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?
@bstix@Provider From a creator’s perspective that sounds rather ungrateful. Why not be happy that people take the time to create free tutorials at all – in the way they see fit? We look for tutorials because they shorten the time we would otherwise need to figure things out. So it’s weird to say “you helped me save 2 hours of trial-and-error, but it took 3 minutes instead of 1, so damn you!”.
I get what you’re saying; but it often feels like a “bears favour”. The content creator wants to help and promises to help, but end up just wasting my time and not helping at all. It’s a lot easier to glance a document or webpage to see if it contains the thing you’re interested in, whereas in a video you’ll have to sit through it all before you can tell if it even contains the information.
@bstix@Provider This! I'm not sure who is more at fault. Is it that writers don't want to write or that readers don't want to read (causing writers to shift from writing)? Either way it is torture. I'm a fast reader. Videos go at their own agonizing pace. Who thought this was a good idea???
@WhatTheChel@bstix It’s not about whether people want to read or write, it’s what can be monetized by providing enough #video runtime to allow the platform to insert more #advertising
@mjgardner@bstix Oh, there's definitely that! And I rarely watch videos (even when downloaded and sent to me), because I just don't have the patience to sit through what I could read in mere seconds...
@mjgardner@bstix
It's exactly this. Just look at recipes. They have to be 5+ paragraph essays about the author's family history, or else they won't get picked up by search engines (read: Google). And if you don't get on the top 5 results, you may as well not exist. Even if written tutorials were more common, they'd also be pressured to be word salads that make it tedious to get the info you actually want.
Yeah, you could skim pages, or read thoroughly, search in the text, easily jump back to the previous paragraph to skim a bit again, google (or DDG) for terms you remember from an article to find it again, etc.
Not just tutorials, I enjoyed reading tech or product reviews, like the original Anandtech when Anand was there, that all seems to be going the way of obnoxious youtubers.
@bstix@Provider Strongly endorsed. For me, watching a video is possibly the least-effective way to learn how to do something. Learn to write or find someone to write for you if you want me to use your stuff.
@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
@bstix@Provider I wish the videos would all simply have the written directions in the description so regardless of how a person absorbs best it's there.
@bstix@Provider
Totally agree, it's awful. I recently noticed that the YouTube android app seems to have built in auto-transcription that is often (but not always) searchable. I haven't been able to find this on the desktop webpage, only on the mobile app.
@bstix@Provider I almost never will give a video presentation even a smidgen of attention. I AM NOT INTERESTED! Give me something to read, and please make it succinct.
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.
@bstix@Provider it would be great to have the best of both worlds: written instructions supplemented by short videos of the most complicated steps. By short, I mean a minute at most— probably no longer than 30 seconds in most cases, only illustrating a single step.
@bstix been using a new piece of software, and its documentation is entirely video-based. That said, they’re much better than average — no like-&-subscribe nonsense — and they’re generally short (2–3 min).
BUT I COULD GET THE SAME ANSWER IN 10 SECONDS’ READING.
I get the engagement/metrics argument; maybe they could post the video transcripts, too? This would be a win for everyone — the hurried/impatient and those with accessibility needs.
I hate YouTube tutorials. Because I can read a lot faster than the tutorials can speak.
I am also perplexed by the rise of audio books. It is not a good idea for a driver of an automobile to listen to an audio book. Otherwise I do not see the point
I have resorted to going to the YouTube video page and reading the garbled bot translation underneath because it's still better than sitting through a video with a bunch of filler.
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.
@noctiswhole
Yes, plus especially craters have discovered that tutorial on YT are more discoverable than their sites in the still so called search engine - as those sites are commonly found only after a more specific query, and mostly only after going through a dozen of pages of sponsored and irrelevant search results. Google's enshittification of the search engine in all of its glory! @Provider@bstix
@patterfloof@bstix@Provider Although there are a lot of AI-written tutorials nowadays that seem to take up the first search page. I have already abandoned several tutorials because usually there just isnt the insight I need because they missed out the actual important parts of how to do the task.
So yes between the many video tutorials, and the AI tutorials, it has become very hard to find a quality tutorial from a person who actually knows what they are talking about.
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 Oh my god yes. I spent $60 every few months on one of those thick-ass “How to Adobe Photoshop” books with an included CD, and worked through the tutorials chapter by chapter, and that’s how I learned every computer skill until the early 2000s. Textual tutorials that are well-written and well-edited are POTENT because they deliver skills into your head as quickly as you can absorb it.
Bonus: paper books have the advantage of sitting NEXT to your computer and not taking up a third of your screen real estate, which was super important 30 years ago when screens were tiny.
