Wanted to ask you about this article, how do you remember the early days of the internet (I was sadly too young at that time). Do you wish it back? And do you think it can ever be like that again? I would be very interested
I miss written tutorials. I hate how every tutorial is a YouTube now. I don’t want to watch 15 minutes and forget to pay attention for the second that has the detail that I am missing or it just doesn’t show. Even short tutorials are 3 minutes when it could have been a ten second read. I want to skim a page and go directly to the point. Has writing really become that hard to do?
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.”
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.
About a month ago, I’d gotten back to replaying Suikoden Tactics, and there’s this whole quest-accepting mechanic that’s the easiest way to rack up skill points. But one of them is a series of “go get X out of the murder death ruins for me.”
That place is pure ass and permadeath is a thing, so I’m not just going to go jaunting down to the final floor because I’m bored. And for the life of me, I could not remember which floor whatever item was even on in order to know whether it was worth trying for right now.
This game is old enough that there are almost no discussions about it. I’m rooting through abandoned forums from 2005 looking for gems. God bless forums from 2005 btw.
Somehow, there is a single video on this subject. It is a series of videos as the youtuber fights through the entire dungeon in one go. There is commentary. There are no timestamps. He does not split the videos according to floor. The information I’m looking for is somewhere in here, but I have zero guarantee he’s even treasure hunting, so he may not mention it.
I could have cried.
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.
I was all set to start bitching about the obligatory 10-15 minutes of “older, medicated suburban housewife shows off her whole yarn closet, every needle, which needle she likes (it’s just pretty), her fingernails, pushes her state-mandated store, and then finishes off with an internet recipe story about how her gramgram was fleeing the war and had to knit jasmine stitch backwards to survive…before fucking up the stitch and never editing that part out. But it’s ok because her hands were in the way the whole time anyway.”
But I think you’ve found the only thing that has me beat.
I will at least use this time to implore any knitting/crochet peeps on the fediverse that if you or someone you love is uploading how-to videos anywhere on the web…SHOW ME THE DAMN STITCH SO I CAN LEAVE. I HAVE PROJECTS, I DO NOT CARE.
I’ll usually go with the length of the video in cases like this. Anything above 5 minutes is a red flag!
I still remember a video I found a year ago that was just barely over a whole minute. It was a guy doing one single really clear cable stitch in complete silence, and then the video cuts out.
I do not know who they are, but I will vouch for that man before god.
Doing a cursory search to see if I can find it again, the second video suggested to me is 26:44 long.
It probably disappeared into the ether because it was too short or lacked a backdrop of dried flowers and a cup of tea.
YT algorithm favors videos that are at least 10 minutes (they fit more ads in) so those get recommended more. As a result, runtimes get padded with fluff so you get recommended to more viewers.
That’s disgusting.
I feel like relying on the algorithms completely misses the human elements.
If I need an answer to something, I want my top results to be short and sweet. If I want a documentary or dj set, I don’t want a 3-10 minute version.
@4am @swan_pr
For me, it depends on the topic of the video.
E.g. there are “full courses” about “learning HTML/CSS” or “Svelte” or anything frontend development related, that work for me.And I don’t watch any youtube video on youtube anymore, but only use an invidious server, like yewtu.be - works like a charme (most of the time).
No ads, no tracking, no algorithm \o/
Of course, it all depends on the context. A tutorial for a specific knitting stitch can be done in under 5 minutes, other stuff not so much! There was also an interesting thread somewhere yesterday asking why don’t people use their subscription feed on YT and the answers were a good representation of the user base here, ie: most do use it and avoid the algo at all costs! So I think we’re all on the same page here, we search and use YT in a way that is most efficient but not the most common :)
@Nepenthe @Provider @bstix @Anders429 Haha, I’m tempted to turn that whole thread into a piece of music with “I HAVE PROJECTS I DO NOT CARE” as the chorus. (I’m hearing it as some sort of electronic hardcore punk.)
If you can pull it off, you have my blessing. Better post it when you’re done, though.
@Nepenthe @Provider @bstix @allenstenhaus If you want a written tutorial for weird sewing things, I got you covered. I think I have two. One is for a tiny bag, the other is for fabric artist trading cards :D
Ok, explain. Link me. I’ve been turning this over in my head. I cannot fathom what “fabric artist trading card” could possibly be
Reading documentation is still king here.
@Anders429 @bstix for me its even not accessible then, because I can’t see the Code in the Video on Screen, ocr is also not reliable there.
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 soon will be very hard to find written ones that aren’t done by AI and full of dubious info.
@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 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.
YES. And when you find a written version you have to scroll past a mile of backstory to get to the point.
