ida deerz makes furry music. draws things. codes funny websites. runs a netlabel called @CUTECERVID. puts deer boobs on label 228s. owns a modular synth. is 25. or 26, depending on when you read this. can't really edit it after the site has shut down, can i? does activism. sucks girlcock. injects grey market estradiol once a week. streams videogames. mods videogames. programs videogames. is mentally ill. speaks dutch. has several headmates. composes amigamods.

→ info in that post over there →



hootOS
@hootOS

Neither do i. my neat lil suggestion: cohost

i already spoke with @kaceydotme about cohost, got her properly interested in it and now she's considering using it for her Legacy Online community, which revolves around connecting retro gamers with mods that can re-enable multiplayer features in old games and allow for coordinated netplay.

i personally think this is a sick idea for a few reasons:

  1. i've seen many a post on cohost lamenting the loss of forums and self-hosted blogs for social media and instant messaging apps as well as SEO hell, which all create issues when searching for information on software and hardware we care about
  2. cohost allows for some decent organization of information to find what you're looking for. short of using pinned tags, a page can use a pinned post to list off tags that can isolate particular information people may be looking for
  3. you don't need to be a user to see the content.

i could potentially see Cohost as the revival of hardware/software information collections available easily online. im not sure if that's the kind of thing assc wants out of cohost, but i think it could be a pretty sick development on cohost if others haven't already considered/executed on this


idadeerz
@idadeerz

i've certainly thought about this before myself. there's plenty of software which i am very skilled at, but for which the learning process either boils down to "just download other people's projects and study them, or watch a shitty unedited 480p YouTube tutorial from 2012 with incorrect information" (OpenMPT) or "we don't really have a wiki, just ask fellow modders in our Discord, or watch a shitty unedited Twitch-streamer-bro-esque 30 minute long YouTube tutorial that only covers the basics, and if you want anything more than that the modders are responsible for answering the same question 200 million times in our Discord" (Celeste modding)

no, seriously, there needs to be a central source of information people can just point to. i want to mod Celeste, i would absolutely never be made responsible to answer everyone's questions in a Discord server just because i mod the game and i have knowledge on it that other people lack. and the Discord server is horrible; you either have to search keywords to the question you have in the hopes that someone else has answered it (good luck doing this when your keyword is also the name of a level/mechanic in the game, and so you get 2000 irrelevant results from the speedrunning channels lumped in with your search results). or you have to ask the same basic question that has been asked by 300 other people, which is horribly inefficient because every time they need to answer it again; not to mention you're asking it to people who'd rather be doing something else than answering basic questions, so it can be scary for newcomers to inquire about things they don't know, plus sometimes there could be nobody around to answer a question so it can take ages for it to get answered.

there's a lot of efforts within the community to improve all of this. the Everest wiki already has plenty of written resources on modding the game. it looks like there's a new video tutorial series on Lönn, the primary level editor for the game (which, by the way, renders all the most popular YouTube tutorials outdated, since they were made for an editor called Ahorn which i believe has been deprecated by now in favor of Lönn. great!). it's good that these tutorials exist, but overall you're still supposed to just join the Discord and ask people there to teach you. for a lot of things, there's just no information anyone can point to elsewhere.

as an end user who wants to learn more about modding, you're expected to not only give your personal info to Discord, a third party software/corporation, just for the chance to find the information you need; you're also expected to be a master at navigating Discord and its search functionality, you're expected to talk to people and engage in conversations to receive the information you want, and in a lot of cases? you won't get the specific information you need, and you need to be able to piece it together from other bits of information that are vaguely related. this makes the process to learn about Celeste modding horribly sluggish and inaccessible for a lot of users. not to mention the fact that most of this information is not stored centrally; if the plug gets pulled on Discord, where will all of this information live? in the heads of the modders? there are hardly any actual saved records of so much of this information, and unless you can contact the modders to get them to explain things and have it recorded somewhere, this information will be lost to time. Discord is building a huge Library of Alexandria, and it is inevitable that it will burn down at some point once the software becomes too bloated with bullshit that appeases shareholders and another venture capitalist chat client will come to take its place; and even if it doesn't die out slowly like that, you're still at the whims of the people running Discord. there's nothing stopping them from gating off content behind a paywall if they feel like it.