@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)
@bstix@Provider
Heard on NPR this morning, that UNESCO has declared "computer learning" ineffectual. It goes with a study I read some years back that showed that retention is poor when reading from a computer screen instead of textbooks containing the same information. Physiologically speaking (brain function), a textbook provides tactile and spatial memory "hooks" that the sameness of a computer screen does not, that enable superior recall at a physical level. "Muscle memory" if you will.
@tony@bstix@Provider
Special pleading, generalizing from the specific (your own experience). A book is a far more useful learning tool than a computer, because you can flip back and forth, underline important items for later reference, and physically handling a book sets memory recall markers. I have known about this for decades and it's good to see the science finally being recognized. Playing cards, say duplicate bridge, on a computer is a shallow experience relative to the real thing.
@tony@bstix@Provider
Computers are far more efficient than libraries of books, obviously, but that is not the point. The content of a HS math text does not need updating, nor a history book, a book of literature. One doesn't "search" a textbook, one learns the material. You have changed the context to suit your vision of what I was talking about. We're not talking about research, we're talking about K-12 schoolbooks. You don't need to update how to add and subtract or Shakespeare's poems.
@tony@bstix@Provider
A school situation is EXACTLY what we're talking about, elementary and grade school especially. Children using remote learning during covid fared miserably. And you CAN search textbooks by underlining, bookmarking with tabs, etc. For some subjects, say history, using different colored markers to emphasize certain paragraphs heading, names, dates, etc. made it possible for me to memorize the essential facts in a history book in a day or two before an exam.
@tony@bstix@Provider
Why update elementary math texts, to give "educators" something to do and keep the publishing industry afloat? In 1976, a friend asked me to teach her 15 yo daughter about lowest common denominators and prime numbers. The textbook, unlike the one I used in high school, was gobbledygook. No wonder she couldn't understand it! I couldn't figure out what they were saying and I have a masters in radio engineering! Within an hour she understood it and made an A on her test.
@bstix@TechEnthusiast 100% This is especially annoying when I’m trying to find out how to do something in Python or whatever programming language I happen to be playing with. I am blind and use a screen reader. If the text is written, I can review word by word, line by line, character by character, ETC. This is important when trying to learn programming.
@Anders429@bstix lol actually i watch videos for programming sometimes - what is really bad is getting a good look at that one knitting stitch that has a six letter abbreviation and only the worst text explanations WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH TAKING A PICTURE OF THIS
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 assume it all works the same on mastodon, if it's showing up ok, so:
• Bold is 2 asterisks on either side
like ** this **
• Italics is either one asterisk on each side like * this * or underscores _ like this _ (does this show up italicized for you?)
• Strikethrough is ~~ two tildes ~~ and looks like this
Obviously just remove the spaces in between the symbols and letters, because I can't figure out yet how to stop markdown from working on here any other way, in order to depict it precisely
@FanCityKnits@Nepenthe Unfortunately, yes, there are. I don't come across them often because I mostly search for patterns on Rav but I've seen them there too. To be fair, though, there is a substantial number of crafters (mostly crochet) who prefer videos because they can't read charts and don't understand written instructions. For them YT is crafting heaven.
@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.)
@Nepenthe@Provider@bstix@Anders429 that's why I made a 2-minute how to series for the FT-60r. Each video has to show how to do something on the radio in 2 minutes or less.
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.
Unfortunately, no. The answer to "ads drive off good content with ad-friendly content" is not going to be more ad-friendly content.
That's already driven the payments for ads down well below liveable levels. Making the content more cheaply is only going to increase that trend.
You can still make content better than what makes sense for ad-supported. But it's going to be buried even deeper in the ad-ecosystem deluge, so it won't really be findable.
@keith@codefolio@4am@swan_pr people should get paid for their efforts, but advertising and algorithms negatively impact the quality of what they produce.
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 :)
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.
@swan_pr@Provider@bstix@Anders429@Nepenthe
A five minute video is the WORST because it's going to be four minutes of branding, then 12 seconds of them showing me where in the menu the option I need was buried, then 48 seconds of Don't Forget To Like And Subscribe Kay Thanks Bye!
@swan_pr@Provider@bstix@Anders429@Nepenthe
I generally don't view them all, just keep searching for a text-only explanation. Even those have a lot of blabbity blab to scroll past.
If I DO launch a vid, i jump through hoping to find the worthwhile part.
@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.
@typographica@bstix One does not earn much money from YouTube videos at all. Those of us that do YouTube videos don’t do it for the money. We do it because there are a lot of people who prefer videos over written. This is not right or wrong. People learn in different ways. There is lots of great written content in the Swift world. It is just not as easy to search for as a YouTube video is, but I have no problem finding what I want if I am looking for written content..
