Benvenuto nel Poliverso

The 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...

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in reply to JA Westenberg

slims 🐟⁂

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

it also doesn’t help that people are discouraged to write because LLMs will just swallow it up and use it for themselves.

Questa voce è stata modificata (3 giorni fa)

Carlos Solís likes this.

in reply to JA Westenberg

ides.dev

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

oh god I hate this. This ten minute video could have been two or three sentences. I am not going to subscribe to your channel, I only came here to find out how to replace my car headlight bulb - I do not want to be notified when you post more car videos!!

in reply to JA Westenberg

Gentleman Technologist

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

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

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Greenvahn

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

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

in reply to JA Westenberg

CartyBoston

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

forget code, it takes me *forever* to learn video games now for the same reason.

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Jay

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

Truly the pivot to video is complete.
One of the worst things about this timeline.

in reply to JA Westenberg

JWcph, Radicalized By Decency

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

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.

in reply to JA Westenberg

Glen T, heated, not stirred

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

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.

in reply to JA Westenberg

Nicole Parsons

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

The video is interrupted by an advertisement every few minutes. Very irritating.

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oisin

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

I so much dislike this fact, stopping and starting and going back over the video, the irritations like voice tone and speed, the digressions and emotional notes, ugh, please, just express the knowledge in clearly written form.

in reply to JA Westenberg

Steve Fenton ➜

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

"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!

in reply to JA Westenberg

Silviavont

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

it sure does look like that a lot of times, you are right. Awful...

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luca

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

That is so true. I believe it's all about two factors, the easier "stream of thought speaking" (against writing a correct text) and the desire to show off themselves, before any technical content

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ava_doll

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

Videos are so slow! I’d rather read quick steps than watch someone talk forever. Where’s the simple guide when you need it?

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Alien software, human hardware

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

but on the plus side: you can use the YouTube "ai" to turn the video into a longer-winded text full of errors!

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jimkennedy

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

and the first two minutes telling you how "we're gonna jump right into it."

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Mark Lynch

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

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

in reply to JA Westenberg

Allan Haverholm

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

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.

in reply to JA Westenberg

MidgePhoto

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

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.

in reply to JA Westenberg

Elric

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

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.

in reply to JA Westenberg

Dizzy

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

true. I wouldn't mind so much if they didn't pad it out so much with useless ramblings just to stretch the useful bit.

in reply to JA Westenberg

C.S.Strowbridge

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

Or if you do find a written tutorial, it's written by AI, so you can't trust it.

in reply to JA Westenberg

xs4me2

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

True…

in reply to JA Westenberg

Tobias Klausmann

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

Heartily agreed! While _some_ things benefit from video (like "How do you take apart this thing?", though well made photos do the same), most things really don't need a video and bad voice over.

FWIW, there is this script:

github.com/obra/Youtube2Webpag…

which converts YT videos to a series of screenshots along with the subtitled text. I have not tried it, so I don't know how well it works.

GitHub - obra/Youtube2Webpage: I learn much better from text than from videos

I learn much better from text than from videos. Contribute to obra/Youtube2Webpage development by creating an account on GitHub.

^GitHub

Questa voce è stata modificata (3 giorni fa)

in reply to JA Westenberg

Federico

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

Really annoying
But luckily I have found an exception for coding:
Codecademy

No video, just text and coding exercises. Directly on their platform. You code following the exercise, it corrects you and you can test yourself directly on their platform

I have a love/hate relationship with them: I love the fact that it is practical, no 30 minute video course, but the pace is really slow.
But if you want to tackle a new topic in coding, it's just great

in reply to JA Westenberg

ava

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

Ugh, so true! I hate watching long videos when I just want quick steps. Give me a simple guide please — my brain can’t handle all that fluff!

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Martin

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

But every information is repeated 5 times, to get the 10 minutes video filled up.
With garbage.

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Fenix

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

We should just return to minimal text pages. No beautiful design, just straight to the point information.

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Michael

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

A guy I now work with documents internal procedures by linking to YT vids. I'm about ready to rewrite all our wiki pages

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Kyden Fumofly

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

I dont know if is this or that Discord replaced so many forums, that many problem solving answers and learning material is not searchable or will get lost forever.

in reply to JA Westenberg

Steven

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

I can't agree more! I in particular do best learning through text and am good at scanning a document quickly to find what I need. I hate watching videos produced by amateurs with annoying speaking habits who spend the whole video drawing imaginary circles with their cursor around the menu item they are talking about!

in reply to JA Westenberg

Peter N. M. Hansteen

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

I only recently started realizing that more often than not, people are surprised to find that for the presentations I give, there usually is a full text written version, and that the references are links to actual text resources.

