EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
General => General Technical Chat => Topic started by: madsbarnkob on May 17, 2017, 07:12:25 am
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This is a post that I wrote on facebook, but I would like to ask that you share this with your friends on facebook or other social media, feel free to rewrite or link to this thread, what I want out is the statement about saving information.
I kindly ask you all, that you carefully consider and think about all the websites you have used to learn about electronics, all the forums you have trawled through for information and the vast amount of videos on youtube that has helped you understand and solve a problem.
This information only exists because there are people wanting to let the information live on, from user to user, open platforms like personal websites and forums are indexed and made searchable by almost any search engine on the internet. Imagine if all you ever found on google was closed facebook profiles and no information.
This is a circle of information sharing that has been broken, the eco system of knowledge sharing is dying with social media.
Only uploading pictures of your experiment with a short sentence or "science!" is destroying the electronics hobby, if you value what you have learned on the internet, then give it back to the internet, make your own website or, less time consuming, write a good long thread on a forum about the technical issues you had and how it was solved.
Do not worry about if you think that your english is not good enough, do not fear that you make yourself look inexperienced, so would I in many fields of science and there is no way that I master every aspect of electronics. Ask, Learn and Help each other!
There is a generation gap right now, 20 years ago everyone shared their knowledge on mailing lists or had a html website, next leap came with the blogs where focus could be moved to creating content and not maintaining code, but with social media, all control, history and indexing is gone. There is no information left for the future generations, because it is all posted on closed social media groups. Content is mixed, unorganized and for the most lost for the user after a couple of weeks, way down the stream.
Fight the loss of knowledge! Make a website or post on a forum! Only use social media to link to your website/forum post. This is the only way for the information to live on.
I hope you will share this call to arms with like minded electronics interested people.
Kind regards
Mads Barnkob
Administrator of www.highvoltageforum.net (http://www.highvoltageforum.net)
Author of www.kaizerpowerelectronics.dk (http://www.kaizerpowerelectronics.dk)
Moderator of www.4hv.org (http://www.4hv.org)
User of eevblog.com forum and diyaudio.com forum
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Agreed with Facebook being a terrible platform for information to live. Forums are perfect, the info lasts as long as the owner keeps it alive, and google indexes them very well. I cannot count the number of times a subtle hint gleaned from a forum has helped me past a stumbling block. Facebook is only suitable for disposable chit chat
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I don't get it. I will share as much as I feel like. It is not my problem that others are special snowflakes and can't learn stuff. And learning something fundamental from forums is a path to disaster anyway. Books are still very relevant, read them.
Also, what you are observing is lack of editors. All information is out there, but picking out good stuff from the trash is hard work, and nobody is going to do that for free.
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I don't get it. I will share as much as I feel like. It is not my problem that others are special snowflakes and can't learn stuff. And learning something fundamental from forums is a path to disaster anyway. Books are still very relevant, read them.
Also, what you are observing is lack of editors. All information is out there, but picking out good stuff from the trash is hard work, and nobody is going to do that for free.
I was never against sharing, as you can read, what I am trying to bring attention towards is that where the information shared is really stored. I do not follow your link between special snowflakes and actually making knowledge widely accessible.
My primary field of interest is high voltage generation and Tesla coils, a subject where you find very little literature and where the ground breaking development in topologies was done on forums by amateurs.
I am not advocating for everyone to do as I, run a website for 8 years and answer all comments/emails. But share technical solutions on a forum more than directly inside the social media. But the easy upload from a smartphone to all your friends on facebook is a hard competitor.
All information is not out there, more and more amateur knowledge is trapped inside closed groups. It not just what comes out of IEEE publications that is relevant...
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Books are great for fundamentals, but some little software issue or toolchain tips is not going to ever be in a book.
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Want to find stuff.....learn how to use search engines and use the tiny titbits you find to hunt down the answers you really need.
By your post count you've not been here around long enough to see all the sticky threads that are full of content so worthy to be placed at the top of their respective boards.
There has been so much good info posted in the years EEVblog has operated that most anything electronic is already here.
We have threads dedicated to just that you desire, all you need to know is how to find them....that's the key to finding stuff.
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Want to find stuff.....learn how to use search engines and use the tiny titbits you find to hunt down the answers you really need.
