I would love to RTFM if vendors would provide anything resembling them. Grrrrrr.

Like, I work with a lot of FOSS projects in my hobby-time. The absolute bulk of them have extensive documentation (online rather than printed, but it at least exists). At work, when my org pays a vendor big $$$$ for a solution, we’re lucky to get a Word doc with a few unhelpful screenshots because they expect us to keep them on retainer for any support/technical issues.

Nerd rage over lol.

You’d be lucky to find TFM these days.

It’s all IKEA sketches at best by now and if shit doesn’t work you then can get a new one.

Best alternative is to Search The Fucking YouTube.

It’s horrible, I know, but it’s a pretty large database with some good users in between.

I recently had an issue with my car that the official brand mechanic couldn’t fix or even be bothered to acknowledge. I searched all the forums (and read the manual), but I finally found the solution on YouTube. Thanks to 3rd party software I was able to download it for future reference, because who knows when it’ll be taken down…

Forums: “Having an issue? Just read the manual!”

Manual:

If you have any issues, please contact a user on our forum.

The drive to forums makes most people just “Google it” for a step by step solution.

Also, most digital projects, and definitely most manufactured products, no longer provide any kind of user servicability. E.g, Factory service manuals are impossible to find for any automobile later than like 2006, they are all now obfuscated behind dealership database tools and subscriptions such that the information is never made publically available. And aftermarket manuals are flaky and incomplete at best, downright misleading and dangerous at worst. This basically applies to almost every consumer electronic, appliance, and frankly almost all digital software now too- real, detailed technical manuals just… aren’t there. Because whoever is producing them makes more pure profit on selling service than the product.

Can’t tell anyone to RTFM when there is no manual to read because the profit seeking corporation would rather you pay their dealer network $600 a visit to do basic simple things. When there is no manual, the only way left to learn about anything is either to start bodging it yourself until you figure it out (which most people are not capable of doing, or will destroy their property in the process), or rely on the forum posts of random people online who do have personal or professional experience with the things they’re trying to fix.

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.

• can’t RTFM when no one WTFM
• software projects with manuals are an exception – most projects can’t be bothered (rare cases, they just export the API calls to a README and call that the manual)
• hardware projects follow the stereotype of a manual in Chinese, machine translated to English, and distributed as a fourth generation photocopy

I haven’t seen a good BOFH story in forever as well…

Maybe Reddit, and Google, got good enough that you could search for your specific problem without having to know the general documentation. And the expectation simply became point me to my specific problem