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 Sometimes it really is easier to show than to tell. Video tutorials make a lot of sense for navigating complex bike maintenance procedures. Much easier than reading the documentation provided by SRAM, for example.
@bstix@Provider writing a blog post doesn't pay writer's bills, YouTube does. Most people who can afford blogging for free are busy. So most blogging now happens on YouTube, where creators can actually make some non-trivial money. It sucks but us geeks seem to have given up on inventing a good way to pay authors.
@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.
I think you may have forgotten the 1 minute part advertising other of their videos that they have done and are really proud of, some of which much probably deserve your attention and time and +1 and subscribe ;-)
@xorn@bstix@Provider ueah, it depends on what you are looking for. I mostly like a combination of the two: a good description, followed by a clear video, that shows it.
Let me read what I have to do, before or after the tutorial. And make it short, skip the tales about your uncle doing it wrong all the time, or why you are so good at this or whatever story you want to tell.
@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.
@bstix@Provider I was trying to work through an online class on Python, and every hour video included ten minutes of encouraging the viewer to keep at it, and five minutes of lame puns. The actual instruction was fine, but text would have been much easier.
@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.
@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@Provider I don't mind some video tutorials. When you're learning a specific technique or it's a more thinky thing, sure. When I'm trying to configure a device/program, or doing builds for characters in a game, yeh, it's bloody annoying.
I'm just thankful the cooking world still relies on written recipes. To the point that almost all recipe articles have a "jump to recipe" button these days. Hell, any video of a recipe worth its salt has a link to a written recipe 😆
@sortius@bstix@Provider I stumbled upon the "original" recipe for Fettuccine Alfredo a week or two ago. It was pages of exposition about the history of the dish, and then the recipe. First, ingredients: pasta, parmesan, butter.
I didn't read past that. I don't need 20 pages of exposition and 2 pages of recipe for pasta, parmesan, and butter. Just tell me pasta, parmesan, and butter, and I got it from there. Four words and a couple commas. That's it.
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 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@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.
@bstix@Provider it drives me insane that I can't type text into a box and have an article come back to me. I've found videos that explained a thing beautifully, and then I can never find it again because the phrase I remember wasn't in the tags.
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.
@bstix@Provider I read considerably faster than people talk, so written information is a lot faster for me to get. Written tutorials are way better too because you can easily re-read difficult parts.
@bstix The ones that annoy me are the youTube videos that are text on the video but just a music overlay... no verbal instructions at all and since Ic an't see the video period it is useless to me.
@bstix@Provider Same. I hate video tutorials. I play a lot of video games and sometimes I need to look something up, which sometimes means I get lucky and someone has written a decent walkthrough down, but often times means I have to start and stop a damn video over and over and over to get the information at the pace I need.
@bstix@Provider oh god I hate it when I try to look something up and the only thing I can find is some awkward person going "so uh, you uh, click on this and then, uh, type uh that." Like why can't they just type somewhere in a blog or forum or something "type X in a console"?
@bstix@george Most YouTubers are never paid. It's a rigged game and the only party laughing all the way to the bank is alphabet, youtube and google's parent company,
@dl2jml@bstix@george yeah, I was looking for the comment about YouTubers trying to get clout, attention, etc - the big YouTube "influencer" culture that is just 🤮 desperately trying to get views, likes, and HIT THAT SUBCRIBE BELL/BUTTON
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.
@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@Provider I’m dyslexic and even I can’t stand these Youtube tutorials. The irony is probably that the script they write to make said tutorial is likely many times more useful than the tutorial itself, just because it’s a video…
@bstix@Provider
Many YouTube tutorial videos include the transcript in the “comment” or “description” areas of the video. (I agree with you.) Reddit is also a good source for this kind of info.
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.
@bstix@Provider I'm not sure if it's my neural divergence, but I actually find YouTube demos/tutorials quite intimidating. I will always pick a written one if I can find it.
@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@gvwilson It’s even still out there if you can make it past the first page of results, usually. And it’s not all hobby labors of love. Polygon still published text guides for everything, for example.
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.
The income gap between executive and median salary employees is around 32,000%. I guess the question is, what planet do you live on where a system that allows for this kind of inequity is okay?
But then that's not capitalism. Capitalism is making as much money as possible unrestricted as much as possible. If you start doing things like putting a maximum wage in, or taxing the highest earners and giving back to the lowest, that's socialism.
There are countries with way better CEO to work pay ratios. But in the USA we act like it's totally normal to have these huge wealth gaps, when in reality they are recent phenonemon and the only other era they were repeated was the gilded age which resulted in a decades long depression that was only ended by a world war.
