We no longer say RTFM, read the fucking manual, anymore. I wonder why that is. Is it because more and more projects are moving all documentation to discord?
Some projects still have manuals… But there seems to be less expectation people will familiarize themselves with manuals anymore. I wonder why
Rtfm is so unhelpful even when it is correct.
I guess it’s a teach a person to fish mantra, but still.
Rtfm is so unhelpful even when it is correct.
A lot of the culture around computing used to be just people being huge cunts to beginners so they can feel superior
I never got that impression. I thought people were trying to teach, a little harshly, self-reliance so that people can participate in the community while holding their own and not drowning community volunteers with already answered questions. That are in the FAQ / documentation.
Kind of the opposite of what you get with discord documentation, where people come to the support room and ask the same questions over and over and over and over again, but instead of pointing people at a documentation, they’re really sophisticated projects put a bot which kind of does the same thing
Yeah that’s usually been the stated reason for as long as I can remember, but that absolutely wasn’t what it was in practice especially earlier on (say the 90’s). Getting help for eg a Linux problem wasn’t exactly a pleasant experience for a long time exactly because people thought they’d be “helpful” by acting like massive assholes
I never got that impression.
Getting told RTFM then getting banned will get you that impression pretty quickly.
Now if they tell you RTFM then link you to the exact page you need that’s fine, but sometimes they will literally just say RTFM even if you said you looked at the manual and didn’t find anything on what you need.
“RTFM” was a terrible way to talk to people. It drove people away from projects. That was one of the first things any of us realized about the way open source maintainers and their projects’ communities “supported” people: by blasting them until they retreated. It was something people said to new users for little while, thinking they were being funny, until it became The stereotypically rude thing you can say to a confused user, for the rest of time.
However, there has literally never been a time when technology was supported primarily by documentation. Not during the computer age, not before the computer age. People teach other people how to use things, it’s how it’s always worked and how we’ve always learned best. It’s why schools exist.
I am by no means anti-documentation. I enjoy writing documentation; here’s a screenshot of my homelab’s documentation folder if you need proof.
But it’s important to recognize that I write these things because I might need to look something up quickly as a reference, not because I expect anyone else to learn how to maintain (let alone build) my system by following the docs.
Reference manuals and tutorials are important to hook people into a project and support their use of it. Books are written to cover popular projects for people who, unlike myself, actually do prefer reading it all and have the patience for that. I just don’t want us all to pretend that there’s some moral failing if we haven’t read the entire textbook before we ask a single question.
Very organized. And I do appreciate the architecture documentation you have. How are you enjoying immich?
And good riddance. It was a dick-ish response to people who were already having a bad day. That said, you really can solve a lot of your problems by reading the manual (if one exists). And it certainly beats the hell out of the shit-show which is Discord “support”. At least a manual is usually searchable and has some answers. And a good forum is usually also searchable and possibly indexed by major search engines (e.g. Google).
This.
The trend to moving to discord is crappy for numerous reasons - the biggest one because i refuse to supply a phone number as the price of admission. Second, it’s hard to find and search through old content on the platform. It’s just a crap, proprietary rehash of IRC.
I’m sure it’s great to be on the white-hot front of development for new projects, but to name a few… Podman, PipeWire, Etcd… full documentation is patchy at best, a lot of common use cases aren’t answered unless you find something on the Arch Wiki (for instance) - They’re all great projects, but goddamn is it hard to find simple answers, and the more stuff moves off of github issues or forums and onto shit like discord, the less easy it is to even get a grip on the problem.
I guess we need Watch The Fucking Video these days don’t we… :)
People don’t read articles anymore, most people at least. They want some YouTube influencer explaining it quickly.