Questa voce è stata modificata (3 giorni fa)

in reply to JA Westenberg

Ypsilenna Gloomvale

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

I agree. I usually put extra time into searching for text-based alternatives to these videos

in reply to JA Westenberg

lil5 🚲 🇳🇱

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

what might help is to try different search engines that focus on blogs and lower the ranking based on ads and tracking.

The big two trackers (google & bing) actively give big tech and ads supported websites higher ratings, leaving independent blogs in the dust, at page 8.

Search My Site - Open source search engine and search as a service for personal and independent websites

searchmysite.net - the open source search engine and search as a service for user-submitted personal and independent websites

^{searchmysite.net}

in reply to JA Westenberg

Morqendi

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

And if they do, it's AI slob which starts explaining how to turn on a PC, the history of computers in general, why <your problem> matters. Then there's the solution: click on <menu => option that doesn't exist>.

in reply to JA Westenberg

Drew Crecente (they)

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

Creators profit from YouTube's garbage business model to the detriment of those looking to actually learn anything.

reddit.com/r/NewTubers/comment…

in reply to JA Westenberg

squalouJenkins

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

once upon a time I lamented about this,
explaining the time and energy lost (to make and consult this), the inability to search for keywords.

nowadays I getvthe answer 'shitGpt can sum up for you, then search in it'.

I quit.

in reply to JA Westenberg

SnowBlind2005

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

Are you setting up your AI skills.md file so that it only gives you the advertisements and weekly drama you're interested in instead of random ones after you ask it to write out a guide for you?

in reply to JA Westenberg

Tobias Schächtelin

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

“Could this 10 minute video have been a 2 minute read?”

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Count Holdem

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

Roots feed the branches, and during any 'leap' change, as has been the computer age, there requires a countermeasure to fill the gap/deficit that's left in said "leap".

And as a byproduct of millions of years, of harder physical differentials, placing too much weight on software, and far less on hardware, results in the inevitable asymmetry we're seeing now.

May as well be a brain in a vat, while cockroaches inherit your past potential.

in reply to JA Westenberg

Netraven

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

if it's a video 9 times out of 10 I will not view it. If I must view it, I will not play it, but skip through it as fast as I can.

If it's on YouTube? Forget it.

in reply to JA Westenberg

Manuel Senfft

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

German #music #education for #free in written form:

books.tagirijus.de/

Have fun, people. 👍

#free #education #music

in reply to JA Westenberg

Lord Caramac the Clueless, KSC

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

My brain can very easily retain information I have read in text. I have a very hard time remembering what somebody said in spoken words.

in reply to JA Westenberg

ghosttie

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

makes me want to make a tutorial video that's just the text of the tutorial slowly scrolling past

in reply to JA Westenberg

Fruits

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

For me it has been a blessing. I've always struggled to keep focused when reading walls of text, but now I can get a visual guide.

For quick "was it Y?" I've never failed to find a brief written answer (usually in SO, reddit or the rare forum post).

For long tutorials, I've managed to find stuff that gets to the point very fast. SponsorBlock for YouTube is also pretty good for skipping meanderings.

We have choices now. What works for you is good, what works for others is also good.

in reply to JA Westenberg

Professor_Stevens

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

Food bloggers used to write things down. That is, they used to teach you how to cook. Nowadays, they still write, but it's like every article starts with, "I was born on a farm in Nebraska..."

Questa voce è stata modificata (3 giorni fa)

in reply to JA Westenberg

Webnovelverse

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

Absolutely correct

in reply to JA Westenberg

Alper Çuğun-Gscheidel

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

Most people would rather die than write. Fake“professionals” prefer to ramble the same inane bs many times over writing it down once.

in reply to JA Westenberg

Adrian W

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

Oh hell that is so true! It drives me bloody insane!

Ten minutes of video drivel that could be condensed down to a couple of pages of text and a few diagrams - all of which might take just a few minutes to read, understand and act upon.

