You know what I miss?
Written walkthroughs for games.
No I will not watch your fucking video.
No I will NOT watch your fucking video.
NO I WILL NOT WATCH YOUR FUCKING VIDEO.Written instructions that I can search in and not have to fuck around with timestamps to find the part I need, then rewind it, then rewind it again, then… oh look it’s your stupid sponsorship read, because I give approximately negative-one fucks about Raid Shadow Legends or goddamn Squarespace (which you could’ve used to post written fucking walkthroughs, but here we are).
GameFAQs was the shit. Dozens of walkthroughs for every game, usually with some awesome ASCII art of the game’s title screen, a table of contents, and an easily searchable code for each section so that you could CTRL+F your way to the exact part you need. All in a deliciously lightweight .txt file that loads in seconds because it’s only a few KBs.
Gamefaqs and the walkthroughs on it still exists, its just not at the top of a Google search anymore
Yeah but newer games don’t have the same amount or quality of walkthroughs that existed in its heydey. Just looked up TOTK; there’s like 3 guides, none of which are in the old school txt style and none of which are actual full walkthroughs. Maybe I’m just having a rough time navigating the newer UI.
For old school games it’s still great, for newer stuff it doesn’t seem quite as good.
The lack of a full guide walkthrough on a game like totk is to be expected because it’s a fully open world game and there’s no definite path to follow.
Plenty of newer linear games have full walkthroughs. https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/ps4/241004-sekiro-shadows-die-twice/faqs/76974
Maybe I just need to bookmark Gamefaqs and look there directly without search engines.
I have a hypothesis that there are a lot of people out there who are legitimately bad at reading. You’d never know if you stuck to text based mediums like this, reddit, forums, and so on. People who can’t or don’t enjoy reading and writing aren’t going to be making a lot of content here.
For many of them, the rise of video is probably a godsend. What would take them 15 minutes to read and understand, frustrated the whole time, now they can just watch a five minute video on.
Meanwhile someone like me, and maybe you, is mad because what was a five minute read is now a fifteen minute video.
A stomach-turningly large amount of americans remain illiterate to this day
No we am’t.
I absolutely agree! I hate video walk through with a passion. I miss the days of finding a text guide, printing the part I’m stuck on, and going back to my game instead of having to wade through a ton of junk.
How do I defeat this section… maybe there’s a text guide somewhere…
“Watch my let’s play episode 47! It’s only 2 hours!”
Ugh. I’ll check Steam guides, here’s one.
“Watch my let’s play episode 47! It’s only 2 hours!”
I’d love to write written guides for games, but… how do I monetize it? YT is by far the most effective monetization. Written guides don’t earn any money, especially since everyone uses an adblocker now. Nobody would pay to read a written guide, unless it’s a book.
Because I also hate YT guides, I just started writing them. But nobody cared, nobody read them. I got more views on a 2-hour YT video without any commentary than I got on a written guide. There is no fun writing a guide if it doesn’t help anyone and doesn’t get me any feedback. Youtube gets me views and feedback, and it might actually earn me money. So I cave, and make a video (video is still pending). I’ve made a very basic YT guide and it got me way more views, “likes”, upvotes and comments than any written guide, and it took me much less time to create. There is even potential for monetization, I’m close to 1000 subs on YT. Written guides? There is no point putting ads on there, they will be blocked (also i hate ads and you should block them)
PS: The written guide is here: https://tobyhinloopen.github.io/anno1800-guide/ - It’s even interactive.
This is a nice example of capitalism shitting things up.
Youtube is in many ways the inferior product for this, but it can make money so that’s where people go.
If more people had more money (instead of most of it accumulating in the hands of a few assholes), some sort of “pay what you want” model might work. But with so many people with zero or negative savings, that doesn’t seem viable.
Also, side note, I’d be less likely to block ads if they were contextual rather than targeted. Targeted ads should be illegal. but if you want to put car ads on the need for speed wiki, fine. You don’t need to know who I am for that. That’s how tv, print, radio, billboards, and so on worked for generations.
“Just join my Discord server!”
gameFAQs and similar sites still exist. Wikis and steam guides are also really useful. I’m more of a patient gamer and rarely play big titles but so far I haven’t found a game where I couldn’t find written guides at all.
And the fact that when you want to see where something is located on a map in a game it is impossible to find it ANYWHERE. You have to go to those scummy sites that make you read paragraphs with ads sandwiched in between and a following video ad taking up half the page to finally tell you in the final sentence. When they can literally just show you a point on the map.
