The perils of YouTube
by hazel from LinuxQuestions.org on (#4TGSA)
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 A lot of them came from the Linux Documentation Project, now sadly out of date.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.
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 A lot of them came from the Linux Documentation Project, now sadly out of date.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.