.coffeegeek.com/guide/howtos/
@bstix @Provider Chances are three video doesn't contain the answer anyway. It's all about monetizing your tech support needs.
@bstix @Provider I'm guessing a big part of it is that writing blog posts doesn't pay ad revenue these days. Also most text tutorials are drowned out by algospam and your content will probably get scraped and reposted with better SEO and worse ads the moment it's out. :/
@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 @Provider
Oh gosh, this! I am way better at picking up what is relevant to me in a text article while scanning a text than waiting for thing to happen in a video. It's so infuriating sometimes. Also, video streaming is using so much data that I would rather not do it when I am using mobile internet... So yeah, bring back text based tutorials...
@bstix @Provider I was one of the guys who used to write those, for Microsoft and others. I was at Microsoft when the boom dropped and most and most written documentation projects in favor of minimal on line help files and CBT (pre-video scripted feature demonstrations. The project (the Word for Windows technical manual) was shuffled to Microsoft Press, which didn't want it, leaving me in the middle. Fun.
@bstix @Provider I'm not sure if it's my neural divergence, but I actually find YouTube demos/tutorials quite intimidating. I will always pick a written one if I can find it.
@bstix @Provider God yes. I recently bought a bottle of rum that has a ridiculous ball valve built into the neck so my first attempt to pour it yielded nothing. Googled it & a YT video came up—something ridiculous like 7 minutes or longer—that could have been handled by a single sentence on the label. (Or better yet, not using a ball valve)
@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@feddit.dk @Provider@feddit.de
Written tutorials are not hard to do, but before I tell you what they are, just a reminder to like and subscribe to this post, it really helps me out.
Now let’s dive in!
Written tutorials are just not as easy to “monetize”
@bstix @Provider I can’t see any of the responses (must be a mastodon thing) but I can tell you that this not the first time I’ve 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 you’re 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 @benjiweber
You also can’t “copy and paste” code from their video screen.
@bstix couldn’t 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 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.