I miss text-based tutorials

And Discord is not a substitute for documentation.

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 :)
It's like anti-documentation

Ahh yes, the 15 min video that should have been 3 bullet points.

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.

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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.
- This is so horrifyingly accurate it gave me a headache
- I really want to vote this down because it is textbook cancer youtube but I have to respect the precise craftsmanship.
- 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.
- Read it faster than seeing it on video at 2.5x
- What if all text tutorials became this? Recipe websites are already this way.
- 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.
- 10/10.
- I even hate the sound of the voice my head made up to read this in

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

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.
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..."

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

Ah, the good old days of GameFAQs

Also back when IGN wasn't a meme
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.
- while playing without having to get up and go to the computer
  
  That took me a full minute to understand...

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

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.

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.

imo education is the single most important investment we can make, and we're failing in spectacular fashion.
- That is literally the intention of a large group of very rich people, it is going as intended.
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.
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.

And I have to stop listening to my music :(

It's not just gaming tutorials, nowadays even some programming documentation comes in video format 🤢

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.

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

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

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.
- Brackeys recently made Godot video tutorials. You have been missing out.

Gamefaqs, but for life, please!

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.

"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.

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?!

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.

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

Do it
- They can't, they have to watch a video tutorial on how to make a software before.
Can't chatgpt just do that now?

Does a low resolution desktop capture of someone slowly and sloppily typing messages for the viewer into notepad count as text-based?

How about a gigantic compressed image of mostly plain text attached to a post that requires an account to download files? Maybe also with a colored/patterned background to make trying to print the monstrosity even more fun.

Or maybe actual embedded text, but served via 300 MB of bloated libraries and fonts and a script that disables right-clicking and text selecting.

a script that disables right-clicking and text selecting.

I happen to have a script that disables JavaScript. Thanks uBlock Origin for making these idiotic and anti-accessibility sites better.

This was the video that caused me to post:

https://youtu.be/fBqOSENDakY?si=MWNDvT4OIkWsGW6J

Yeah, I only made it 37 seconds in. Unless you're live-streaming, edit your tutorials! People wouldn't complain about the time/length of videos as much if they were short and to-the-point. But I guess that would affect ad revenue...

Off-topic: round keys on a keyboard just feel wrong to me, and I wouldn't trust someone who uses them...
- Seconded on round keys.

The worst part about video tutorials: you can't CTRL + F, search, specific things. You can't jump straight to your problem. The best you can do is skip to a point where it may be what you actually need to know.

For game walkthroughs, you could just ctrl-f the spot you needed to know about. On a recipe, ctrl-f "boil at" or "bake at" to check the correct temperature and time. On programming, ctrl-f the function name or part of the line you suppose might be where your problem is.

Video? Gotta remember the fucking timestamps. Google doesn't help by pushing youtube at every opportunity and downplaying every small blog, either.

auto-transcripting tech has come a LONG way. I use it all the time for referencing things I've heard in a podcast and want to share or w/e

The irony is that a video could technically be shorter than reading (you can speak and listen faster than writing and reading). Except that most video tutorials have 15-20 minutes of bullshit before it gets to the actual tutorial.

I would love to meet the person who speaks faster than I can read :)
The thing with reading though, is that you can skim text to find the relevant pieces and go through it in a non-linear way. Even if a video was short and to the point, I’d still have to watch it from start to end.

Honestly, I'm 21 years old and 95% of tutorials I consume are text-based. For really complex stuff or really niche stuff, sometimes only a video exists, but I think text is a big norm. That can be because I'm in software development though as most things are documented by text and most tutorials in that area are text-based.

Feel it. Sometimes prefer a video in certain circumstances. Those who offer both are tops.

A limited, imperfect solution: add “transcript” after YouTube in the URL.

YouTubeTranscript.com

Can try to use control/command F to find relevant parts.

Depends on the case. For example for short tutorials that could have been maybe 3 sentences should not be in a video format. However for stuff like jailbreaking a PS3 I would rather use a video tutorial because I will do many things I don't know, one after another. Video will assure me I am doing things correct.

Or just understand what an action does before you try it on your technology

Be the change you want to see in the world.