“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.

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.

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).

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.

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

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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