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Galaxy brain - I once came into a college class that was about an hour of lecture. I settled in, got my laptop ready and set to split screen with the lecture PPT on one side and my notes app on the other (my instructor sent out the PPT ahead of class because I told him it helped me with note taking and my ADHD). The instructor started talking and was doing a general overview of some other things before starting the lecture, so I decided to quick check my work email on my phone. Real quick! And I don’t know what happened, but the next thing I heard was my instructor going “alright guys, that’s all for today, have a great weekend and I’ll see you Monday.”
Every goddamn tutorial video… Congrats. You’ve just pissed me off with you droning on and on.
“Hey guys, welcome back to Dipshit McGillicuddy’s. Today we’re going to be, uh, doing this simple, uh, tutorial. All you gotta do is use these links <shows notepad on screen> and follow, us, these instructions. Sometimes I get confused on this and not sure what to d— <skips 3 minutes in> And thats when my father decided to tell me that he once grabbed JD Salinger’s a— <6 more minutes in> I think it went wrong when I snitched on Big— <Skip another 2 minutes in> And thats how you do it.”
I will sacrifice your first born.
Fuck video tutorials.
Write it down you lazy fucks.
Edit: There are things for which video is good - stuff that really requires the visual. Which is about 10% of stuff.
Yeah, tutorial videos can be great for mechanical, physical stuff.
Learning how to replace the serpentine belt in my car was much easier to just watch a guy do it, rather than read the documentation, and having to constantly go back and look up the name of this or that part to create a visual.
But anything software related? I’m crawling up the fucking wall waiting for the person in the video to finally get to the next terminal command, and stop talking about something that doesn’t apply to my situation.
I have found my people 👆
Dozens of us!
Also, I feel this way about news stories just as strongly
Haven’t watched news in decades, print or death. Also political speeches should be mostly outlawed.
I miss the days when everything was either an instructable or a video game guide
I just want to Ctrl+f some keywords in the text to find what I need, not listen to ten years of rambling back story
I hate online recipes for this reason.
They’re all prefaced with some bullshit
Tutorials are videos because Youtube makes people a lot more money than a text website.
Online recipes have an entire fucking story glued on because without the story, the instructions aren’t copyrightable.
It’s profit motive all the way down.
Ctrl+F for cooking terms like cups or tbsp. Though the real problem nowadays with recipes is that they’re all AI slop
But if they don’t give you all the back story how would they segue into telling you how it relates to the wonderful sponsor to their video today?
By just not having a profit motive? It’s telling that the best tutorial videos these days are short form from people just trying to help other people to learn the thing they just stumbled their way through because nobody else had made that digestible tutorial yet. A sincere “thank you” from a stranger feels amazing, and I don’t think it needs to be somebody’s actual job to explain how to change the filter in my specific model of fridge.
For transcripts of YouTube videos (where available): If on mobile browser, switch to desktop mode. Press “show more” under description, then “more” under the longer description, then scroll down to transcript and press “show transcript”, then scroll again for the actual transcript. (It’s on display in the bottom drawer of a locked filling cabinet stored in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.)
And yeah, ugh!
And then you find one that’s halfway decent and bearable, except the video is 5 years old and step one references a menu that no longer exists. I installed Ardour over a year ago, I have yet to create any music with it. I’ll give you one guess why.
I made a whole website for my squadron in Elite:Dangerous for this exact reason. I hated having to send people to shitty YouTube tutorials to learn, so I just wrote my own guides from scratch.
Honestly I’m all of this, all the time and I hate it. I’m medicated too 😭 (inadequately)
Some topics I need a video for a visual explanation and some channels do those extremely well (think vsauce). But 99.99% of video tutorials are literally just someone reading the written tutorial, adding a ton of fluff, and leaving out all the helpful footnotes
Or on the flipside when every written tutorial for the subject is just a step by step guide with absolutely zero footnotes or explanation on why or what that step is, or how to adapt that step to different setups
There is a thing with tutorials or video courses. I must find the right play speed, somewhere between still understanding what it says, and not being so slow that makes me lose concentration.
I’m the opposite of the third one. You want me to read?! Boring shit?! No way! - My brain
Whaaat? I mean, why do I have to listen to your annoying voice breathing into the mic asking me to subscribe and like it, explaining in 0.25x speed with the mental organization of a drunk monkey instead of reading 2 paragraphs at my own pace, hearing my own internal voice skipping directly to the point of my interest?
Reading stuff is better, but I do appreciate that technology allows me to watch random video essays at 2.5x these days.