A CEO earns 354x the income of a normal worker in the US. It’s really insane what happens over there. I’m really glad a CEO in Germany only earns 154x the income of a normal worker, much more fair over here!
I’m kidding, we are all fucked. US citizen say a ratio 6.7 would be justified, Germans say 6.3.
Yes, why the fuxk should you care about making society better when you live in one. Might as well go live in a jungle or something so you don’t get to benefit from improvements.
This is not complete by any means but this is what I did (recently):
Explore around: Currently there's an influx of new user and communities (subreddits) being created. Total users has doubled (give it take) in 10 days. Active monthly users has increased 6x in the same 10 days
Try to engage: For many (most?) of us this is a brand new place. Not so long ago it felt rather quiet (I remember taking a look a few months back and thinking "It's a cool idea but there's not enough content") As a forever lurker, this has been easier said than done. The vibe I get (YMMV) is from early Slashdot / Slashdot clones, only much more vibrant. I haven't seen something similar in a really long time
Missing content? Either you wait (keep exploring) or become proactive. Even if you intend to hand it over down the line, create/start building any community you are missing. For those that are joining after you, it's reassuring having a moment of "Hey, here there's also interest in $RANDOM_THING"
Be aware of size: Recently I was taking about this. Some "not so large subreddits " have 10x users subscribed as users in the whole "lemmyverse"? "lemmy ecosystem"? (I'm still not sure how it's named)
The system is quite new and has had a sudden explosion in popularity. Be prepared to see some rough edges here and there.
A couple of things that might be odd to get your head around:
Instances: Although you can think of instances as a "whole reddit" they all work together. Both of us are on different instances and I'm commenting on your post. I'm not even sure without scrolling on which server resides the post
Fediverse: The collaboration is not constrained to instances alone. I was engaging (from Lemmy) with a post originating on a different platform (kbin) and checking how it looks on a third platform (Mastodon). The analogy might be bad, but think of commenting from Reddit on a post originated on digg and checking how you see/comment on it from Twitter.
You can do either. Think of threads as Reddit posts, with threaded replies etc (kbin, lemmy). Think of posts as Twitter tweets (Mastodon), replies are @ a user.
Do you know how I can save a thread? In Reddit I’d save a post or a reply that has some useful info. With all these tutorials I’d like to have them saved (threads and replies).
E.g. I went to post a photo from Safari (desktop) and the popover with the upload button hides the moment my mouse goes into it, so I can't upload the photo.
The point is your gained wisdom through experience. That’s what the old people always tried to tell us.
Are you going to solve any of those problems? No. Are you going to be able to join some organization or movement that solves them? Probably no. Will you be able to affect any change that the world will take notice of? Probably not.
But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be a part of it. Not everything that has value makes meaningful changes on the world. There was a French artist, Marcel Duchamps, who once exhibited a urinal. This was clearly not an attempt to move art in any direction, or change public perception, he was kinda just being an asshole. But it had that effect anyway. People still get pissy about it, in the form of, “Is it art?” conversations. Is it? Doesn’t matter. It was a low effort one-off idea that has lasted for decades.
Life isn’t actually a race to see how much you can achieve. And if it was that, then it wouldn’t be measured by money. It wouldn’t be measured by “legacy,” the way we use that word for rich people and sports stars. If it really was a contest, then it would be based on how much good you can manage in the face of constant depressive onslaught.
The world has never seemed like it has a point to most people. But they try their best, and they make meaningful impact on the lives of others, often without intention or even knowledge of having done so .
One of my most influential people has no idea that he did anything. He’s around somewhere, although I haven’t seen him for 20 years. All he did was treat me like a person when I was a dumb teenager (not to say all teenagers are dumb, but I was). It really wasn’t much. But I hadn’t been treated that way before, so to me it’s influential because it was something he did that he didn’t have to do.
That guy is not going to be lying on his deathbed thinking, “At least I was a good influence on scared of planes.” For all I know, he doesn’t remember me. Doesn’t matter. He spread some good into the world. That’s your job. That’s your point.
Just be a better you tomorrow than you are today, as many days as you can manage. Know that no one does that every day. And you’ll live a meaningful life that maybe has influence. Your legacy is you.
Well said. I would also add that for me, stopping my consumption of news has dramatically increased my happiness. The news outlets only spread negative fear mongering bs. Most of it you can't change. I stopped consuming negative media and its helped a ton.
OP I would read the above comment a couple times and anytime you’re feeling down. Especially the part about just being a positive influence on those around you, that’s all most of us can hope for. Be the light in the darkness, as they say.
