I absolutely love having access to so much information, but it really seems like most people just don't even care. The ability to access experts of all kinds for advice or just to fill curiosity has been a boon to me, and I like sharing what I know with people who are interested. But when I look around at the people I know -- some of them are incredibly smart (much smarter than I am) but instead of making a reddit post or going on a topical forum, they just watch a youtube video or try to attempt whatever it is poorly themselves or just don't care to know more about things.
When I was a kid I wanted to learn electronics, so I got some books and parts at radio shack but certain things weren't obvious for someone who knows nothing, so I didn't know where the ground was supposed to go in a schematic diagram for instance. And the adults around me didn't know -- so I just had to figure it out. Now a kid can go on /r/askengineers and get an answer from an engineer in less than 20 minutes.
But overall -- maybe the 'information age' has backfired for society in general. Those kids will figure out what they want to know regardless of how easy it is, and so many people just look for information that confirms what they already think then weaponize 'facts' so they don't have to budge.
I'm really not sure -- it is so useful to me, but every time a nice place gets an influx of people it turns to shit, so I tend to lean misanthropic in the long term.
I'm one of the people who exhibit the behavior you've observed (watching a youtube video rather than creating a forum post, not the "try to attempt whatever it is poorly themselves or just don't care to know more about things" part), so I thought I'd explain how it got to this. First there is the "why not create a reddit post":
A problem I have with reddit are the users looking through my post history trying to extract more information than I present at face value in my post. Sometimes, it works out in my favor because I have an XY problem and get redirected to the correct resource. But most of the time, its just used to determine how they'll engage with me (seriously or not, mockingly or not, high effort or low effort). This is a specific problem that doesn't exist on HN, as a rule.
I'd rather not delete my post after I got my answer, in order to help other people coming in from google searches, so instead I create an account for each subreddit that I post in. If each subreddit should be considered its own forum, it would make sense to have a different account for each forum. It was even once encouraged by reddit for users to have multiple accounts.
The issue now is that most subs "shadow queue" (not shadow ban) posts from new accounts in an attempt to curtail spam. You'll still see your post if you're logged in, but not if you're logged out. And there is no engagement on it until a mod releases it.
Similarly, I am permanently behind a VPN, so creating accounts cause them to be actually shadow banned by default by reddit admins. I must message them to prove that I'm actually a human, after realizing that the mods also don't see my post in their queue. Once, after I got my account appealed, it got shadow banned again, for reasons unknown to me. I was particularly bitter since I had spent 4 hours to make a single high effort comment on that account.
Even if I've managed to overcome all this friction and gotten my post actually appears in the "new" queue, there are myriads of reasons why the post won't yield fruitful results. It could be the timing of the day or the week. Perhaps my title wasn't catchy enough. Maybe my wall of text was too big because I tried to fit enough context and people's eyes just glazed off. Maybe the post got overshadowed by more successful posts upvote wise and never made it to the hot page of the sub. Perhaps my questions is way outside of the skill range of that average sub's users (I've seen this happen often on my posts and others', in various outcomes). Or perhaps the regulars there have seen the same introductory level questions twice a day over the years and simply refuse to engage with them anymore.
It has gotten to the point that if I can't find someone else with the same question in various wordings as I have on reddit through a site:reddit.com search, I simply assume that no one has the answer.
As for why youtube, it's not where I usually start, but ends up being the best solution after all other potential solutions have been exhausted. I'll give some examples:
For music (I know its not work related), a lot of amateur/indie music is so old, it can't be bought anymore, and can't be liscenced to spotify. Most real piracy solutions are defunct (lack of seeders, dead mediafire/megaupload links). The only way to find the song is some random person's channel that was made 12 years ago and hasn't been updated since.
For many "open core" saas products, the problem starts at the documentation. Often, I just need a "getting started"/bird-eye-view of the system and how it would potentially connect with the rest of my systems. The first thing you are told to do in the docs is to sign up for their managed offering. Once I find my way to the self-hosted section of the docs, I am told to download a docker image. I don't want to download a docker image or sift through a 500 line docker file to know which configs are relevant or will do to my system. Then, they'll have a "you can also compile it from source" link that points to their github project page. If things they had a binary upload, excellent. But now I need to figure out what to stick in my config file, environment headers to set, arguments to pass before I have a "sane" startup.