The sites that do both, especially with timestamps to the reference video are bae. Same for just about any instruction honestly. I 99% prefer a written thing, but every now and then just seeing how something is done is very helpful.
I haven’t tried it for a walkthrough yet, but try: https://www.summarize.tech
This would be a great opportunity for someone to make a bit that does this for Lenny.
Who the heck is Lenny?
Lives next door to Alice
I was playing donkey kong country tropical freeze on my wii u while i was on vacation and my internet barely works there and i needed help finding a puzzle piece but i managed to load an ign guide and since then if i ever need a guide ive tried to find written guides its much more helpful
Yeah. Video makers are chasing a profit incentive. We can’t hace written guides because of neoliberalism. Or possibly they are out there but search engines have de-prioritized that content.
If we had a profit incentive to just… release the script of that youtube video - as a written guide… we could have what we need.
Transcripts do exist on YouTube to be fair, in the video description you can choose to load the transcript which has timestamps and is automatically generated for all (?) YouTube videos. Though this doesn’t solve the issue as there will be times where you have to watch the footage, it certainly helps in skipping to the right time
IGN guides are usually pretty good for this. It’s text based with pictures. For some games like Halo Infinite, it had videos, but only for the relevant section so you don’t even need to scan the video. It’s direct and to the point.
A youtube transcript could work in a jiffy.
Maybe try some AG1?
Dude, I’ve seen so goddamn many AG1 ads from so many different streamers and podcasters I was finally like “ok, so many differnent types of people are shilling for this crap, maybe I’ll look into trying it”…
…
…
$80 DOLLARS A MONTH!!!
A text version is way more time consuming for the author. Some people do these videos for free with no ads or sponsorship, they do it only to help others, you cannot shit on them only because it’s not your preferred media.
And for walkthrough I honestly think it’s often the best format. It’s easier to understand what you should do when you see it and it’s also easier to find what you’re searching for when you see it. When you have to ctrl+f a bunch of synonyms because you don’t know which words the author of the walkthrough used to describe the scene it’s time consuming. Looking at 1 or 2 seconds of gameplay every half hours is less annoying, at least for me.
A text version is way more time consuming for the author.
And that’s why they’re better quality. And I don’t think any written oldschool FAQ were sponsored at all. They’re an art and I miss them. I also hate the videos for everything, thankfully steam forums or reddit usually have written answers for my gaming questions. Oh and wikis.
80% of web1.0 was amateur passion projects and that was what made it a wonderful and hugely varied experience. The other 20% is most of what survived the transition to web2.0. Was there anything particularly novel or exciting about the matrix scroll background or the Enterprise clip art centered over an eclipse clip art? Of course not. Was the page professionally edited and formated to provide the absolute best user experience? Nope, it was riddled with typos, the margins were inconsistent, and the labels on the frames were references too obscure for the average convention goer. Why was it better? Because the person who made that page absolutely loved the topic, knew everything about it, and was super excited to be able to share their knowledge with everybody who stumbled upon their page.
There used to be literal books sold at bookstores with game walkthroughs. I still have a couple of my old Prima guides! Then gamefaqs made those a bit obsolete because fans were willing to do the same thing for free, just out of love for the game (and maybe a bit of competitive spirit). No photos and you had to wait a while for people to write them, however!
Are you okay with ads? Asking for a friend.
Written instructions with ASCII maps that gives you the information you’re looking for in 10 seconds compared to a 12 minutes video filled with air? Are you insane?!
jeez try adblock
bears repeating – “An adblocker is as essential as an antivirus for your computer’s safety.” (and your mental health as well)
I mean … I wish it wasn’t so, but any time we’ve given advertisers any leeway, they have perniciously refused to behave …
For as long as data caps exist all advertising is theft
Data caps? Are those some sort of hats I’m too European to understand?
Speak for yourself. Here in Germany, we enjoy data caps and bad coverage.
I think I’m doing it wrong, I just can’t get myself to enjoy it.
Consume harder
Mobile data plans often have them and the used to be more common back in the day.
anything in the US sold as “unlimited” generally has a soft-cap that if you exceed it, your speed gets throttled
We have these in the UK too. Many networks have contracts with fixed monthly data allowances
It looks like you have an adblocker installed! Either sign up for our spam emails and give us some of your personal information, or voluntarily disable your ad blocker and expose yourself to the horrendous ad spam we’ve shoved into every single spare pixel of our UI!
