The pivot to video. I yearn for written tech guides or automotive process with well written instructions and detailed pictures. The fact that so much of the info once found in text is now pivoting to some chucklefuck holding his iPhone in one hand while trying to show you how to do a two handed job is extremely aggravating. Don’t even get me started on the need to sift through a 25 minute long tech video because you need to find that one step that you missed.
Yes! Gawd. I can read so much faster than they can speak, I retain the knowledge much better when I read, it's easier to search through written instructions for something specific, and I'm not always somewhere I can just blast audio.
Good morning YouTube today I am going to show YOU, how to wire a receptacle.
heavy metal intro music and graphic lasting 20 seconds
Alright so today we are going to wire a receptacle. For this job you are going to need a flat head screwdriver. I got this one from home Depot. You don't need anything fancy, this one was eight dollars. If you don't have a screw driver you can buy one on Amazon, I'll put my affiliate link below.
Voice over if you like this video please subscribe, and don't forget to hit the bell so you don't miss any new content
It's the same thing as trying to read a recipe and it starts with an essay about "I first tasted this dish while on vacation in Tuscany with my husband Bob and our dog Scoochie (luv you Scoochie! here's a picture of Scoochie sniffing an acorn.) We stayed at this lovely bed and breakfast and waking every morning to the sights and smells of the Italian countryside. Now, you can use any raisins but the preferred type are called Mariocastellani Pizzaluigi and are only grown in the Fettuccine Valley of the Rigatoni province. They taste like apples and peaches on a breezy afternoon when there's a hint of rain on the horizon while an old man named Alfredo Formaggio chain smokes and watches futbol (we call it soccer!) on a wood panel television set. In the afternoon Scoochie took a giant shit in my ass and I died of dogshitanosis. Bob joined the navy and had a bunch of gay sex. So for starters you'll need three cups of unenriched oat flour..."
I will defend the gastronomical essay followed by a recipe as a worthwhile literary genre that can be enjoyable to read. The essay can be seen as an aid to understand the vibes and cultural context of a dish that can not be conveyed simply by a list of ingredients and some instructions.
Most online recipes are not that though. The text before the actual recipe is just filler crap written by people who cannot write with the sole purpose of cramming in SEO keywords, affiliate links and banner ads.
hate videos with a burning passion - they are generally extraneous, inefficient time wasting pablum.
lately all of the major search engines are bringing up hallucinated garbage thats written as the AI decided it should work, not how it actually works. its pretty unnerving, actually.
My learning style is predominantly through written text and me just doing it myself. It's nice to have videos for explainers for programming here and there, but if I'm trying to tackle a new lang I need it to be written out. But every mofo dev that understands the concepts and wants to teach for ad revenue is stuck doing YouTube videos.
every mofo dev that understands the concepts and wants to teach for ad revenue is stuck doing YouTube videos.
Bingo! The reason everything is moving to video is not that people want it or that the video medium is inherently better than written text to convey information. The reason is the profit motive, it is easier to monetize videos than text by infecting it with advertising.
Kinda the opposite here, like you can write how to remove the pump gasket to access the flux capacitor by granulating the sprocket 40 times and I'll still have no clue what you're talking about, but a 38 second video of some guy just doing it is
I love when trying to find out something about a specific part in a video game and can only find let's play videos or a video that wastes several minutes of my time.
Retvrn to GameFAQs plaintext with ASCII art logos. Shout out to that one guy who's made a guide for every Yakuza game, you're much better than any troop
I'm 100% with you on this one. Text based things are easier to skim and search. It's dreadful when you're only missing one piece of a large puzzle, but you've got to scan through a long video trying to find the part where what you're looking for is addressed. It could usually be explained in under a paragraph.
There are specific video tutorials that are clear, to the point, and specify every detail so there is no confusion on what you're doing regardless of your level of knowledge going in.
They exist, I've seen them, its magical having my hand held and being walked through a task I was confused about.
However they make up about 2% of all video tutorials
A large percentage of my job relies on giving instructions to the dumbest motherfuckers you've ever interacted with. I try to make it SUUUPER simple for people by including bullet points and/or numbered steps. It'll be shit like:
Sign into your account
Navigate to the area you're having trouble with
Do this
Done
Inevitably, I will get some fucker daily who is like "that's too much can you please send me a video" fuck off no just read what I sent you
I have run into this in customer support roles A LOT. Many time's its because we would only provide support in English. They could just put it through google translate and get the gist of it, but wont...
