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.

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.

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

Be the change you want to see in the world.

This was the video that caused me to post:

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Abso-fucking-lutely!!

It's another example of how modern tech is 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 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.

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.

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.

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

And Discord is not a substitute for documentation.