The docs are also an excellent way to get lost in the weeds to "try to attempt whatever it is poorly themselves". You can easily get misled, as terms are recycled between different products with different meanings in each one. They may provide api docs, but no working examples. They may provide working examples, but without any notes, comments or implications on what each line or command does (To get started, run this command in your console: sudo curl ... | sh). You may have reached a certain point before getting it to work, but now you're stuck and you're not sure where the issue is. Sometimes, the docs are sparse, and when you're trying to learn a concept from a page, they'll have links all over the page linking to other concepts. You don't know if these are advanced concepts you can ignore for now or fundamental concepts prerequired for learning what you're trying to learn.
The community around these products are also less susceptible to helping you out. The product devs are focused solely on building the product, or support only the paid managed saas users. The other users are often "drive-by" github issue makers, mostly employees working with said product. They will post massive dump logs and grafana screenshots with machines provisioned with TBs of memory and clusters with hundreds of nodes. They're here to get their problem solved so they can move on with their workday, not subscribe to the project page to receive notifications of others who might have the same issues as them.
Youtube has "solved" these "open core" issues for me more than 3 times now. When you find a good 30min/1hr/playlist, its like finding a gold mine. They almost always start with a succinct birds-eye-view so you can early return/break once you realize this isn't what you need, rather than the product's landing page saying how its the silver bullet to all your problems. The web of "concept" has been linearized in a dependency chain for you. You can see the person doing things and their effects in real time without having to commit the effort. You can see what auxiliary (debugging) tools are used and their install process. You can see which commands are more relevant than other, instead of wading through `prog --help` or `man prog`. They comment on what they're doing so you know the scope and side effects of each command. You can watch it at 2x speed, skip, rewind. All of this allows you to cement a better fundamental understanding of the product you're working with, rather just calling up support from the paid managed service and slapping the it on your CV.
Then there are all the other fast evolving spheres of tech. Being stuck in the usual enterprise CRUD, it can be hard to dip your toes in adjacent domains. Whether it be finetuning an llm for your purposes, fpgas, linux, gpu shader programming, networking, photoshop/illustrator, video editing, game dev, etc... These domains are all evolving rapidly, and if you want to start and finish something with only a weekend of free time, a youtube tutorial is often good enough.
When I was a kid I wanted to learn electronics, so I got some books and parts at radio shack but certain things weren't obvious for someone who knows nothing, so I didn't know where the ground was supposed to go in a schematic diagram for instance. And the adults around me didn't know -- so I just had to figure it out. Now a kid can go on /r/askengineers and get an answer from an engineer in less than 20 minutes.
But overall -- maybe the 'information age' has backfired for society in general. Those kids will figure out what they want to know regardless of how easy it is, and so many people just look for information that confirms what they already think then weaponize 'facts' so they don't have to budge.
I'm really not sure -- it is so useful to me, but every time a nice place gets an influx of people it turns to shit, so I tend to lean misanthropic in the long term.
A problem I have with reddit are the users looking through my post history trying to extract more information than I present at face value in my post. Sometimes, it works out in my favor because I have an XY problem and get redirected to the correct resource. But most of the time, its just used to determine how they'll engage with me (seriously or not, mockingly or not, high effort or low effort). This is a specific problem that doesn't exist on HN, as a rule.
I'd rather not delete my post after I got my answer, in order to help other people coming in from google searches, so instead I create an account for each subreddit that I post in. If each subreddit should be considered its own forum, it would make sense to have a different account for each forum. It was even once encouraged by reddit for users to have multiple accounts.
The issue now is that most subs "shadow queue" (not shadow ban) posts from new accounts in an attempt to curtail spam. You'll still see your post if you're logged in, but not if you're logged out. And there is no engagement on it until a mod releases it.
Similarly, I am permanently behind a VPN, so creating accounts cause them to be actually shadow banned by default by reddit admins. I must message them to prove that I'm actually a human, after realizing that the mods also don't see my post in their queue. Once, after I got my account appealed, it got shadow banned again, for reasons unknown to me. I was particularly bitter since I had spent 4 hours to make a single high effort comment on that account.