“ … expose yourself to the horrendous ad spam, open your system up for malware, viruses, trojans, and phishing galore, run a crypto miner in JavaScript for us, and absolutely destroy your month’s data limits!”
every single spare pixel of our UI
more like every single pixel
Stop using Google. Stop using Facebook and Twitter and TikTok. Stop complaining about the loss of things that still exist because you spend all your time on trash websites. Stop stepping in dog shit and saying everything stinks.
Make a T-shirt with that
What should I use?
Granted, the only thing I use on this list is Google, but I’m still curious. Always looking for quality sources of information.
I really like DuckDuckGo for searches
I found duckduckgo results were so bad that it made searching for stuff way worse. I always ended up going back to Google (I know I can use the !'s or whatever) or bing.
The best search engine that Ive used that gave me that “Google from 1999” vibe is kagi.
It’s paid search which immediately ruffles people’s feathers because we’ve gotten so used to trading our data and privacy for free stuff on the web. But I think it’s reasonably priced and it gives me incredible search results. I have never had to go back to Google to find something.
Google is an ad company. Kagi is a search company.
I don’t understand this, i’ve had perfectly fine search results with all search engines i’ve used… I’m sorry but i have to wonder if people are just bad at using search engines.
I had that same thought myself. I was getting such bad results on ddg I assumed I was doing something wrong. I thought, maybe two decades of using Google trained me to search Google vs search the web.
I gave it so many chances and even tried to change my search terms to adapt to ddg and possibly get better results. Nothing seemed to work.
When I tried kagi, I immediately was getting usable results. That said, i also find myself perusing the results and trying stuff further down the results than I ever would with Google.
I’d say about 50% of ddg searches end up with me adding !g.
Use StartPage. It’s anonymized like ddg but it uses google on the backend
Their pricing is rather premium. They ought to make it a lot cheaper if they want wide adoption since the competition is “free”.
DuckDuckGo and Firefox
StartPage. It uses Google, but it’s anonymized, so the results aren’t manipulated by the algorithm trying to personalize for you
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Absolutely. Sometimes it’s hard to remember that there was a time, not too long ago, when the Internet was actually fun to use and you didn’t have to search too hard for useful information.
Ironically, back then people my age were warning kids “don’t trust anyone or anything you read on the Internet, don’t give out any personal information to anyone”.
Fast forward 25 years and my peers are quoting 8chan shitposts as fact and “investing” their life savings on crypto websites they heard about on Discord.
It’s even worse than that, the very person telling ME not to trust anything on the internet (my mother) now believes everything she reads on Facebook without a second thought.
And NFTs. I know people IRL currently shocked Pikachu-ing that they aren’t rolling in cash off of gifs
Man, I think it was best when you DID have to search for information.
This morning I saw a link to Boingboing and it made me miss going to websites. They obviously still exist but most of them are just rehashing reddit posts or similar. Like if you see it on one page you can be sure it’s on a dozen more…most posts are from social media now and it makes me not bother browsing.
It was so cool to stumble upon (RIP stumbledupon…) interesting links on forums. The indie music blogs I read are long gone, replaced with social media pages.
As much as I like lemmy, it’s just more of the same we’ve had for years. Having everything in one place is cool and all …but… I miss having bookmarks and different sites to go to.
I’m open to suggestions for general interest/weird blogs that aren’t full of “watch this video from [platform]” posts and get updated regularly if anyone has any.
It’s pretty niche, but if you’re interested in ancient and medieval history (with a focus on military history), and breaking down historical inaccuracies in media, A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry is a pretty cool blog that gets updated fairly regularly and is run by a history professor.
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Searching before Google was crap, sorry
And it’s come full circle, now searching on Google is crap.
Pshh not if you were a based dogpile enjoyer
Back in the days when you’d collect new search engines like pokemon and battle them against each other for the BEST RESULTS.
Yep, it was horrible. I vividly remember Yahoo! directories…ugh. But there was a golden age when there were plenty of useful websites and forums, AND when Google actually gave you the results you wanted.
When was it truly easy? It wasn’t back in the early days.
He didn’t say it was easy. He said it was fun.
Browsing was fun in the late 90s. Clicking through search engine directories you probably wouldn’t find what you were looking for, but you’d still spend hours reading about lucid dreaming, brain wave synchronisation, how to make coke from bananas and all kinds of random hobbies and things that you wouldn’t even have thought of searching for in the first place.
Internet today is just buy this, buy that and click bait. While you might eventually find what you’re searching for for free it’s just no fun to browse.