In addition to these methods of finding some peace within, I’d also say that the world is not as bad as it sometimes seems. It’s difficult because “bad news” generates more outrage and clicks. And as you said the world is indeed run by money, so we get it shoved in our faces a lot. But there is always good too. By my estimate, I’d say about 2/3 of people just want to live a life of peace and fellowship with their neighbors, friends, and family. The other third kinda suck. But hey, they scream the loudest and seek out positions where they can abuse power, so we end up hearing about them and being influenced by them more.
The world has problems, no doubt. Climate change is real and it’s going to affect our lives for a number of generations, but it probably won’t be the end of humanity. We’ll adapt, and with any luck the technology that is being worked on today will save us from the worst of it. Species going extinct is sad, but it’s also a normal part of evolution and has happened for millions of years without our help. Our ignorance and negligence has exacerbated the problem and is directly responsible for the extinction of many species, I get it, that sucks. But we’ve also rescued many from the brink of extinction. Most folks aren’t evil, we’re just a little dumb, and greedy.
War, poverty, corruption, again big setbacks to humanity, but, whether it makes you feel any better or not, these things are consistent throughout all of human history. Remember, 1/3 of people kinda suck. However there’s an argument to be made that none of these issues are as bad today as they have been in the past. I think of all of the above as our room for improvement as a species, something to be hopeful for.
It’s important to be mindful of our shortcomings, but don’t beat yourself up by focusing on them all the time. Instead, consider all the good that we’ve accomplished. Medicine, civil rights, scientific discoveries, technology, art in its many forms, advancements for the disabled, we’re coming up on robotic limbs and hands controlled by your mind, that is simply incredible. In nearly every way the quality of life today vastly exceeds what it did even just 150 years ago, and the average person today lives better than kings of yesterday. Air conditioning? Cold, clean drinking water? A hot shower??! If I were shoved back in time and couldn’t ever take a hot shower… well I’d be very very upset.
TLDR; Yea, sometimes we suck pretty hard. But there are people doing good in the world every single day, and we have come a long way already from our worst habits and living conditions. It’s entirely fair to be optimistic about and fight for the future you want to see.
At the risk of being a dick I wanna make one point though. When Marcel Duchamp submitted "Fountain" aka a urinal, for an exhibition, he wasn't just being an asshole.
He'd joined the Dada movement and they really were unhappy with the status quo after the horrors of war. They held lots of public meetings, protest demonstrations, published art criticism etc, trying to change it.
But this kind of makes it even more supportive of your point. He was just one guy, part of something he believed in, and somehow his small act with the urinal had a huge legacy.
Capitalism is just a continuation of the feudal system. Great for owners / gentry, bad for serfs /workers. Labor creates all value, and should be rewarded as such.
A more morally forceful way to say this is labor is de facto responsible for all production. In other words, labor is responsible for creating the whole product, which has value. By the usual moral norm, legal responsibility should match de facto responsibility. The workers should legally get what they produce
Commenting from kbin. I actually feel kbin is a more reddit-like site and beginner friendly. and I love that we can interact from different sites.
I am more of a forum-type user and not a microblogger, so I liked that aspect of it all. I dislike Mastodon because of the "shout to the void" style that people post on there. I like a site that has sub-communities that all aggregate into a front-page, but this is a little different as I subscribe to individual sites rather than a moderated community within a monopolated site like Reddit.
So rather than a Reddit alternative, I actually like it as a re-thought forum. I've also enjoyed the culture of the fediverse of "we're not here to attack everything you say" so I've felt more open to comment rather than lurk.
@lens_r Welcome, welcome!!! That's good feedback for the developers as kbin.pub states this is still in beta and still has room for improvement. But I've loved it so far as well and is my "main" fediverse instance.
I had been on Mastodon since November last year and never felt that "shouting to the void" feeling. But I understand that is not for everybody.
Microblogging sites with no algorithm like Mastodon or Calckey, require you to invest time to follow, comment and care for other people's content to make friends and followers.
But as you said, some people don't like or have time for that, and forum like site like this are better. I actually giving this a try, because or Reddit I wasn't the most engaged user either.
I think microblogging in general feels pretty "void shouty". Like, the void is populate, but you're still stating a conversation with no one in particular.
I've been active on Mastodon/Calckey about the same amount of time. I never cared for microblogging sites before, but taking the time to find, follow, comment and make internet "friends" has really made it a pleasant experience.
Reddit I've been on since before the Digg migration, but was never super active there, more of a lurker. So I'm hoping to do better here as well.
We would be opening the door to allow a large corporation to do what they've done with open source for a while. They'll privatize the public commons.