Has writing really become that hard to do?
The cynic in me says yes.
@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 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!
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.
You also can’t “copy and paste” code from their video screen.
@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 best example ever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-ZTGpRMU04
@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 @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 I can’t see any of the responses (must be a mastodon thing) but I can tell you that this not the first time I’ve seen this complaint and it has had an impact: I had several tutorials to produce this summer and planned on doing them as videos. As the summer approached I saw comments like this and switched to blog posts instead. So, I just wanted to let you know you’re not shouting into the void.
I can’t see any of the responses (must be a mastodon thing)
This explains a lot. Most of the replies to this comment here on Lemmy are from Mastodon users stating the same thing about video monetization.
There’s a few good comments from people who actually do need video tutorials for crafting, sports and DIY, or from being dyslexic, but most don’t like the YouTube format.
One big hurdle for written blogs is to attract readers when Googles search engine has a preference for videos that makes them more money.
This is one oft the longest Threads I’ve eher Seen in lemmy.
Yes. Unfortunately many comments are the same, because the mastodon users can’t see each others replies. This comment somehow got trendy over there.
My inbox has about 200 replies telling me about video monetization and 100 just tagging my username.
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)
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 everyone wants to be a movie star
@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.
@x0 I love Whisper for this. Turns these videos into nice transcripts that I can search through.
@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.
@bstix 💯 embedded videos forced to fit into 256x256 pixels where you can’t read shit.
@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.
I know what you mean. “-site:youtube.com” has become part of a lot of my Google searches.
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.
I mean written on a webpage, not published in book. The early Internet had lots of pages where people would write tutorials about their hobbies and tech instead of filming themselves mumbling into a headset.
@bstix this, but also sometimes I do need the video tutorial for certain things
@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
Personally I prefer to go at my own pace when I have to learn something. Videos just aren’t good for that.
Ah, the early days of the internet where every click on a link felt like you discovered something new and exciting. I remember making my own ‘homepage’ (with stats counter, most of the visits were my own), the dial-up modem’s noises, browsing open ftp servers to find interesting warez and generally not worrying about viruses.
You were excited to get email because it was almost always from a human being who put meaning and intent into their message. It was like getting a handwritten letter compared to all the random terms of service update emails from a service you haven’t used in four years and emails from a service you didn’t sign up for because someone else thinks your email address is their email address and the outright spam in the filter.
Yes, agree and remember. I lived in very many different places in the late '90s. Often, the only method of communication was email. No landlines sometimes and certainly no cell phones.
I can’t remember the last time I got a personal email. I get some rather lovely ones from my colleagues, but a personal email is a letter, and nearly as extinct.
Lmao me too, a stats counter with like 13 visits
15 of those were me
And then my co-student refreshed the page a 1000 times for laughs and the counter went up, because I didn’t install a cookie with an IP check.
Now everything is stuck in corporate silos and largely out of reach.
I miss the somewhat more decentralized and anonymous nature of the early Internet and the Web. People were more likely to have their own Web site with their own shitty personal flare. Services were more infrastructure than ways to monetize the masses. Everyone was busy learning and trying out new things instead of just mindless content consumption or broadcasting their basic-assed opinion.
Things seemed more substantial. But also anonymity granted people the ability to not be judged by their failures. So trying things was less personally risky and easier to fade away in time.
Maybe I just got old. I would love to get back there, though.
Less centralized than it is now. Miss that.
Less ads.
Otoh web design was very childish back then. Peak was Starfield background with bright color text with some animated gifs plastered all over.
I think I miss most is online gaming where voice chat wasn’t an option. Things were a tad more civilized when you had to type in what you wanted to say. Or just efficient. I actually learned to type fast cuz of this. Plus I can read the shorthand better than understand most people’s accents.
People talk about the early days of the Internet, then only go back as far as the world wide web.
There was Internet before Web servers.
When I think of the early Internet, I’m usually thinking of USENET. Posting a question about a Linux device driver not working, getting an answer back from the guy who wrote it, and then him fixing it to work with your hardware.
If I think of the early web, it was very exciting. Mosaic was the browser, and HTML was clean. Briefly, it was almost pure information and untainted by profit motive.
Anyone with a server on the Internet (an extremely exclusive group) could install a web server and start their own site. It was very populist among the privileged few who could participate.
There were assholes. There are always assholes. But there were very few stupid assholes. The nature of the early Internet meant there was a certain threshold you had to cross before you had access. Then, AOL came, and stupid assholes arrived.
It’s been downhill ever since.
Now GET OFF MY LAWN!!!
Edit: typo
I never used usenet but I really appreciate being able to view discussion forums from when back to the future came out.