I know about learning styles, etc. and that video instruction works better for some people, but give the rest of us the option FFS!!

in reply to JA Westenberg

Arianna Masciolini

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

to be fair, video *tutorials* have worked better than written *tutorials* for me in many occasions. What I really struggle with right now is finding something that *isn't* a tutorial when all I need is concise, high-quality, up-to-date, structured and easily searchable reference material. Especially when it comes to web development.

in reply to JA Westenberg

hitaus

in reply to JA Westenberg • 3 giorni fa • •

Fully agree. Unfortunately most (AI gen'd?) websites also fail to get to the point efficiently, and ramble on around the subject for ages. Hence I prefer a short'n'succinct Codeberg/Github page or minimal blog post that dives straight into the issue and be done with it.

in reply to JA Westenberg

Jetse de Vries

in reply to JA Westenberg • 2 giorni fa • •

Yes, I greatly prefer a concise, written 'how to' above the endless blathering on a video.

in reply to JA Westenberg

Neil Moffatt

in reply to JA Westenberg • 2 giorni fa • •

Writing good guides is so much harder. Modern life gravitates towards the easy path.

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Tizian 「ティツィアーン」

in reply to JA Westenberg • 2 giorni fa • •

I always hated video tutorials. Esp. because the format is inherently hard to adjust for updates.

in reply to JA Westenberg

Marc

in reply to JA Westenberg • 2 giorni fa • •

yes! We had a discussion about this at my customer, and a user survey. The result has been 50/50 between video and written. We did a blended learning concept and we decided to choose the best for the users .

I agree , I like written as well more

in reply to JA Westenberg

Francisca Sinn

in reply to JA Westenberg • 2 giorni fa • •

omg this. Every click to a link is painful.

in reply to JA Westenberg

J Miller

in reply to JA Westenberg • 2 giorni fa • •

FWIW, many educators also find this terrible from an instructor’s point of view. Of course, some enjoy it. But for many it shifts the focus from teaching, learning, and subject matter to performing on screen, which is not what we got into the field for in the first place.

Do not underestimate the extent the ongoing “pivot to video” reflects what can be monetized rather than actual preference or effectiveness.

in reply to JA Westenberg

Urwumpe

in reply to JA Westenberg • 2 giorni fa • •

Like an university lecture without text books and lecture notes. Can't be that bad, right? Its not like development is complex and (often) hard....

#teaching #slop

in reply to JA Westenberg

Akul Bansal

in reply to JA Westenberg • 2 giorni fa • •

Now there is a AI button on youtube videos which you can use for summarizing the video or asking other questions.

in reply to JA Westenberg

Koen Hufkens, PhD

in reply to JA Westenberg • 2 giorni fa • •

As if they are meant to be training some GenAI tool or something.

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Ianto Jones

in reply to JA Westenberg • 2 giorni fa • •

the inability to process written language was the first slice at the throat, imo.

in reply to JA Westenberg

Richard "RichiH" Hartmann

in reply to JA Westenberg • 2 giorni fa • •

not to toot my own horn too much, but this has been annoying me for YEARS, and after pushing for way too long there's now interactive learning built into #Grafana.. as in, If you go to play.grafana.org/alerting , click the question mark in the upper right, and then select the interactive guide, it teaches you within the UI

Grafana

^{play.grafana.org}

#grafana

in reply to JA Westenberg

Very Human Robot

in reply to JA Westenberg • 2 giorni fa • •

"Oh, I remember this video talked about that. Let me just ctrl-F the keyword to find the right part of the video..."

in reply to JA Westenberg

RejZoR

in reply to JA Westenberg • 2 giorni fa • •

And to make matters worse, there is fuck ton of stupid Ai generated generic slop videos that don't actually fix anything, it's just a generic video to fix some very broad issue and you can find like 15 same videos from different "creators".

in reply to JA Westenberg

Debacle

in reply to JA Westenberg • 2 giorni fa • •

I remember, that I had to find a certain function on a device I own.

Explaining where to find it, takes two simple sentences in English, maybe 200 bytes.

The only thing, I found on the net: A multi-minute #video. Megabytes wasted. Let's burn the planet.

Next level: #AI generated #tutorial videos.

#ai #video #tutorial

in reply to JA Westenberg

Ari "APz" Sovijärvi

in reply to JA Westenberg • 2 giorni fa • •

I swear I'm constantly running into a theme, were something that's better off as text is made a video and then some complicated disassembly tutorial again is in text form that is so vague most of the time I have no idea what's been referred to, especially when it's put through a machine translator first.

in reply to JA Westenberg

Alice Dubiel 🔬💉🦠😷🌬☮️

in reply to JA Westenberg • 2 giorni fa • •

You are onto the truth. I love the convenience and art of video/film. However, "educational film and tv" are time consuming and frequently/usually unclear. While I use maps for navigation instead of a list of directions, I much prefer a guide with good clear drawings to a video tutorial. The latter are to keep viewers online while data harvesting. It's the tyranny of the filmmaker to control how viewers are fed information. As kids, we mocked "educational films" as time out.

in reply to JA Westenberg

friendica (DFRN) - Collegamento all'originale

Songbird

in reply to JA Westenberg • 2 giorni fa da Fedilab •

@JA Westenberg
I think that sometimes visualizing helps a lot with guides, but I agree with the fact that those videoguides are ofter filled with useless information and marketing.