But all this work [GPL licensing] was ridiculed. Microsoft, through Github, Google and Apple pushed for MIT/BSD licensed software as the open source standard. This allowed them to use open source components within their proprietary closed products. They managed to make thousands of free software developers work freely for them. And they even received praise because, sometimes, they would hire one of those developers (like it was a "favour" to the community while it is simply business-wise to hire smart people working on critical components of your infrastructure instead of letting them work for free). The whole Google Summer of Code, for which I was a mentor multiple years, is just a cheap way to get unpaid volunteers mentor their future free or cheap workforce.
Our freedoms were taken away by proprietary software which is mostly coded by ourselves. For free. We spent our free time developing, debugging, testing software before handing them to corporations that we rever, hoping to maybe get a job offer or a small sponsorship from them. Without Non-copyleft Open Source, there would be no proprietary MacOS, OSX nor Android. There would be no Facebook, no Amazon. We created all the components of Frankenstein’s creature and handed them to the evil professor.
kbin has been the best community so far that I've found. I plan to stick around here for awhile. I've also got an account on lemmy.ca that I was using mainly for the hockey community. Now that kbin is able to access the wider fediverse I am not sure how much longer I'll keep using that account.
This. It’s sinfully taboo and consequently deliciously titillating and commodified for exploitation. Cut it back to just a normal human action and a lot of that goes away
For instance, in 2000, a jury in Provo, Utah, took only a few minutes to clear Larry Peterman, owner of a Movie Buffs video store, in Utah County, Utah. He had been charged with distributing obscene material for renting pornographic videos that were displayed in a screened-off area of the store clearly marked as adults-only. The Utah County region had often boasted of being one of the most socially conservative areas in the United States. However, researchers had shown that guests at the local Marriott Hotel were disproportionately large consumers of pay-per-view pornographic material, accessing far more material than the store was distributing.
The activity spike is subsiding, but I’m still finding more than enough to engage with. When I don’t, I switch over to posting the content I want to see more of.
The fediverse doesn’t have advertising, it’s 100% word of mouth, and that isn’t at critical mass yet. People who stuck with reddit aren’t hearing about it anymore, as those of us who are getting behind the fediverse are no longer there to tell them about it.
But mainstream social media will fuck up again. And every time more and more people will end up on the fediverse. Each time, the fediverse gets more and more users, meaning it becomes more and more appealing for the next wave to stick around.
It’s slow, but unless commercial social media makes some significant changes in how it treats its users, the change will only pick up speed. But it will take years, yet.
This is true regardless of symptom severity or health status, every person is at risk. I think most people really aren’t aware of this, they absorbed the narrative that it’s gone, mild, only kills/harms the vulnerable, etc. This isn’t really their fault, there are a lot of factors that have led people to that belief, but people should know their lives and livelihoods are much more at risk now than 4 years ago.
And that this isn’t inevitable, there are simple methods of disrupting transmission and protecting yourself and others. COVID-19 is here to stay (unless we do something about that) and it has impacts on every person infected and on society at large. That shouldn’t mean folks accept illness and worse quality of life. We adapt and adopt precautions in our life to reduce long-term health impacts, like we’ve done before with many other illnesses that plague humanity.
And the possible risks are compounded with each infection. People are acting like covid just isn't a problem anymore, like it's gone away. Meanwhile, roughly 100 Americans are dying of covid every day - and we're not even in a surge at the moment.
The CDC themselves, from the very link you just posted…
100 a day is 36 500 deaths per year. Have a look at the deaths per year on your link:
2010-2011: 37 000
2012-2013: 43 000
2013-2014: 38 000
2014-2015: 51 000
2016-2017: 38 000
2017-2018: 52 000
From 2010-2011 to 2018-2019, a 9 year range, 322 000 flu deaths were estimated. That is 35 778 deaths per year from the flu. That’s almost 100 per day.
Covid onward can’t be used because anyone that had covid or covid symptoms just got ruled as a covid death, even if they died with covid but not because of covid. The actual deaths caused by covid are significantly lower than what is reported due to this, and this isn’t some conspiracy theory either. This is just how covid deaths are counted. Died and had covid? Covid death even if they had a heart attack or got hit by a bus. Many of the covid deaths actually would have been flu deaths in reality.
What exactly were you looking at on that page to make you think I was wrong? That’s literally where I got the numbers from in the first place lol
I apologize. For some reason, when I read your comment, my brain said, "100,000 flu deaths a year?! That can't be right!" So yes, there's an average of 100 American flu deaths per day. Thank you for the correction, and I apologize again.
I’m too lazy to verify your numbers, but realistically, covid nowadays is simply just another life risk. Yes, people are still dying and that’s bad, but most of them are just in the age where people tend to die of such infections.
