How do you guys remember the early days of the internet? What do you miss about it?

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.

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."

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.

Has writing really become that hard to do?

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.

Has writing really become that hard to do?

The cynic in me says yes.

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

YES. And when you find a written version you have to scroll past a mile of backstory to get to the point.

@bstix soon will be very hard to find written ones that aren’t done by AI and full of dubious info.

@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 @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 @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.

@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 @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 @Provider This! I'm not sure who is more at fault. Is it that writers don't want to write or that readers don't want to read (causing writers to shift from writing)? Either way it is torture. I'm a fast reader. Videos go at their own agonizing pace. Who thought this was a good idea???

@bstix @Provider video is better for certain things, but does not replace a written tutorial at all. If anything, they complement each other.

@bstix Is it due to a higher preponderance of visual learners? There should be both. Text, and video.🤔@Provider

@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 wish the videos would all simply have the written directions in the description so regardless of how a person absorbs best it's there.

@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.

@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 @Provider I was trying to work through an online class on Python, and every hour video included ten minutes of encouraging the viewer to keep at it, and five minutes of lame puns. The actual instruction was fine, but text would have been much easier.

@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 @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

I know what you mean. “-site:youtube.com” has become part of a lot of my Google searches.

@bstix @Provider

It seems so, and this is not good because many times written tutorials (including technical ones) are better.

@bstix @Provider hear hear. Fucking video tutorials... they always skip over the one tiny thing you need to know ...

@bstix @Provider it drives me insane that I can't type text into a box and have an article come back to me. I've found videos that explained a thing beautifully, and then I can never find it again because the phrase I remember wasn't in the tags.

@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 sometimes I want a video to walk me through it and *still* get irritated by trying to drop it in exactly the right spot 50x to execute the steps. . . Give me written instructions any day. And link to the damn video.

@bstix The ones that annoy me are the youTube videos that are text on the video but just a music overlay... no verbal instructions at all and since Ic an't see the video period it is useless to me.

@bstix A friend once said "videos are for marketing; text is for instruction" and it made it all make sense.

@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 @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 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.

@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 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
And wondering why you need X or Y that doesnt relate to what youre doing only to find out it was a commercial 🙃
@Provider @rhinocratic

@bstix best example ever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-ZTGpRMU04

@bstix
@Provider @bursaar Agreed! There's no CTRL+F on a video, either!

@bstix @Provider Trying to copy snippets of code to try / adapt out of the video sucks as well. I often don't need/want to download an entire sample project from a link in the description.
Plus, given time constraints, I occasionally try to grab a few moments for tutorials while hanging out with family, sitting at a restaurant, or whatever else, so I'd have to watch videos muted as well.
Definitely always look for written form.

@bstix @Provider I’m dyslexic and even I can’t stand these Youtube tutorials. The irony is probably that the script they write to make said tutorial is likely many times more useful than the tutorial itself, just because it’s a video…

The worst are the videos that are little more than a Windows desktop and a syntesized voice of a tutorial that could be written. Additional negative points for instructions writen on Notepad on the screen on that video.

@bstix @Provider @benjiweber

You also can’t “copy and paste” code from their video screen.

@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 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 💯 embedded videos forced to fit into 256x256 pixels where you can't read shit.

@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 everyone wants to be a movie star

@bstix I don’t think it’s because writing things is hard but people have become increasingly passive. Why sit down and read for an hour when you can just have someone explain it to you in only 15 minutes

@bstix this, but also sometimes I do need the video tutorial for certain things

@bstix @Provider A 3 minute video where someone shows you how to change your car's headlights does tend to be better than a text description.

But it's no longer a 3 minute video. It's 25 minutes with a 5 minute sponsor segment, 15 minutes of faffing about, 3 minutes to plug pateron, 1 minute of intro and outro, and then 1 minute where they show the changing of the lightbulb but they cut away to a wide shot so the host can be shown clowning around and you can't tell what he did.

@bstix @Provider From a creator’s perspective that sounds rather ungrateful. Why not be happy that people take the time to create free tutorials at all – in the way they see fit? We look for tutorials because they shorten the time we would otherwise need to figure things out. So it’s weird to say “you helped me save 2 hours of trial-and-error, but it took 3 minutes instead of 1, so damn you!”.

@bstix @WideAperture

It has always been an issue for published tech writing, that it is often obsolete by the time it hits the shelf.

But the bigger problem is that developers began to nurture an ‘oh, they’ll figure it out’ attitude and stopped thinking of instructions as necessary.

My biggest issue is interfaces have become some international secret code of mystery glyphs hiding functions several levels down in unexpected corners.