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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.
That’s 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 don’t want a 3-10 minute version.
Reading documentation is still king here.
@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
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.
@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."
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
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.
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 soon will be very hard to find written ones that aren’t done by AI and full of dubious info.
@bstix
YES. And when you find a written version you have to scroll past a mile of backstory to get to the point.
The cynic in me says yes.
@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
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 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 @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
I know what you mean. “-site:youtube.com” has become part of a lot of my Google searches.
@bstix
@Provider @bursaar Agreed! There's no CTRL+F on a video, either!
@bstix everyone wants to be a movie star
@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 @Provider I read considerably faster than people talk, so written information is a lot faster for me to get. Written tutorials are way better too because you can easily re-read difficult parts.
@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 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
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 @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)
@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 I’ve 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 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.
@bstix @Provider hear hear. Fucking video tutorials... they always skip over the one tiny thing you need to know ...
@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.
@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 best example ever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-ZTGpRMU04
@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.