I’d guess, there are about 4 million deaths a year in a country the size of the US. So having something on the order of 100k per year due to covid isn’t that concerning, if the lifespan isn’t affected that much.
We have vaccinations against covid. If you’re properly vaccinated, you’ll probably be fine and younger children will grow up in a world where you just get covid once in a while and get better immunity than we old folks could ever have.
Get this though: many children still do end up hospitalized. The majority of them have no underlying comorbidities or conditions. Their only reason for ending up in hospital is luck of the draw. That was presented at the CDC meeting where the recent booster was approved. It’s not just the elderly or infirm who end up in the hospital and die from it. It’s still killing, hospitalizing, and making seriously ill way more people than flu.
You’re getting all raved up about covid, but in reality, this is just a tiny bit more risk. Yes, more risk is bad, but what is the alternative? Continuous shutdown forever?
You have to accept, that there are just some risks that we have to accept. If you’re going out on the street, there’s a chance you’ll be run over, do you stay indoors all the time because of that?
No, we don’t have to just accept continuous illness and death. Why do you think that it’s necessary for people to suffer when there are simple solutions? There are steps between nothing and total shutdown, read above for some of them.
Covid isn’t like people going in the street risking getting hit. Covid is a communicable illness spread by others, not a personal choice someone makes. People can’t just choose to never be exposed even if they wanted, we have to interact with others. Further, people can and do avoid being run over in the street by walking on sidewalks and crosswalks, riding in vehicles with protections, with lots of traffic safety rules in place to minimize accidents. Right now our covid elimination strategies are similar to that of traffic safety in the early days of automobiles when there were no safety regulations. Right now we have a bunch of people driving wildly with at best ineffective vaccines, we need a lot more than that if we want to stop repeatedly trying to dodge covid crashes and have any sense of stability in actually living with covid.
There are no simple solutions. Vaccines solve 95% of the problem, but not 100%, and the remaining 5% are what you’re complaining about.
All other solutions can only be temporary, since they require massive changes in pretty much any aspect of our lives, and they will cause massive problems in other areas.
You’re basically proposing suicide for fear of death.
Actually I’m proposing life is valuable and we should protect it.
The vaccines don’t solve the problem and the solutions do not require massive change, but they do require people reflect on what’s important and adjust their behavior accordingly. I think that living a good life is important so I believe we should do things to better those odds, like reducing the amount of damage covid does to the body. Choosing continuous illness and your worse years coming much sooner sounds closer to suicide to me. Masking, improved ventilation and filtration, paid sick leave, and other simple steps are not absurd and shouldn’t be temporary. We know easy ways to reduce massive suffering, it’s ridiculous to me that people oppose it.
You still don’t seem to understand the opportunity costs you’re overlooking here.
Reducing people’s freedom is justifiable to a certain extent, if it saves lives. But that’s a trade off. Currently, the death and illnesses due to covid are very rare, so overall the “sickness load” is rather low. Changing behavior in a way that reduces that load significantly will necessarily cause reduced freedom for huge amounts of people. You’re taking away more than you’re saving.
That’s what I meant by suicide for fear of death. Sacrificing very much to protect very little.
These misunderstandings about covid are what I mentioned in my original post. Covid is currently killing fewer people than it did the first few years, it already burned through the most vulnerable and you can only die once. But illness is not rare at all. Aside from the rampant acute illness, Nearly One in Five American Adults Who Have Had COVID-19 Still Have “Long COVID” and about 10% of infections results in long covid. We don’t even know what the long term effects are, we do know it’s already having impacts on people’s health and on healthcare services, and that there is no lasting immunity. People used to suffer and die from preventable diseases, a lot. We didn’t say oh well, sucks to suck. We learned and adapted, that’s what we need to do that again.
You mentioned costs and freedom, what does freedom mean to you in this context?
Most of the current long term cases are in people without vaccination - either because they refused, or simply because it wasn’t available at the time.
There is a lasting immunity, or better, the residual immunity lasts long enough until the next wave/winter hits. Especially the amount of severe or long covid cases drops drastically.
Freedom can mean pretty much anything that could be affected by “measures”. Lockdowns might be the most obvious case, but even mask mandates are limiting how and where you can go, they also put financial (and environmental) strains on people. Stay at home orders for infected people are also pretty drastic reductions of freedom.
No, I’m continuing the original statements I made. That covid is causing long term health issues, and while vaccines can lower the odds of long term impacts they do not prevent them. The only way to prevent long covid is to not get Covid.