I remember:
- CompuServe chat rooms
- Playing Neverwinter Nights, the “original MMO” some say, on CompuServe
- Telnetting into my library to check out books and have them mailed to me instead of walking across town to the library.
- Usenet and FTP
- mIRC
- Randomly typing words or phrases and following them with .com to explore the web.
- Penny-Arcade
- Something Awful
- New grounds
- stickdeath.com
- Rotten.com
- Ogrish
- all the shock images like Goatse, Tubgirl, and Lemon Party
- Fark
- Digg
Heck, I even remember how I found out about the internet in the first place. I was reading the encyclopedia (I was following knowledge rabbit holes even before Wikipedia!) and got to the entry about it. Absolutely blew my little mind and I started begging my dad to show it to me since we had a computer.
original MMO
[types out an emote describing how my MUD character is laughing]
FYI: it was a MUD. The number of connections it allowed at once was the big selling factor, I think. To this day, it’s the only MUD I ever played with a subscription fee. On top of the ISP and dial-up phone charges. 😵💫
These days, I sometimes hop onto Materia Magicka. It’s a more modern MUD, but it’s been around since I was in high school and it’s pretty fun.
Randomly typing words or phrases and following them with .com to explore the web.
They had to make an announcement at my elementary to stop this since it became a trend to try your first name .com and someone’s ended up being porn.
Yeah that happened to me, but I just wanted to play Supermunchers…
I still really miss the early days of IRC
There was this one program I used a lot back in the day; I’m pretty sure it was called Virtual Places.
Basically it was a browser that turned any web page into a chat room, and you could chat with anybody browsing the same page. Everybody would have these little square avatars; mine was an eyeball. And you could get a bunch of people on this little “bus” that somebody could “drive” and all move to a different web site together.
Oh. My god. Why did I never know about that. That would have been incredible. I feel honestly robbed now T_T
That shouldn’t be too hard to recreate. Maybe somebody already made it
It’s one of those things that makes me wish I knew more than ‘hello world’ level coding; I would love to resurrect this.
Honestly for something like that asking ChatGPT would get you at least a quarter of the way there. And besides, starting a project is the best way to learn a new skill.
that sounds like a lot of fun, reminds me a bit of the online world in the Megaman Battle Network series. always loved the idea of a virtual “3rd place” if you will.
That’s really what it was like.
Nowadays it would be overrun with bots, though, I bet.
I think it would be the separation between “real life” and “online life”.
Getting hacked used to mean either restoring a page from a backup, asking your friends to help you get some gear back, or deleting posts on a forum.
Today, getting hacked leads to empty bank accounts, identity theft, and real life fallout.
I miss the anonymity that was the “default”, when the logged in user was the data product, not the person behind that user.
Most of all, I miss the community that used to exist with their odd etiquettes and diverse ideals. It was a delight to stumble across new forums, now it always just seems to be more of the same.
Totaly agree with you. Used to say ‘online money for online things, offline money for offline things’
So, I was born in 1976 and nineteen years later I had high speed internet. I do often sit and think about those early days. For me, it was a lot about trying new things and making them work in a fashion that I wanted. I mean, aside from all the AOL chat rooms, Second Life, ICQ, etc. There was a lot of exploration and creativity. It wasn’t very different from Lemmy and Mastodon at the moment, to some degree.
Then came Web 2.0. I was reminiscing about that recently as I went through my old (circa 2007) Twitter account and deleted the dozens and dozens of Connected Apps and Services. Back when Twitter was an SMS service only, you had to use third party apps to connect to it. There were so many awesome apps back then, even before the iOS App Store. Then so many of those apps were bought by Google, Facebook, or Apple and turned into something else or just flat out killed because of the competition. Most of them didn’t make it. RIP PhotoVine.
What’s sad is that our collective creative expression is being used for likes and karma removed on social media (because you can actually get paid while the platform serves ads) rather than creating our own unique communities. It seems like the Fediverse gives some of that power back to us - if we choose to utilize it.
I mean, it’s great that these social platforms exist for people to so-easily create and express themselves but at the same time it’s all so repetitive and click baity / rage baity. The algorithm decides what to show you to keep your attention the longest, not to motivate or inspire you. It’s not super easy to find interesting quirky odd things that make you question the world so social media is creating a warped sense of reality where we all generally like the same things. It’s monotonous. It’s artificial. It’s driven by dopamine and ad revenue. I know it’s not all bad, but a lot of it is. I know there’s lots of weird and quirky and inspiring content out there. But a lot of it is not. The problem is how do we discover this stuff if we don’t already know about it?
