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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

Drives me nuts. The internet is dead.

I just bought a home and I have been googling the best way to tackle certain home improvement projects - like how to prepare trim for painting. Virtually every result is some kind of content farm of AI-generated bullshit with advertising between every paragraph, an autoplay video (completely unrelated) that scrolls with the page, a modal popup asking me to accept cookies, a second rapid-fire modal popup asking me to join the newsletter to "become a friend"

For better or worse, Reddit is really the only place to go find legitimate information anymore.

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For this kind of search, YouTube and TikTok (yes, TikTok) are your best bet. Videos are not (completely) flooded by AI (yet) and you can find pretty much anything about manual work.

I prefer text content to videos by a long shot, but genuine, human text content is almost dead. Reddit might be one of the rare exceptions for now. There are also random, still active, old school forums for lots of things but they tend to become extremely hard to find.

You are right that youtube is better but so much of that content is also biased towards sponsors. At least the good instructional content with high production value tends to be very heavy on sponsorships. The indie stuff can be great, but you are gonna have a 720p shaky camera with terrible lighting and lots of umms and backstories about why I am redoing my vintage farmhouse (a-la the recipe meme where every recipe page has a 32 paragraph preamble before the actual recipe)

For what it's worth, the last time I had a home improvement project I needed youtube help with, the one-and-a-half minute mumble-tronic video shot on a Nokia brick-phone was the most helpful one.

Would I have preferred a nice 1080p, shot in good lighting on a flat white table? Yes. But those also tend to be 30 minutes along, and as you said, with a sponsorship for HurfDurfVPN in the middle.

Well why do you expect people to teach you for free how to do home improvement? Those people who know how to do it well are working with it and you can pay them to improve your home.

AI-generated youtube videos are here too, although they're fairly easy to spot for now. The general formula seems to be a bunch of stock images / AI-generated images / stock footage relevant to the video title, with a LLM-generated script read out by an elevenlabs-style voice.

Gaining information from a video (often just someone talking into their phone) feels like sucking a milkshake through a coffee stirrer compared to reading a forum post written by a human. Worse, you can't see how deep that milkshake is at a glance, so you may end up with just a sip from a melted puddle vs. the big volume of content you wanted.

That depends. For anything that involves learning how to do a physical movement, video is an infinitely more information dense medium to learn it through.

I would disagree, I've done a number of diy home improvement projects with decent (for dyi) results using mostly youtube. My old school washer and dryer have been saved repeatedly by following step-by-step youtube videos for fixes and part replacements.

TikTok is where you go to find someone (if not synthetic voice) reading to you a 30 second summary of the manufacturer's press kit and pretending like they reviewed it.

Get a general purpose home maintenance book.

For example, https://archive.org/details/stanleyhomerepai0000fine/page/14... links to the chapter "Painting Trim the Right Way" from the book Stanley Home Repairs, 2014.

Could also look at used book stores. Home repair hasn't changed much.

Edit: Could even fire up Wine and try the CD-ROM "Black & Decker Everyday Home Repairs" (published by Broderbund) at https://archive.org/details/BlackDeckerEverydayHomeRepairsBr... . https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3424503-everyday-home-re... says;

> Like its predecessor in book format, the CD-ROM version offers easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions on more than 100 common household problems, from how to fix a leaky faucet to repairing hardwood floors. What's more, the CD-ROM version incorporates animation and narration to help make the repair project even easier to understand and complete. Instructions can be viewed one step at a time or all at once, and, if desired, can be printed out and taken directly to the repair site. Included with each repair project is the projected time needed to complete the work, estimated cost, and a list of materials and tools needed.

That sounds pretty nifty, actually!

I think this and validated sources are the best direction.

A trip to the bookstore to buy "x for dummies" can save dozens of hours of web searching.

The current iteration of the internet and AI is lacking depth, detail, and expertise.

You can find 1 million shallow answers on reddit, or echoed in AI, but anything more than the most cursory introduction is buried.

Not only is shallow information easier to generate, it is what most users want, and therefore most engines and services cater to it.

To find better content,you need to go to specialty outlets that don't cater to the lowest common denominator.

Owner/builder here, of a 1939 home. I invested in a home reference library part way through my own improvements; I should have done it before even lifting a screwdriver. Renovations (https://www.bookfinder.com/search_s/?title=Renovation%205th%...), from Taunton Press, is the first source I consult when starting a home improvement project. Chapter 18 is all about painting. Many of the other titles from Taunton are excellent, but Renovations is unmatched in it's coverage.

All of the flat white MDF trim you buy is primed and ready for painting, too.

I have an older car and a newer car. I can find out how to do any repair on my old car because it existed during the old internet when people did all kinds of write ups.

The information on working on my new car is non-existent other than Youtube videos where the majority is just a random dude who knows nothing filming himself doing a horrible self repair.

IME for home improvement Youtube is the best resource, though I can understand if you were hoping for text and pictures.

Also your local library probably has a bunch of home improvement books. They're probably from the 80s, but trim painting techniques don't change that much.

What you can do in the library is sample a wide variety of the books in the topic you want, and soon you'll identify an author, or publisher, as your favorite, and then you can go purchase more in their series, and consider donating them back to the library when you're done with the project!

> For better or worse, Reddit is really the only place to go find legitimate information anymore.

This is frightening and, I fear, true.

But I'd also add one odd little counterpoint: some of the most useful discussions and learning experiences I've had in the last four years have happened in private Facebook groups. As soon as the incentive to build a following using growth-hacking and AI -- which private groups mitigate to a greater extent -- is taken away, you get back to the helpful stuff.

The FreeCAD group on Facebook is great, for example. And there are private photography groups, 3D printing groups, music groups etc., where people have an incentive to be authentic.

Public Facebook feeds are drowning in AI slop. But people who manage their own groups are keeping the spirit alive. It's almost at the point where I think Facebook will ultimately morph into a paid groups platform.

The video sites are gonna be way better for this. Or reddit. I don’t know how much longer that will be true with AI video generation becoming cheaper over time though

I used to search in English to get more results. Short-term, I might start searching in my native tongue to get less results.

Yeah, I've had this experience as well. I'll have to go 4 or 5 pages deep in the results to get to a forum thread someone wrote in 2005 referencing a product that doesn't exist anymore plus a bunch of advice that's mostly still applicable.

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