He said “you didn’t have to search too hard.” The opposite of “hard” is "easy "
Small web. Indie web. Fuck web3, let’s do web0.
Web0 let’s fucking gooooo
Time to move to Gemini!
Web0.3, everything is static HTML served via IPFS, this time you don’t even find things by domain names you just get linked raw content hashes.
For all the “90s kids” trying to bring back 90s fashion they got it all wrong. We need to bring back 90s internet.
One thing I have noticed though is how many websites have said to heck with responsive multi column layouts in favor of just a single column layouts that looks good (and the same) on both desktop and mobile. So basically the 90s layout with better CSS.
But I love my big baggy jeans 😭
I want 1990s Internet back. Except for background MIDIs, which should be banned elsewhere but which should be made legally mandatory on music-related pages. Forcing record companies to share literal performance instructions for their music would annoy them gloriously.
that’s why I like lemmy, it went backwards in many aspects, in a good way
Im with you here. Content on lemmy isnt great… it mostly all falls under the same 5 or so themese.
But the comment section is wonderful everywhere ive been.
Lets not take this time for granted.
I also want quotes back instead of screenshots of text.
The rise of Facebook and fall of flash were two of the worst things for the internet.
We gained the normies and lost the interactivity
The rise of Facebook
totally correct preach on
and fall of flash
…holdup there buckaroo.
Flash was the shit
Flash was
theshitConsidering that flash brought us newgrounda and inspired/generated an entire generation of animators and web designers, i’d comfortably say you are objectively wrong about that.
I think there’s an argument that flash did well for the internet back in the day, but alao there’s an argument that it doesn’t need to belong in the current age of the internet.
Well, yeah. Flash filled a hole of missing technology in the HTML standard. How it did the job is arguable. Now we have stuff like HTML 5 and CSS, which is better than flash in every aspect.
Flash was a solution for a real problem that web creators were having at the time. Unfortunately, it was a stopgap solution that ended up being incredibly popular and nobody was concerned about building a smooth transition to a standardised way of doing things.
In the 1990s the web browsers didn’t really have any real interactive multimedia capabilities. Browser makers said “eh, that’s the plugin makers’ responsibility”, and so someone made a plugin all right, and the creators said “eh, that’s good enough”.
In hindsight, of course, it’s easy to say that browser makers and the web standards folks should have just gone for the sort of stuff we now have in HTML5. But that’s because we nowadays see the standards as a good thing. This was taking place in the late 1990s, and the browser makers, Macromedia and the creators were not really all that concerned about standardisation and interoperability. Which, of course, ended up hurting everyone when it all collapsed on its own.
Things might have been different if Adobe had actually turned Flash into a genuine open format (like PDF, which is still very much a living and useful format despite the fact that you shouldn’t touch Adobe’s own PDF software with a ten foot pole) and it had become part of the landscape of web standards, but that’s for the alternate history buffs to debate.
Flash was a security nightmare
Facebook was actually fun to use, at least for me, before it was a household name.
It was a quirky gimmick in the beginning, but I never trusted it, even as I set up my account my first post was me mentioning that I had no idea why I did this. And a friend of mine said It felt weird to them too that they just started theirs because they felt they had to
That sounds like you joined after the fun period, lol.
iPhone was the worst thing for the Internet. For society too.
I’ve been saying we need web 1.5. The web before 2.0, but with the tooling and technology we have created and learned to use since.
I mean, we could have a community for building a geocities-style network of dumb-sites and personal pages linked to other people’s pages or shared interest pages dedicated to non-chatgpt content. With its own
death(autocorrect, wtf?) local search engine to bypass Google’s SEO (like a sub-internet). Make the web alive again. We have had some Lemmy posts about favourite websites that made me think of that.I mean, we could have a community for building a geocities-style network of dumb-sites and personal pages linked to other people’s pages or shared interest pages dedicated to non-chatgpt content.
There is Neocities, which seems like it could fulfill that pretty well.
https://codeberg.org/kitten/app
Is working on something similar.
I’ll make a Angel Fire page while I’m at it
Ok, I’d heard about it before, but I’ll try it out and see if it really is what it looks like. I can’t criticise it if I haven’t really tested it myself.
Also: can neocities be shut down like geocities was?
Neocities hosts all the websites for free from donations, but if that ever wasn’t enough and they had to shut down, it would require that everyone on there migrate their website to a new host (or self-host).
