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How do you guys remember the early days of the internet? What do you miss about it?
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?
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 not better, 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!
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.
@codefolio @4am @swan_pr which is fine, if people want to get paid for providing tutorials or instructions, then that's good for them, if advertising is the mechanism to allow that, then so be it.
It's still hard that it cuts off the early internet. Ads driven by search engines means SEO, which mean making it *very* hard to find the kind of instructions you can't sell ads on.
It's understandable that people write what they can get paid for. It's hard that the early Internet methods of doing this are now effectively dead, with no replacement.