Many time's its because we would only provide support in English. They could just put it through google translate and get the gist of it, but wont...
the fucked up thing is that, in my 6+ years of working at this specific job, I have found that the foreign language clients who reach out are NEVER as fucking helpless as the people from English speaking countries (I'm primarily talking about the US/UK/Australia). We actually run shit through Google Translate in the event someone writes in in like Swedish or Japanese & send our replies back translated; so I'd completely understand if someone wrote back in with like a "こんにちは。説明が理解できません。翻訳が間違っていると思います。ビデオを送ってもらえますか?" (Hi I can't understand those instructions I think they were translated wrong can you send a video?)
But no, this will be people who are native English speakers and they will fucking lose their shit if they get a succinct email back that puts each individual step into bullet points. "I DON'T LIKE READING EMAILS IT IS TOO HARD TO FOLLOW ALONG PLEASE SEND A VIDEO OR CAN WE SET UP A ZOOM SCREEN SHARING SESSION??" to which I reply no.
Agreed on the pictures, or at least short and to the point video steps
I'm so tired of looking for cooking or other tutorials and the video is 10 minutes long for a 2 minute task, with 3 minutes of the video dedicated to some scam ad segment and a further three minutes begging for subscribers
Text guides and video guides both have their place depending on what is being taught and the needs of the learner. What makes a guide suck or not isn't the media format but whether the guide was made by someone who wants to teach people or by someone trying to make "content".
Full agree. I purposely eschew any video results when searching how to resolve an issue or fix something. They waste my time with a bunch of inane nonsense and are very difficult to reference when in the middle of doing whatever it is that I'm doing. I can't stand video guides.
Agreed, a video essay to me is no different from straight audio, which I’m okay with for certain information. However, instructional content I would much rather have text and images.
like 15+ years ago I used to help contribute to walkthroughs on a video game fan site and at that time the admin really wanted to fully transition to video walkthroughs only, which I thought was exceedingly dumb. If you need to look up how to do something in a game it is so much easier to find it in a text/image walkthrough than have to scrub through a video, especially back then when lots of people's internet sucked ass still. Not sure if its just my specific type of fucked in the head or what but I have no problem reading a long ass plain text document to get information, where as watching even a sub 10 min video is usually too big of a chore for me. So I definitely agree.
I'm quite happy the internet is full of 13 year old videos of a man with the most exotic native dialect I've ever heard in my life explaining to me how to disassemble a gear hub of of a 1999 Mod. 1A-Phenotype 8ẞ SRAM/Sachs that had a production run of that one tuesday in 1998 but boy do I wish we had more Sheldon Brown. .
same, like i spent my entire childhood and adolescence learning how to read instead of having a life and now i cannot talk to people effectively even online because they are illiterate and do not understand the words i use or the way i use them. and they still think they are genius protagonists who know everything. maybe im just autistic. I can get through a wall of text much faster than someone can speak the text out loud, even if they don't pad it out with ads and subscription begging like they always do.
For a lot of things... I'm kind of being forced to using "AI". Often I'm looking for what should be 3 short paragraphs and 2 pictures, but Google gives me useless listicles, or like it's impossible to get all 3 words in the results, or the search terms have a semantic order but Google is only returning results for the oppose semantic order. .
I ain't watching these 10-30 minute padded and meandering videos that are 99% ripped from a blog or w/e, that's bullshit.
one would hope that the prevalence of video would have at least led to the average person having a working knowledge of how to shoot a video but nope! tripod? lighting? what's that?
I agree that improved documentation for just about any job would be superior, but I do have to admit that I'm thankful for the time that these chucklefucks take making their poorly produced instructionals. For me, while better is always better, if what was out there didn't exist I'd have no avenue by which to learn at all
I agree, but I also find it hard to complain about people supplying free information. Low effort is better than no effort. I know how to do a bunch of different shit, but I am not out there making videos explaining any of it. The ads and other monetization efforts are irritating though.