[ansgri]

True. This didn’t seem to be the case 10 years ago.

Maybe this is the result of commercialization of information: much finer optimization of follower count inevitably leads to oversimplification and overselling. And experts are increasingly less motivated to share knowledge with non-experts, like in academia where clarity of explanation to outsiders is sometimes valued negatively.

Also, most of the useful beginner to intermediate level content is created in video format, and that’s just grossly inefficient for a busy person: you cannot quickly scan a video, and you need sound, and good understanding of spoken English (IME much harder than reading) so the barrier to learning is actually higher.

Also, there were blogs, and now there are mostly walled gardens. In many industries (e.g. I’m familiar with professional dog training) most information is there and is poorly accessible.

I’d like to hear other opinions too.

[topkai22]

I suspect the increasing dominance of open source and free (as in beer) software for the last decade is at play, too.

Companies selling development software/libraries can pay for teams of content developers and evangelists. They also would serve as single source of truth for the canonical way of doing things. And they would give away the content in order to get license sales

The rise of the free (as in beer) software doesn’t have the same incentives, culturally or economically. The documentation of the better libraries is often great and better then the what I remember from closed source vendors in the past, but it normally stops at the boundary of the library. It’s rare to see teams of evangelists/content on OSS projects directly creating integration level content (although some of the bigger projects see that).