By your post count you've not been here around long enough to see all the sticky threads that are full of content so worthy to be placed at the top of their respective boards.
There has been so much good info posted in the years EEVblog has operated that most anything electronic is already here.
We have threads dedicated to just that you desire, all you need to know is how to find them....that's the key to finding stuff.
If this was for me, I am sorry that I have somehow not expressed myself clear enough, or you did not read it fully.
TL;DR: Information posted on facebook is lost, information on indexed forums are not, use forums/make a blog.
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I kindly ask you all... post on a forum
SPAM. Marketing spam. Boring.
(Sorry if a kitten has died due to this sentiment.)
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I kindly ask you all... post on a forum
SPAM. Marketing spam. Boring.
(Sorry if a kitten has died due to this sentiment.)
The marketing was done when I posted about my sites in "other blog specific" subforum a while ago. This post is signed like that to show who that is behind it. If you disagree with saving information in a digital age, that is your decision, I just hope to make a few wake up calls to the lurkers and maybe get more active users of all electronics forums or more personal websites and blogs.
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Personally I tend to post quite in-depth stuff on my Facebook page - it recently served up my "Memories for April" that consisted of two schematics and a PCB layout - I took that as a sign that I wasn't posting enough graphs :)
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Thats wy I have my own website. Well sort of. I dont really own it. Its a free Jiimdo website.
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Personally I tend to post quite in-depth stuff on my Facebook page - it recently served up my "Memories for April" that consisted of two schematics and a PCB layout - I took that as a sign that I wasn't posting enough graphs :)
My point is still that it is lost inside a social network that is not indexed or accessible from f.ex. the waybackmachine
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My point is still that it is lost inside a social network that is not indexed or accessible from f.ex. the waybackmachine
Point taken. I was not advocating that anyone restrict their posting of such content exclusively to social networking platforms - naturally folks are free to do what they damn-well like with their time and energy, though.
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Nonsense its just more avenues for different forms of expression, these are not people with the time to create a blog or video and log or help others or else they would be creating content. Social media is for networking its not ruining or diminishing anything. I got back into electronics and finally got into microcontrollers because I saw an esp8266 on instagram. Not everything needs to be a blog post, youtube video or instructable.
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Forums and blogs are better than Facebook, but are not magic. There is lots of information that was available 10 years ago that is effectively gone. Authors have gotten tired of hosting a page, forums have died. There are lots of reasons - money, time, legal threats, ....
The bottom line is there isn't anything that is truly free, and the donors of information can't be depended on to do it forever. I am grateful to those that have, and try to do my part in passing it forward, but things will always be lost.
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I have a my only little US$20/mth Wikimedia server, where I post random FPGA projects. Even though it has 1/2 M page views on the two main pages, I am in two minds about closing it.
Why?
* It is a hobby. something I do to fill my spare time, and I want to be free to tinker with other stuff as my moods take me
* I don't have as much free time as i used to (or maybe I don't find as much time as I used to), so the site is getting stale
* I get about an email twice a week with somebody telling me that their world will end if I don't help them with an assignment. I try to help them as much as I can in an 10 minute email exchange, but am never able to commit the needed time unless I am also interested in their problem. Sometimes they get really needy... it hurts to tell somebody "This is not my problem, stop emailing me and go away"
* I've run out of fresh ideas - I've explored all the bits I am interested in, and don't really fancy the idea of embarking on multi-month projects like when I wrote a DisplayPort source from scratch.
* I have a few people offering me contract work, but never offering to pay enough to make me want to dedicate all MY free time to THEIR cause.
* People ask me to debug assignments for them. I don't like it when somebody else's problems becomes my problems. I've got enough problems of my own as it is!
* US$20 a month isn't much, but over a year that $240 less pocket money I have to put towards my hobbies (I'm not going to put ads on it, because I hate hobby websites with ads)
* The nagging worry that one day the site will get hacked. If it got hacked I would just delete the Amazon EC2 instances and call it a day
* You only get a small amount of feedback and encouragement, and end up questioning if it is of any value at all.
It will have to disappear eventually, it won't outlive me for long without somebody paying the bills.... That is something the Internet hasn't had to deal with much, as it has only been mainstream for 20 years or so and constantly reinventing itself. (Well, maybe not - anybody remember Geocities?)
