hitaus
JA WestenbergThe worst thing about online learning is that everything has become a video. Every code tutorial. Every design tutorial. Nobody actually writes out a guide anymore. It's just "hey guys welcome to my tutorial" and watching 10 minutes of content that isn't remotely relevant...
Earthshine@Daojoan it's so goddamn infuriating. And you can't search for info anywhere, because all the support/community is only on discord now
PassengerWhen Discord collapses, it's going to take a scary amount of knowledge bases with it.
@passenger @Daojoan DISCORD. IS. NOT. A. KB. Everything anyone posts there is already ephemeral. May as well have never been posted at all.
Daniel Schildt@earthshine @passenger @Daojoan Similar problems with Slack based communities, because "free" version actively hides and deletes older posts after a certain amount of time.
Fabian Transchel@passenger @earthshine @Daojoan Well yes and no - since the knowledge wasn't accessible in the traditional sense anyways, the informational margin is suprisingly slim imo.
miszeleqI blame Discord on the downfall of the modern web. You used to be able to find answers to your problems easily on moderated forums, where people used to follow the rules of netiquette. Nowadays you need to join private server and scroll through endless spam.
IDK who had the idea of moving the support/community into de facto chatroom that is Discord, but there is a special place in hell for them.
Suran
derptron@miszeleq @earthshine @Daojoan I blame stackoverflow.
That guy set out with the stated goal of killing all forums and usenet and having all questions and such in one central database used by everyone.
It fucking worked. Those things all died and search results largely point at that place. AI is starting to swamp it out, but there you go...
I was actually slow to shift from usenet/forum to stackoverflow. Eventually I did until I just stopped participating in the "community".
Orb 2069@miszeleq @earthshine @Daojoan
We're going to find out in twenty years that the endless torrent of spam that drove people away from public forums to Discord and Facebook was funded/aided by Facebook and Discord.
It's fucking Jia Tan, all the way down. I know it in my bones.
狐ヴィクシー@miszeleq @Daojoan @earthshine Canva had the idea of archiving the Affinity suite forums and moving the community into Discord.
Which is why I'm sticking with v2 and not trusting v3.
Which is why I'm sticking with v2 and not trusting v3.
Azarilhⓥ@earthshine True, i hate it. Nowadays i often specify "site:reddit.com" whenever i seek for help or for true human opinions, because otherwise i just find irrelevant garbage.
Christopher Neitzert@Daojoan b-b-b-but some of us want to know how the developers grandmother harvested the bits and crafted them into tuples by hand for every bit of code I have to study ;)
slims 
🐟⁂
ides.dev
Max@Daojoan Bonus funsies of your hearing is shit, so you have to rely on the auto-generated captions. Ask me how I know how much fun that is.
The Witch of Crow Briar
Gentleman Technologist@Daojoan drives me nuts. I can skim text and pick out the necessary info in seconds, but video takes *forever* even at 3x speed where they sound like rabid chipmunks
Janne Upla@GentlemanTech @Daojoan so much this. I still refuse to listen anyone waffling about when trying to find a simple tech trick, i mute & put cc's on and jump about in a video (if no text-only help available) and when i hit the right keywords start listening.
I thought turning video tutorials to text would be the killer app for "ai" but meh. Maybe I should watch a video on how to vibecode a utube2txt .
Pedram@GentlemanTech @Daojoan @geospaz that's something :)) at least one could find the most relevant video based on the actual content not the title, hashtag, most viewed, taste of "similar" users, etc.
Greenvahn@Daojoan Big part of the problem is how they monetize information. A video forces you to "stay", whether 5 mins or less. A text, like others commented here, is more difficult to monetize. I miss the old days of the internet when it was truly about sharing knowledge and info, far away from metrics and clicks
Alexis Sophia 🏳️⚧️@Daojoan I had a really annoying one the other day. It was a course that my boss wanted me to do, around the use of AI in video distribution. Anyway, the training website was set up that as soon as the window playing the video lost focus, it would pause!! No clicking on other apps while watching this video on pain of pause.
Naturally, I spent a few minutes reverse engineering the website to extract the video and watch it outside of their crap, so that I was able to do other things whilst the guy wittered on about irrelevant Jira integrations.
Damir@sophiarose @Daojoan I’ve found that Firefox’s picture-in-picture mode works really well in cases like this. Usually, it tricks the page that it still has focus, so the video keeps playing, but even if stops, you can resume it with PiP controls.
@peacegiverman @Daojoan I tried that. The javascript on the site must have been polling focus because a few seconds after restarting playback, it would pause again! At which point it was "right, this is war. I will not be beaten!" Thankfully, it was an unprotected mp4 file, so trivial to feed into vlc
Roel Groeneveld@Daojoan Indeed. That’s a terrible development that hampers anyone looking for a quick solution to their problem or answer to a question.
Apparently in general, more people prefer watching a video compared to just reading or skimming a tutorial or blog post? Or the creators have this assumption…
CartyBoston@Daojoan forget code, it takes me *forever* to learn video games now for the same reason.
