The perils of YouTube
 

No, I haven't put this thread into Linux-General by mistake. I'm thinking specifically about all those YouTube videos that purport to tell you how to do things in Linux.

I'm getting rather tired of seeing threads by newbies, for example this one, who innocently followed some video or other and are now in a bad fix.

When I first started out with Linux, getting help was easy. You googled your problem and you would get a range of fairly authoritative answers. A lot of them came from the Linux Documentation Project, now sadly out of date. The rest came from various Linux forums or wikis, or from Stackoverflow.

Now people google and they get loads of YouTube videos. They have no way of knowing that the people who make these videos are not necessarily experts. There's no kind of filter that videos have to go through before they reach the public. So they do what someone else is shown doing, without having any idea of what that operation actually does to their system, or the circumstances in which it might or might not be a good thing to do. And then they come here and qvetch about it.

We end up having to pick up the pieces. The people who make the videos never get to see the harm they've done. Here endeth the rant.

The issue is that these days, for a lot of people, gratification is more important than quality of content. A lot of posters on Youtube would rather put up a video that is of questionable quality for likes and comments than because they genuinely want to help people. If they did genuinely want to help people, they would have to be >95% sure of their knowledge before doing so. For instance, I will not attempt to help anyone on LQ unless I have a good idea that what I'm saying will actually be helpful and has been tried and tested by myself.

Have a look at the Debian forums, the Linux Mint forums. You'll see that a lot [i.e. as in most posters] there spout reams of utter garbage just because they want to be heard and to get their requisite dopamine hit from doing so.

This is the culture of the internet these days. And it's also a culture of people wanting quick fixes rather than taking time to learn things. The culture encourages impatience [and is born from it]. Not everything works this way unfortunately in life [e.g. try learning the violin the 'quick way', it doesn't exist].

There is some kind of quality control, inasmuch as one could look at the comments sections and likes before taking heed of the advice in the videos. I generally won't listen to something someone else says on Youtube unless the video is rated overwhelmingly positively. But for many people, they just want an answer that will solve their problem in the short term without understanding what they are doing or why they are doing it.

And the problem is exacerbated further by the fact that those who do know what they're doing and come to the forums in search of intelligent discourse with their peers get frustrated by all the nonsense and retire from the field; making things even worse. It's a vicious spiral.

Was that for real? Mind you, I don't think the responses in that thread were terribly useful either.

What would be nice would be if we had an up-to-date version of the TLDP HOW-TO's. Then we could just point perplexed newbies to the appropriate one. I wonder if a group of us could start up something like that.

Oh yes, it gets worse:

I don't know, I think a lot of newbies don't want to read how-to's nowadays. They just want the answer for their problem spoon-fed to them in their own thread.

I skipped that part???

I give up!

But Hazel, isn't it far better? After all, "YouTube is more than valid because it is both visual and audio presentation at same time."
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ld-4175659307/

And I agree totally. While there are some videos out there that definitely DO have some good information, many (most?) do not. Lysander666 said it well; a lot of folks who come here want a spoon-fed answer. They aren't willing to look at a man page, or try to look up a solution, which absolutely slays me. When you have literal mountains of information at your fingertips, and you can't be bothered to spend a few minutes thinking about things and learning on your own, it is definitely annoying to have that person ask someone ELSE to do it for them. And it's not limited to age, either...numerous folks my age have the same 'disease', and the cure is always the same: tell them to show some effort and come back after they do.

I posted a while back about this:
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ts-4175523397/

I never mind someone saying "I have XXX problem, and have tried doing AAA, BBB, and I get stuck <here>. Anyone have any thoughts?"

vs.

"Dear team: I am facing problem XXXX. Provide solution soonest"

And more than likely scenario two has a solution that's easily found, if the person tried to look.

You might like this YouTube video Hazel, funny :laughing my ass off:

In fairness, at least the guy tells you what not to do... :D :p

The trouble is I don't understand video drivers either so I can't see what this guy did wrong. Whatever he did, it surely ought to be reversible, so his complaint has a point.

I was also trying to work out what kind of software manager he was using there. It certainly wasn't anything in the aptiverse, so I assume it was a Mint-specific video configuration tool. And maybe it is buggy; most people here know how I feel about this kind of "user-friendly" overlay of management programs. They complicate everything and when they go wrong, they are hard to put right.

What I find funny is that he blames Linux for this when he's actually using something that seems very un-Linux-like to me.

Funny...I just started doing Linux stuff on my youtube channel.

Youtube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb1...gH39xCCierFJHQ

Mine's just going to be more about my journey with it, maybe some tidbits here and there, etc. Not really planning on "how to's" or anything like that. There are so many different distros out there and such that one could easily get messed up watching a youtube video if they didn't know what they were doing.

But yeah, the newer generation just wants a quick fix without doing the research or at least attempting to read and learn. It's sad really.

I can't say I fully do either - diagrams literally help there (it was the only way I could even figure out the half of it, not that I looked because of that video tho).

This is what I was talking about; he said that he changed the driver in whatever GUI applet he was using (displayed in the video) to one of the fglrx drivers in the same GUI applet, which solved his problem (not being able to get the screen resolution he wanted). Then it decides to change it back to the "recommended" driver (the xorg ati driver), then restarts, then it drops to software rendering, and then he could not change it back to even the recommended driver, let alone any of the fglrx drivers (that solved his original problem). Then he complains about having to use the command-line to fix it (which he doesn't seem to even bother trying to do), or having to reinstall the whole system (when he's the one that decided to change what was working beforehand), then complains that Linux isn't user friendly like Windows, then says something to the effect of "in Windows I could just use "device manager" to fix it". Notice a pattern with some such OP's here, and what your thread is talking about ? That was what was funny...


hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha :p

Yes, there is a pattern.

Saturate, diffuse, and confuse: Saturate the channels with inaccurate or downright wrong material. Diffuse and hide the real videos by producing prodigious quantities of chaff. Confuse the heck out of novices so they head back to the perceived safety and comfort of the familiar Windoze crap.

Microsofters use Youtube to sow caltrops in the path ahead of those looking into GNU/Linux. Notice the emphasis on classical M$ talking points there.

Turbo's NAILED it! TOTALLY agree Turbo!

I almost forgot: he also says something to the effect of "when are Linux developers going to make things easier" or some such nonsense...

That seems somewhat over the top. I reckon cockups are usually a better explanation than conspiracies.

A problem when dealing with M$ is that many good people get overloaded by it all and end up mistakenly projecting their own goodness and motives onto a nasty group for whom their values just don't apply. Keep in mind that even through M$ is engaged in nasty behavior does not mean it's not happening. Underhandedness, up to and including death threats, has been part of their marketing methods for decades. The arrival of Youtube is just another medium to exercise that nastiness.

If you need material to read, including tens of thousands of court records, PJ has left Groklaw running in read-only mode since her retirement and there is plenty of material there outlining how M$ works.