I agree masks are cost prohibitive, I support free distribution of n95s or elastomeric and fit testing in communities, but how are they limiting where folks go? When we had widescale masking I was able to go the places I wanted, safely. I disagree that asking people to stay home while sick is a drastic reduction in freedom, I actually believe people’s desire to go in public and spread disease that can cause serious problems for them is a much great reduction in overall freedom. Another drastic reduction in freedom is what people who don’t want to get covid have been experiencing, which is being cut off from all public life. One-way masking is not enough, it’s like wearing a helmet in a monster truck rally, helpful but insufficient. Even hospitals are not places one can go without getting ill.
I can’t convince you to care about yours and others wellbeing. I believe that freedom is something we share and create for each other, not simply being able to move about and do whatever I want as an individual. I truly hope you educate yourself on the risks of covid and take proper care to avoid it. Peace.
For workplaces and businesses, improved air filtration would be a huge big deal for reducing respiratory illnesses. It also helps with allergens and with stinky coworkers. Smarter workplaces are already doing this; but there’s a long tail of people working in spaces with grossly inadequate ventilation to begin with. Air filtration is an occupational safety issue.
They don’t want to be told they have to wear a mask or that people should stay home from work when they’re sick. Anything that would impinge on the rights of businesses to make money is against my freedoms.
It’s the climate crisis but for health. Some people just can’t bear to give up their treats in order to save lives.
Anecdotal evidence but I have collected the 4 big strains and albeit vaccinated correctly it was quite the hassle each time (a week in bed or more), and yeah short of breath and more after each (once for around 3-4 months with brain fog, with the addition that I didn’t really feel spicy food at all spicy during that period, just very good).
It’s definitely not a joke and I hope I won’t catch it again.
To add to this, SiDock is an awesome project working on an open-source, patent-free, self-stable antiviral for covid using the computers of volunteers. Anybody can volunteer their spare computational power with a few clicks. I have been crunching it since 2020 and find it very fun.
Kbin also has Mastodon integration (though it's still being worked on and isn't in its final form yet), which I think is handy because I'm hoping that Kbin doesn't defederate from Meta, so that I can also still have an account to keep in touch with people I care about who are going to be using Threads without having to manage another account elsewhere.
I also prefer the layout to Kbin better. While the stock Lemmy layout is nice (it does a fantastic job of emulating the old.reddit layout), I like the fact that Kbin shows a little bit more text about each post. It also keeps more data public (like your votes and reputation scores), which I actually prefer being out in the open, as it helps weed out people who may be giving bad faith arguments in various discussions.
The votes being public to end users is a big thing I really like that kbin has; I hope that functionality eventually makes it over to lemmy’s front end once a lot of the fires are put out.
Transparency in online interactions has continually been whittled away over time. Seeing who wants to boost or bury something gives so much more context to content, especially to outside observers passing by.
This is a very contentious topic right now, and it’s not clear at the moment whether votes will remain public or be made private. There are some very vocal proponents on both sides.
Judging from their past and all the bad actions they have done in the past, bad for democracy, privacy, minorities and marginalised people and how openly they have a far/extreme-right bias. Well I feel extremely negative about them joining in. They were also part of destruction of another open/federated protocol in the past: they played big part in destroying XMPP/Jabber messaging. So I am afraid they will do their usual embrace, extend, and extinguish thing and their surveillance capitalist thing and yeah. no good. Best to block their instances outright.
Yeah, I was thinking of Jabber as well, when I heard this. For a brief period everything was perfect. Facebook and Google were both using Jabber. And even WhatsApp was using it, I think. So if you had an account somewhere you could actually chat with all your friends, totally unimpeded.
The EU really are the protectors of the free and open internet. Given the Republicans would kill any attempts to pass any regulations here in the States, we're basically reliant on the EU to save us. So thanks, guys :)
They've been high on Reaganomics for decades and refuse to accept that legislating the private sector was critical to keep them from ruining everything.
The DMA's Article on interoperability is actually already in force, as far as I can tell. Will be interesting to see when / what will happen in practice.
you can still use XMPP. i use it, my family uses it.
hate facebook all you want (i certainly do) but dont act like normies would be living in a federated utopia without them. theyd be on whatever is closed source with the most number of people and the most advertising dollars behind it and the simplest user experience. normies like easy, and its hard to blame them.
true. but don't forget that when these things were new, they came kicking and screaming. think of how many people retired during the PC/internet boom just so they wouldn't have to deal with it all at work. the entire world changed and made websites/email a necessity to exist and survive. i don't really see a minor flavor of tech like microblogging following that path. people will have an option between "easy and closed source" and "mildly just a little technical but with freedom" and will choose to go with whatever is easy.
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