What I miss about the early days of the internet is the lack of a handful of megacorps owning and curating everything we experience.
yes, same but also always remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
how clueless we were
I miss the real-ness and freedom of it.
Everything is marketed now.
Everything is about money and selling either what you’re doing or selling you crap.Its no longer an exploration, its gotten into exploitation, and the same groups and companies that were created to explore are now the primary exploiters.
Particularly Google needs to be torn up into tiny companies that are never allowed to communicate with one another in any fashion. They’re being allowed to do stuff that Microsoft never even got close to doing because being slapped back.
Its not super early but I miss the big days of Flash Games. A plethora of passionate games all at your fingertips. My heart goes out to all the developers that made that possible.
Look up flashpoint. Bring your nostalgia to life.
Any Stick RPG players out there? Xgen Studios had quite a few classic flash games.
I’ve been around long enough to have witnessed the internet go through many stages of development. From the early days of dialup internet (back then AOL Online was essentially a walled-off version of the internet - it was a big deal when the AOL software actually let people visit other websites). We had a different local dialup service so I had the full unadulterated internet.
Back in the mid 90’s, nearly everything on the internet was paywalled - without a credit card there was very little you could do. Even Encyclopedia sites (like Microsoft’s Encyclopedia Britanica) was behind a paywall. I don’t miss the slow speeds of dialup and I don’t miss the slow downloads (back in the day there was no way to pause and resume a download so if you lost connection, you had to restart!).
Of course real geeks know about newsgroups and how they fileshare so this was a moot point going back a very long time, but for the average internet user this wasn’t a thing for quite a while.
I spent a lot of time on the IRC (internet relay chat) which I used to fileshare. It was where I learned to download calculator games for my Texas Instruments graphing calculator that ultimately introduced me into programming my own games which gave me a foundation that I’ve used ever since in various careers over the decades.
What I miss is the civility of the internet pre-2008. When it was harder to get on the internet. Not everyone had a PC or knew how to use it to get online. Now with iPhones any troll could get online. That’s when I noticed a big shift in online communities.
Damn, you just reminded me I downloaded some sick games onto my TI-84 back in high school. I gotta find that thing, I can’t quite remember most of the games besides Tetris.
What I miss is the civility of the internet pre-2008. When it was harder to get on the internet.
Agree 1000%. In the early 2000s the internet was a sanctuary from mainstream society, and more cohesive in many ways. Now, all of the real world’s problems have become manifest online. Not in the fediverse yet though 🤞
Oh man, this thread has been a real nostalgia trip for me.
Honestly, what I miss most about the early web of the 90’s was getting up from the computer, maybe to refill my drink, use the restroom, or to join the dinner table, and realize that I had just been browsing the web for hours. And it was fun! Clicking from page to page and site to site, exploring, reading, learning. It was all so fascinating and wonderful.
Nowadays, the Internet doesn’t seem to provoke that sense of wonder in me anymore. I don’t get up from the computer after many hours of browsing, unaware of how much time had passed, and go “Wow, that was a lot of fun. I can’t wait to do that again.”
Like others have said, I do kind of miss the quirky designs of all of those “perpetually under construction” websites hosted on Geocities and the like. People really expressed themselves and their interests in a way that’s just not as common anymore. And who didn’t love the GIFs of a guy jackhammering next to an under construction sign scattered throughout a web page?
Then I also have core memories from that time period, like Dial Up multiplayer games, where you entered your friend’s phone number into the game and your modem called their modem to play. Or going to the post office to mail a Money Order for an eBay purchase, since I was only 12 or 13 years old. Or Napster, and waiting hours to download a song that turned out to be something else. Or just waiting minutes to see an image download line by line. Or learning to hand write HTML for my own website. Or my Dad coming home with one of those “phone books for the Internet” and connecting to random FTP servers hosted by universities or NASA or whoever and exploring what they had available.
Good times.
I totally don’t miss all the flashing shit, and awful music on every site. Nor do I miss super long load times, but I do miss the more personal feeling. I also miss feeling like every click wasn’t someone trying to get me to give them my money, or steal my info. Don’t get me wrong, there were toxic parts of the internet back then, but I feel like its everywhere now.
Oh, and I’ll never miss that dial up sound, or dropping because someone picked the phone up. I also know popups and ads existed back then, but I feel like every site I go to now, I spend at least 45 seconds trying (often unsuccessfully) to close all the pop up and ads, just to attempt to read an article. Of course more pop up if you scroll to keep reading too.
Basically, I mostly agree with the article.
I miss the wild west feel and community. And that it wasn’t always online. I also hate that everything is in a web app,etc. I miss exploring random websites. I feel like the internet is just a series of walled gardens these days.
You didn’t have to subscribe to everything