Maybe I should write a book - at least a book in the library has permanence and costs me nothing while it sits there....
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I'm not sure that the loss of many of the "maker" projects posted at Facebook is an inherently bad thing. Many of those projects are mad by people without any basic electronics knowledge and are built upon other projects of similar style without any regards to applicability or electronics design.
When people are driving heavy duty relays using a bc547 transistor with no base resistor and the back-emf diode put across the transistor (and 12 mil clearance between tracks with 240VAC and the 3.3v VCC) it might be better that stuff like that gets lost as soon as possible.
When I grew up and learned the basic of electronics in the seventies i did so by books written by professionals, and from magazines like Elektor where the designs was made by knowledgeable people and vetted by a professional editorial staff. It was easy to pick up good designs and basic simple theory as an hobbyist since you were surrounded by good material.
Today anyone can (and does) publish pure shite without any regards to quality, safety and suitability online and expose the newcomers to it. Sometimes I almost think that the bad old days before internet and the explosion of "new makers" was a better time - but not really. But I'm glad that I grew up before it happened. And also learned computers from the bottom-up long before the home-computers era of the mid 80s.
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I fully agree. I also hate when people on forums say to use google. If everyone did that, you would just be finding a bunch of forum posts of people saying to use google. :-DD I hate when I'm googling and find a post of someone having the exact problem and then they are told to use google and the post is locked. Or when the person found a solution and never posted it. "it works now!" What did you do? We'll never know.
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I fully agree. I also hate when people on forums say to use google. If everyone did that, you would just be finding a bunch of forum posts of people saying to use google. :-DD I hate when I'm googling and find a post of someone having the exact problem and then they are told to use google and the post is locked. Or when the person found a solution and never posted it. "it works now!" What did you do? We'll never know.
People only say that if they simply don't understand it themselves or when theyy are just an asshole or very impatient. But yes it can be extremely frustrating (also as a professional).
I actually don't agree with the topic starter at all.
There hasn't been more information than ever before. The fact is that it's aslo easier for people to get involved into 'electronics'. Well, Arduinos that is (Lego but with wires).
And as always, the articles that are being shared the most, will pop-up first. And these are mostly very average things.
So the good stuff is still there, but you have to look harder because it's being washed over with a lot of other stuff. Unfortunately with that also comes the fact that most people copy without thinking. Therefore you will get a lot of nasty myths. This is especially strong in the world of audio and acoustics. (so strong that even some 'guru's' are starting to believe in marketing BS).
In general I think that forums are still great platforms, because it gives people the opportunity to respond and debate.
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In additions to this.
There is a weird two fold going on.
In general people don't make, fix or repair things anymore. At least where I am from.
People just buy things and even pay a lot for it. Simple old and vintage looking table for over 2 grand! etc.
I also see this with students and interns. Their set of skills and knowledge is just sad (no offence). We had interns studying electronics who where unable to solder. Like whuuut?
On the other hand science, engineering and video games are 'cool' nowdays. Still blows my mind, 20-25 years back you were a no-no.
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I have a my only little US$20/mth Wikimedia server, where I post random FPGA projects. Even though it has 1/2 M page views on the two main pages, I am in two minds about closing it.
Why?
* It is a hobby. something I do to fill my spare time, and I want to be free to tinker with other stuff as my moods take me
* I don't have as much free time as i used to (or maybe I don't find as much time as I used to), so the site is getting stale
* I get about an email twice a week with somebody telling me that their world will end if I don't help them with an assignment. I try to help them as much as I can in an 10 minute email exchange, but am never able to commit the needed time unless I am also interested in their problem. Sometimes they get really needy... it hurts to tell somebody "This is not my problem, stop emailing me and go away"
* I've run out of fresh ideas - I've explored all the bits I am interested in, and don't really fancy the idea of embarking on multi-month projects like when I wrote a DisplayPort source from scratch.
* I have a few people offering me contract work, but never offering to pay enough to make me want to dedicate all MY free time to THEIR cause.
* People ask me to debug assignments for them. I don't like it when somebody else's problems becomes my problems. I've got enough problems of my own as it is!