all the other available options have their own issues. YouTube seems like a good option to me, mainly because i get the impression that YouTube is too big to fail. and there's hardly any restrictions placed on free users, plus anyone can access it without an account. what does worry me is its copyright system and how it gets used to harass small creators. but what's also an issue is that YouTube videos aren't extremely accessible; sometimes creators might not have the ability to add closed captioning, and you're also stuck with content that moves at the pace of the video's creator. this is especially grating when the only available tutorials are unedited, with ums and uhs everywhere, and they bloat the tutorials with several minutes worth of intros, shouting out their Patreon subscribers, asking you to leave a like and a comment and a sub, et cetera. but also when it starts with an intro all like "so, you want to do $thing. how do you do $thing? you might want to do $thing in $situation. blablabla." no, just shut up! show me how to do the thing! i already know why i want to do this! now i have to skip ahead- oh, looks like i've skipped ahead too far. why can't i just find a single video that just tells me directly how to do what i want to do? YouTube isn't inherently accessible to everyone; it requires addons like SponsorBlock and uBlock Origin, manual adjustments like skipping around and changing the video speed, and a lot of luck with finding tutorial creators that don't bloat their tutorials and add captions so it's available to people who don't speak English. otherwise, YouTube just won't provide you with an optimal learning experience.

YouTube is also not very accessible for people who want to teach stuff; writing an article only requires you to know how to type and format text, and how to navigate the web. but to create a video you need to know how to write a script, you need audio recording equipment to record the script, you need video recording hardware/software in order to get footage for your tutorial video, you need video editing software and the skills to use it to edit and render an end product using all the footage you made, you need hardware that can store the video files you created, you need to know how to navigate YouTube and how to upload videos and tag them properly and add closed captions to them. additionally, you need to know how to mix/master audio to make your voice sound good, you need to know where to find licensable music to use in your videos or you need the skills to be able to compose it yourself, you need to be able to operate video downloading software in case you require footage that you can't create yourself or in case you need something like a news broadcast or some other type of content that is relevant to make the points in your video, you need a powerful computer capable of rendering out video material at a high enough quality, et cetera. you can outsource a lot of these things to scriptwriters, audio engineers, and video editors; but then you'd have to manage a project with several different people, who you'd ideally have to compensate for their work, too. basically, creating video tutorials is not something anyone can just do.

Fandom exists. i don't even need to say anything more than that, we all know how godawful Fandom is as a platform. Celeste has a wiki on Fandom, but it's just bad. the Objects page uses seemingly random and arbitrary user-created names for all the object instances in the game, which don't even correspond to their in-game names, rendering this information utterly useless if you ever want to apply it to modding the game. Spikes have an entry, but so do "Corrupted Spikes" and "Crystal Spikes" despite these just being reskins of Spikes and not different objects. "Sludge" has a separate entry too, despite also being a reskin, but this is the wrong name since in the community it is referred to as "Dust". Clutter Switches are referred to as "Platform-Rearranging Buttons". Touch Switches are called "Shields" because they vaguely look like a shield. Watchtowers are called "Skull Binoculars" because they vaguely look like a skull. Zip Movers are called "Traffic Light Blocks"; except for their reskinned variant in Farewell, which are inexplicably called "Starbelts".

i'm guessing there's also the option of setting up your own wiki; there's also this wiki already available. i'm not a wiki expert, but i do get the impression that this requires so much setup that it's not viable for end users to look into, outside of finding already existing wikis and contributing to them; but that also requires you to learn the ins and outs of how a wiki system works and how to moderate/manage it. not everyone is going to want to do all of that.

i've thought about cohost as a platform for posting educational/tutorial content before. the staff's motivations for running cohost do seem aligned with a vision of sharing content freely and making the internet a much more accessible place. i don't really have anything to add to the original post; anyone can access cohost, information is easily organized and filtered, the entry barrier is much lower than on any of these other platforms. i do have faith that cohost won't get filled up with bloat over time. what i am much more worried about is its long-term viability as a platform. cohost is a very niche platform, it doesn't have the kind of backing that venture capitalist-funded platforms like Discord and YouTube have. i do worry sometimes that cohost could much more easily go down than any of these other platforms. for informational text posts, this may not be a huge issue, as they can be ported over to locally stored documents if anyone desires to archive them. but it does make me wonder what the exit strategy for cohost is; if cohost goes down, what happens to all the posts on it? will tools be provided so that users can save and archive them? are all the posts easily transferable to a new, hypothetical platform that succeeds cohost? besides my ADHD, this is the only real unresolved issue keeping me from fully dedicating myself to utilizing cohost as an educational platform. i don't want to put that much effort into a platform i don't 100% know the longevity of.

that being said, i have already written a lot of material i'd consider to be educational over in #ida deerz writes about nerd shit. none of the things in there were written explicitly with the goal of teaching skills to people, but i do hope that with every long-form post i write, there's at least something that people learn from them.

funnily enough, this post absolutely qualifies for that tag, and i hope it serves to educate people about the means of creating and sharing educational content on the internet like this, and how utterly stagnant some online spaces for facilitating this type of stuff have become over the years.


You must log in to comment.