Even if I've managed to overcome all this friction and gotten my post actually appears in the "new" queue, there are myriads of reasons why the post won't yield fruitful results. It could be the timing of the day or the week. Perhaps my title wasn't catchy enough. Maybe my wall of text was too big because I tried to fit enough context and people's eyes just glazed off. Maybe the post got overshadowed by more successful posts upvote wise and never made it to the hot page of the sub. Perhaps my questions is way outside of the skill range of that average sub's users (I've seen this happen often on my posts and others', in various outcomes). Or perhaps the regulars there have seen the same introductory level questions twice a day over the years and simply refuse to engage with them anymore.
It has gotten to the point that if I can't find someone else with the same question in various wordings as I have on reddit through a site:reddit.com search, I simply assume that no one has the answer.
As for why youtube, it's not where I usually start, but ends up being the best solution after all other potential solutions have been exhausted. I'll give some examples:
For music (I know its not work related), a lot of amateur/indie music is so old, it can't be bought anymore, and can't be liscenced to spotify. Most real piracy solutions are defunct (lack of seeders, dead mediafire/megaupload links). The only way to find the song is some random person's channel that was made 12 years ago and hasn't been updated since.
For many "open core" saas products, the problem starts at the documentation. Often, I just need a "getting started"/bird-eye-view of the system and how it would potentially connect with the rest of my systems. The first thing you are told to do in the docs is to sign up for their managed offering. Once I find my way to the self-hosted section of the docs, I am told to download a docker image. I don't want to download a docker image or sift through a 500 line docker file to know which configs are relevant or will do to my system. Then, they'll have a "you can also compile it from source" link that points to their github project page. If things they had a binary upload, excellent. But now I need to figure out what to stick in my config file, environment headers to set, arguments to pass before I have a "sane" startup.
The docs are also an excellent way to get lost in the weeds to "try to attempt whatever it is poorly themselves". You can easily get misled, as terms are recycled between different products with different meanings in each one. They may provide api docs, but no working examples. They may provide working examples, but without any notes, comments or implications on what each line or command does (To get started, run this command in your console: sudo curl ... | sh). You may have reached a certain point before getting it to work, but now you're stuck and you're not sure where the issue is. Sometimes, the docs are sparse, and when you're trying to learn a concept from a page, they'll have links all over the page linking to other concepts. You don't know if these are advanced concepts you can ignore for now or fundamental concepts prerequired for learning what you're trying to learn.
The community around these products are also less susceptible to helping you out. The product devs are focused solely on building the product, or support only the paid managed saas users. The other users are often "drive-by" github issue makers, mostly employees working with said product. They will post massive dump logs and grafana screenshots with machines provisioned with TBs of memory and clusters with hundreds of nodes. They're here to get their problem solved so they can move on with their workday, not subscribe to the project page to receive notifications of others who might have the same issues as them.
Youtube has "solved" these "open core" issues for me more than 3 times now. When you find a good 30min/1hr/playlist, its like finding a gold mine. They almost always start with a succinct birds-eye-view so you can early return/break once you realize this isn't what you need, rather than the product's landing page saying how its the silver bullet to all your problems. The web of "concept" has been linearized in a dependency chain for you. You can see the person doing things and their effects in real time without having to commit the effort. You can see what auxiliary (debugging) tools are used and their install process. You can see which commands are more relevant than other, instead of wading through `prog --help` or `man prog`. They comment on what they're doing so you know the scope and side effects of each command. You can watch it at 2x speed, skip, rewind. All of this allows you to cement a better fundamental understanding of the product you're working with, rather just calling up support from the paid managed service and slapping the it on your CV.
Then there are all the other fast evolving spheres of tech. Being stuck in the usual enterprise CRUD, it can be hard to dip your toes in adjacent domains. Whether it be finetuning an llm for your purposes, fpgas, linux, gpu shader programming, networking, photoshop/illustrator, video editing, game dev, etc... These domains are all evolving rapidly, and if you want to start and finish something with only a weekend of free time, a youtube tutorial is often good enough.