Pteryx the Puzzle Secretary@CartyBoston @Daojoan
I understand that a factor in that is that "Fandom" (nee Wikia) goes out of its way to attempt to buy every single wiki for every single game, and tries to find excuses to sue any they don't own (like someone phrasing the same basic info the same way). I've heard that they own GameFAQs these days too, which is part of why people barely contribute to that anymore.
Wish I had ideas for how to shatter that particular master of the universe.
Jay
JWcph, Radicalized By Decency@Daojoan Absolutely agree. To everyone making tutorials, DON'T START WITH YOUR LIFE STORY!, just get to the point.
It should be noted that they got it from somewhere; user manuals are also almost always paragraphs or pages of barely subject-adjacent slog before getting to anything the the thing does & even then it's somehow over- & underexplained at the same time.
There's a reason teaching is something you train for; it's actually pretty difficult to do well.
Glen T, heated, not stirred@Daojoan My own experience is that if you maintain a technical blog then bots will turn that into video anyways. One of them was kind enough to mention my unique username, and so I found it when doing an egosearch for that page to send someone a link.
Till Kamppeter@Daojoan I am posting news about my work at #OpenPrinting regularly and did already for more than 5 years.
I intentionally do this as a written blog and not as videos, as on the blog you can search text, easily navigate, you can copy example code and paste, auto translators work better on written than on spoken text, same for accessibility tools ...
Or do you prefer watching an old graybeard talking, and for those who want video, I get interviewed here and then.
Nicole ParsonsThe video is interrupted by an advertisement every few minutes. Very irritating.
@ftranschel @Npars01 @Daojoan
Not for the ones that are actually embedded into the videos. "Shoutout to today's sponsor..."
Not for the ones that are actually embedded into the videos. "Shoutout to today's sponsor..."
Karen Mardahl@Daojoan Like I want to watch 10 minutes of blah when all I want is to check whether it was Ctrl+Shift+G or Ctrl+Shift+K to do The Cool Trick. Argh! Plus, the “let’s make everything videos” fanatics NEVER consider accessibility requirements for a second. Double, nay, triple argh!!
oisin
Steve Fenton ➜"How to save your Google Doc"
00:00 Why digital files need to be saved
07:24 A history of save icons
23:32 Formats used by different office tools
31:56 Famous errors caused by not saving files
58:45 Saving files in Google Docs
And all to say "they save automatically".
Like and subscribe!
Tim Chase
Silviavont@Daojoan it sure does look like that a lot of times, you are right. Awful...
luca
Alien software, human hardware@Daojoan but on the plus side: you can use the YouTube "ai" to turn the video into a longer-winded text full of errors!
jimkennedy@Daojoan and the first two minutes telling you how "we're gonna jump right into it."
Mark Lynch@Daojoan all compounded by the fact that the vast majority of people uploading instructional videos are *monumentally fucking shit* at instructing. Teaching is a skill, and most people who try to do it just leave you wanting to punch them repeatedly for being so obliviously bad at it
@mark_f_lynch @Daojoan
Odd opinion: if education were keeping up with the times, English classes would *absolutely* be replacing their third treatments of basic English grammar and five-paragraph essays with three months of coverage of how to make a good video essay.
Odd opinion: if education were keeping up with the times, English classes would *absolutely* be replacing their third treatments of basic English grammar and five-paragraph essays with three months of coverage of how to make a good video essay.
Sara@pteryx @mark_f_lynch @Daojoan oh, my kid who's in college rn has absolutely been assigned "produce a podcast about [topic]"
Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷@KimSJ @mark_f_lynch @Daojoan
I get the sense that the basics are perceived by a lot of students as arbitrary, purposeless, and meaningless. They might be retained better if the logic behind, say, why punctuation even exists were clearer to the average student.
I get the sense that the basics are perceived by a lot of students as arbitrary, purposeless, and meaningless. They might be retained better if the logic behind, say, why punctuation even exists were clearer to the average student.
Allan Haverholm@Daojoan Very much agree. I'm a visual person, but in the sense that I scan a well organised text much, much faster than a rando with a webcam can explain it.
MidgePhoto@Daojoan I like the use of #video as very short clips embedded in a text narrative or instructions, along with still #photographs.
As used by the @bbc in the early days of the Web.
Stills are often best for showing which part is where, video is a good way to see how someone skilled does a particular tricky move, words convey #structuredinformation, and best printed.
As used by the @bbc in the early days of the Web.
Stills are often best for showing which part is where, video is a good way to see how someone skilled does a particular tricky move, words convey #structuredinformation, and best printed.
Elric@Daojoan I blame the platforms (Coursera, Udemy, etc). They all enable mediocre quality video peddlers to make a fair amount of money.
A course-creation/monetization platform that didn't rely on video would probably be beneficial.
Elle@elricofmelnibone @Daojoan and now you can't even audit the courses without paying, so good luck deciding from the bot comments if the course is actually legit or just an over-stretched, poorly-explained mess encouraging the use of the outdated tools!
Dizzy
C.S.StrowbridgeOr if you do find a written tutorial, it's written by AI, so you can't trust it.
xs4me2
aœ@Daojoan @sashabilton True. But there are exceptions.
Sasha@sashabilton @aoe @Daojoan There are exceptions because Video production requires a specific skill set, as does teaching stuff and they two worlds rarely interface successfully for the viewer.