[techdragon]

Oh but it’s not a fine idea. It’s expanding the scope of our problems. I have ADHD … how to videos are fucking poison.

I first noticed it with minecraft redstone machine explanations and tutorials. They started out as nice elaborate step by step guides with pictures… then they became videos full of calls to action from Patreon and twitch.tv and discord and their various minecraft servers…

Now I see it fucking everywhere and I’m sick of it. I want you to walk me through a process so I can follow it at my own speed. I don’t want your artificially slowed down video recipe with 6 minutes of filler life story shit to help you get that second YouTube advert or your sped up and fast cut edited tick-tock reposted to YouTube with on screeen clickable call to action pop ups kindly enabled by YouTube in their latest “crack cocaine for users attention” update and most fucking important of all… I do not want someone making it easier to produce this sort of shit for technical content that is hard enough to understand as it is from probably already average-to-poor quality documentation without getting a shitty AI powered video recap!

I hate having to say this but as much as I feel like an old fart on the lawn yelling at children to get off it… something something eternal September something something… it legitimately needs saying. Video is not universally the best way to share information and the fact that YouTube, et. al. will host your video content for free so you don’t have to try and work out how to make a web page, so you can focus on building your brand or whatever motivates the content in the first place … does not make it appropriate that we are sliding gradually into an idiocracy style world where nothing ever gets ducking written down properly.

And it just you know… makes my life harder and it’s very hard to be sympathetic to people making my life harder as their business model.

Edit: In case anyone thinks I’m being hyperbolic. I have bought at least dozen physical items in the last year where the only written instructions were legally mandatory safety info and how to plug it in. Everything else was QR code to their YouTube clip or companies YouTube channel…