Alright, Wikipedia model (but for web art and enthusiast communities). Looks good, let’s gooo :)
This sounds like it could be fediverse’d. A platform that uses activitypub but gives users more solid html/wysiwyg tools and a ‘fills the page’ UX for each ‘post’ which is basically just a website with a tiny frame that contains platform-centric tooling. And posts are intended to be long-lived/edited rather than a ton of back and forth.
Make webrings great again.
FWIW this could be quite easily done with IPFS, everyone just runs the software and like that you can trivially seed and download websites that link to each other by hash instead of domain name.
Sounds good, I only need to run ipfs to host myself. Do you also need to run the software to see it on the clearnet? Probably there are gateways for this.
there are public gateways here and there, primarily just ipfs.org, though of course beware that they can totally just ignore what you wanted to view and instead send you malware.
Easiest is to just download the ipfs desktop software, which iirc also works as a local gateway and since it’s a GUI makes everything as easy as possible to understand.
I shudder out just how poor performing the modern web is. I mean, there is a place for modern websites that use a lot of bandwidth, but it’s extremely silly how much of the web is just text that loads 10mb worth of bullshit.
I would really enjoy that fediverse wordpress or tumblr integration, or something along those lines.
I know I’m going to get downvoted for this, but “modern UI” doesn’t have to suck. It’s just that a lot of companies don’t give a shit. Modern design is about accessibility— about the ease of finding and using things (including general readability). Google and many others have violated these principles with their “modern” UIs. People shouldn’t say “modern bad”, they should say “Google bad”.
Serebii.net on the other hand is “old web”— and man is it an unusable, unreadable, un-navigatable, overwhelming piece of crap. And I will take that opinion to the grave. Both Google and Serebii.net can be awful, fam.
tbh modern web should be good. We can make the pages look and act just about any way we want. Old web with blink tags, tiny text, insane margins, etc is not what needs to be brought back. The “old” web was only good because it didn’t load 10mb trackers and whatever javascript framework is popular right now.
It’s pretty insane to me that in some ways, the old web was more performant on a 56k modem in 1996 than it is today on a gig connection.
Okay, but… it’s just a page. Try building a store or something like Lemmy with just static HTML and only enough CSS to make larger or bolder fonts and see where that gets you.
Google is bad, but nuance in your argument is still important.
Absolutely great point. Great web design and accessibility can exist in a simple HTML page just as well as the highly engineered javascript infitely scrolling wonder page.
You nailed it. This whole post screams, “I use Google, never heard of adblockers, and let my OS/phone determine my app choices.” I’m constantly amazed how many people rely on Google yet lack the resources to search for information.
Yeah that’s why I use Bulbapedia for all of my catching them all needs.
Same, Bulbapedia is great.
wikipedia is still pretty good for reading w/hyperlinks
Last bastion
Yeah, I like the old Wikipedia design more, but even the newer one is perfectly readable and better than most other websites.
The old internet isn’t gone, you can find it if you bother looking for it.
I found this the other say on a post here somewhere. I clicked on surprise me, and I tell you I was suprised!
It took me to a radio show archive with stations from around the world with 60s - 00s shows and music, and news dating back to the 1920s.
It was awesome, and I wouldn’t shut up about it…
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That sounds very cool! Do you remember the link?
That is amazing. Thank you!
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Wow, what a treat that was!
I’m going to be the devils advocate guy because I can.
I had to renew the registration on my car last month and the only thing I couldnt do from my chair was take the car to a mechanic for the annual inspection. Other than that in 15 minutes after my kid went to bed I got quotes for and shopped around for the best prices on my car insurance, compulsory insurance who uploaded the certificate to the govt, the mechanic had already uploaded a certificate of roadworthy to the govt for me too. What was a full day of running around, waiting at the DMV and phonecalls 25 years ago took me literally 15 minutes when it was convenient for me while eating snacks in my boxers.
Yeah the big companies are doing a lot of predatory shit atm, but a lot of people either dont remember or arent old enough to appreciate just how inefficient the early internet was at getting shit done.
I would say that is not a limitation of the early web technologies. It was the fact that people had not widely adopted the technologies yet. Many of the interoperability features that you were talking about could be easily implemented using older tech. Some modern frameworks may make it easier to have that sort of interoperability, but it was really I think a matter of it taking time for mass adoption
Oh no doubt, but it doesnt matter wether these companies didnt or couldnt the end result for me as a consumer was the same. It just wasnt there.
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Could you explain more? I like this idea
