The worst thing about online learning is that everything has become a video.

Greenvahn

@Daojoan 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

Alexis Sophia 🏳️‍⚧️

@Daojoan I had a really annoying one the other day. It was a course that my boss wanted me to do, around the use of AI in video distribution. Anyway, the training website was set up that as soon as the window playing the video lost focus, it would pause!! No clicking on other apps while watching this video on pain of pause.

Naturally, I spent a few minutes reverse engineering the website to extract the video and watch it outside of their crap, so that I was able to do other things whilst the guy wittered on about irrelevant Jira integrations.

Roel Groeneveld

@Daojoan Indeed. That’s a terrible development that hampers anyone looking for a quick solution to their problem or answer to a question.

Apparently in general, more people prefer watching a video compared to just reading or skimming a tutorial or blog post? Or the creators have this assumption…

CartyBoston

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

Jay

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

JWcph, Radicalized By Decency

@Daojoan 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.

Glen T, heated, not stirred

@Daojoan 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.

Till Kamppeter

@Daojoan I am posting news about my work at #OpenPrinting regularly and did already for more than 5 years.

I intentionally do this as a written blog and not as videos, as on the blog you can search text, easily navigate, you can copy example code and paste, auto translators work better on written than on spoken text, same for accessibility tools ...

Or do you prefer watching an old graybeard talking, and for those who want video, I get interviewed here and then.

https://openprinting.github.io/news/

Nicole Parsons

@Daojoan

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

Karen Mardahl

@Daojoan Like I want to watch 10 minutes of blah when all I want is to check whether it was Ctrl+Shift+G or Ctrl+Shift+K to do The Cool Trick. Argh! Plus, the “let’s make everything videos” fanatics NEVER consider accessibility requirements for a second. Double, nay, triple argh!!

oisin

@Daojoan 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.

Steve Fenton ➜

@Daojoan

"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".

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Silviavont

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

luca

@Daojoan 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

Daniel Schildt

@earthshine @passenger @Daojoan Similar problems with Slack based communities, because "free" version actively hides and deletes older posts after a certain amount of time.

ava_doll

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

Fabian Transchel

@passenger @earthshine @Daojoan Well yes and no - since the knowledge wasn't accessible in the traditional sense anyways, the informational margin is suprisingly slim imo.

Fabian Transchel

@Npars01 @Daojoan There are browser extension for at least this problem. And they work well.