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
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“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?
Just got started with it! And actually it’s working pretty wonderfully. I miss pet recognition, and I haven’t learned how to make my phone sync there instead of google photos yet, but that’s about the only issues right now. Fast, well designed, good tech.
I use immich too. The GPS coordinates from pics and the facial recognition grouping is very cool.
A big part of it is manuals are increasingly non-present or unhelpful. Though, home appliances normally have useful ones still and I have used them on several occasional when doing repairs.
more and more projects are moving all documentation to discord
This is absolutely a trend that needs to stop. It is worse for individuals as info is completely unsearchable; and it is worse for the Discord admins and helpers as they have to answer the same questions over and over as nobody can find previous answers to the same question. A classic forum is optimal for public support.
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…
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.
Forums: “Having an issue? Just read the manual!”
Manual:
If you have any issues, please contact a user on our forum.
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
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.
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 see what you’re saying, but usually all that was required to get the appropriate help was to say I read the manual, and I tried the XY and z that was suggested that didn’t work. What do I do now?
I think people were just looking for a demonstrated level of self-care, so they could focus on the interesting issues.
I fully concede that it looks awful, very b o f h behavior
usually all that was required to get the appropriate help was to say I read the manual, and I tried the XY and z that was suggested that didn’t work. What do I do now?
Oh yes this is definitely how it would ideally go, on both the part of the one asking the question and the ones answering it, but hoo boy has it not been my experience a lot of the time, although it absolutely has gotten better over the decades. Ye olde Usenet could be a bit of a shitfest for asking technical questions, and so could eg. Linux forums. I’d know this because when I ran into something like that happening and I had the spoons for it, I’d try to be a bit more constructive.
Not all that rarely, the people answering beginners’ questions with something like RTFM at best or abusive diatribe at worst thought what you’re describing is what they were doing, even when the question was completely legitimate and possibly even somewhat nontrivial to piece together from some manual or whatever guide. People have some wildly varying ideas of what constitutes basic knowledge of some subject, and many also seemed to feel that because something was hard for them to learn, it should be hard for others too. And metaphorically kicking people in the teeth (and yes that’s hyperbole) for eg. not reading some FAQ isn’t really going to help anything; people – just like any other animal really – will generally react better to a carrot than a stick.
There’s a reason why it’s still a semicommon stereotype that Linux forums are full of assholes, although thank the fucking gods things are much better nowadays. The best part about writing about this stuff is that sometimes people show up in the comments to prove me right by acting like assholes
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.
- 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
You need to read The Register: https://search.theregister.com/?q=bofh
Wow. I’m smiling ear to ear. This is great!
Welcome to The Reg.
First I’ve heard of it.
Programmer thing?
RTFM= Read The (Fucking/Friendly) Manual
IMO it’s harsh, but reasonable to say if the documentation for something is actually clear and concise. It’s particularly relevant with software that has
manpages since those are typically excellent.Yeah I have no clue what are they talking about
Sounds like a programmer thing, telling noobs to read the manual
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.
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