@JA Westenberg

in reply to JA Westenberg

Tilda Moose, citizen

in reply to JA Westenberg • 2 giorni fa • •

Too right. Video guides are only one pillar of (potential) education.

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Christopher Duffley

in reply to JA Westenberg • 2 giorni fa • •

Absolutely! Good God! So sad honestly! I'm glad though that the 100 Days of SwiftUI is still text-based along with the video, but still... I know what you mean!

in reply to JA Westenberg

Patrik

in reply to JA Westenberg • 2 giorni fa • •

I feel that and I am glad that we convinced a bunch of people to write tutorials: oemof-solph.readthedocs.io/en/…

Tutorials - v0.6.4a1

^{oemof-solph.readthedocs.io}

in reply to JA Westenberg

Dataless

in reply to JA Westenberg • 2 giorni fa • •

@pteryx And when you do find a written guide it’s either crammed with extra garbage for SEO or written by an LLM.

@Pteryx the Puzzle Secretary

in reply to JA Westenberg

Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷

in reply to JA Westenberg • 2 giorni fa • •

Funnily enough, I was ranting similarly earlier today. It’s so rude to waste so much of your audience’s time just because you can’t be bothered to write a text version.
mastodon.social/@KimSJ/1161138…

Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 (@KimSJ@mastodon.social)

I hate podcasts without a transcript. Just a waste of time! Very much “my time is more valuable than that of all my listeners combined”.

^{Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷 (Mastodon)}

in reply to JA Westenberg

Mike Mathew

in reply to JA Westenberg • 2 giorni fa • •

the top-shelf content from @piccalilli is worth checking out.

@Piccalilli

in reply to JA Westenberg

Number6

in reply to JA Westenberg • 2 giorni fa • •

Well, videos are good for bicycle repair, usually.

Not so good for coding. Why do I need to see someone type something on screen?

When you find the bit of info that you want inside the video, screen capture the important bits, and make a note in your favorite note-taking app (like #Joplin ) so you won't have to do it again.

#joplin

in reply to JA Westenberg

Matt Franz

in reply to JA Westenberg • 2 giorni fa • •

Why I put that shit in NotebookLM so you don't have to watch them.

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Rafael Pérez ❄️

in reply to JA Westenberg • 2 giorni fa • •

I prefer my tutorials in written form as well. Video is a terrible medium for tutorials. It's a feeling I also get from audio books in general: it's just too slow compared to reading.

in reply to JA Westenberg

gullevek ☢️ 🇯🇵

in reply to JA Westenberg • 2 giorni fa • •

Videos are the worst for learning things like coding. How do copy some sample code? Or do some training things with answers.

in reply to JA Westenberg

John-Mark Gurney

in reply to JA Westenberg • 2 giorni fa • •

I feel this. Tried to watch part of a 3h video on master class mobile phone networks, and there was so much I already knew that if it was a long blog post I could easily scroll past the parts I knew already saving me a lot of time. Instead I just bailed on the video.

(Probably doing videos for those sweet ad dollars.)

in reply to JA Westenberg

Anders Gulden Olstad

in reply to JA Westenberg • 2 giorni fa • •

@encthenet aka “See me do $something I haven’t done (in a long time/ ever before)

@John-Mark Gurney

in reply to JA Westenberg

Ellane

in reply to JA Westenberg • 1 giorno fa • •

I’m happy to be an outlier in this, as are you. The more we choose the best media form (ie. written guides, videos) for each job, and stop bowing to the algorithm, the better the digital landscape will be.

in reply to JA Westenberg

Dodo

in reply to JA Westenberg • 1 giorno fa • •

I noticed a weird difference. Nearly all videos of the knitting, crochet, and sewing community are not overloaded with shit. Most are kept simple and practical, as it should be. Needless to say, they are 90% created by women.

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Captcha

in reply to JA Westenberg • 13 ore fa • •

it's because Google broke the monetization mechanism. You used to be able to post text tutorials on your website, and it was paid for by display adds (and search traffic). Google broke this by scraping your site and displaying it in the 'summaries' box. Video on YouTube is still (somewhat) monetizable, so tutorials go there.

⇧

JA Westenberg 3 giorni fa • •

JA Westenberg
3 giorni fa • •