* US$20 a month isn't much, but over a year that $240 less pocket money I have to put towards my hobbies (I'm not going to put ads on it, because I hate hobby websites with ads)
* The nagging worry that one day the site will get hacked. If it got hacked I would just delete the Amazon EC2 instances and call it a day
* You only get a small amount of feedback and encouragement, and end up questioning if it is of any value at all.
It will have to disappear eventually, it won't outlive me for long without somebody paying the bills.... That is something the Internet hasn't had to deal with much, as it has only been mainstream for 20 years or so and constantly reinventing itself. (Well, maybe not - anybody remember Geocities?)
Maybe I should write a book - at least a book in the library has permanence and costs me nothing while it sits there....
My special thanks to you. Even though I have not ever to my knowledge visited your pages. You are one of the ones who has taken the time to share knowledge, and you have described very well the problems that are associated with doing that.
A book may solve your conscience problem, but it is effectively the same as closing the web page. Unless you somehow get incredibly wide distribution of your book, a book is a old technology form of write only memory.
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I fully agree. I also hate when people on forums say to use google. If everyone did that, you would just be finding a bunch of forum posts of people saying to use google. :-DD I hate when I'm googling and find a post of someone having the exact problem and then they are told to use google and the post is locked. Or when the person found a solution and never posted it. "it works now!" What did you do? We'll never know.
There's the other side to it as well. It's really frustrating when someone asks a question which they could have easily answered themselves, spending 5 minutes with a search engine.
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I fully agree. I also hate when people on forums say to use google. If everyone did that, you would just be finding a bunch of forum posts of people saying to use google. :-DD I hate when I'm googling and find a post of someone having the exact problem and then they are told to use google and the post is locked. Or when the person found a solution and never posted it. "it works now!" What did you do? We'll never know.
There's the other side to it as well. It's really frustrating when someone asks a question which they could have easily answered themselves, spending 5 minutes with a search engine.
+1
When my kids were little the each had an old desktop and of course games were their primary interest but at least it got them interested in one of the greatest tools of the modern age. Their thirst for knowledge was quenched with hands on instruction on the use of keywords in searches, no Google way back then IIRC Netscape is what we used but competent use of a search engine has stood them in good stead into their adulthood.
Back then we had 5 PC's on a wired LAN all accessing the Net via dialup so they had to take turns as to who was online. :-DD
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I fully agree. I also hate when people on forums say to use google. If everyone did that, you would just be finding a bunch of forum posts of people saying to use google. :-DD I hate when I'm googling and find a post of someone having the exact problem and then they are told to use google and the post is locked. Or when the person found a solution and never posted it. "it works now!" What did you do? We'll never know.
There's the other side to it as well. It's really frustrating when someone asks a question which they could have easily answered themselves, spending 5 minutes with a search engine.
Even if i am one of these people, the longer i follow this forum the more i see questions asked again and again. there is a "hello i am begginer what oscilloscope should i get" at least once a week! >:(
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Even if i am one of these people, the longer i follow this forum the more i see questions asked again and again. there is a "hello i am begginer what oscilloscope should i get" at least once a week! >:(
I cut them some slack.
When you are a beginners hardly know if your needs are unique or not, and also need a bit of reassurance that they are doing the right thing.
Beginners also don't know if the old threads are still current, or contain outdated information. They come from a world where tech advice on things like CPUs, Cell Phones and Graphics Cards have a 3 month life cycle at best, so can a year-old post on an Oscilloscope be trusted as current advice?
In some respects they are a good sign. Imagine if the flow of "i am beginner what oscilloscope should i get" threads stopped. Would it be because everybody is now reading the old threads? Has that question finally been answered? Or could it be that the once-steady flow of newbie hobbyists dried up?
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I'm terrible about documenting my projects. I'm more than happy to share schematics, PCBs, code, and other knowledge involved but I'm much more interested in building cool stuff than I am in publishing the information. I can only wonder how much other cool stuff other people do that never gets shared.
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Thank you, you are making a really good point here that shouldn't be ignored.
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I fully agree. I also hate when people on forums say to use google. If everyone did that, you would just be finding a bunch of forum posts of people saying to use google. :-DD I hate when I'm googling and find a post of someone having the exact problem and then they are told to use google and the post is locked. Or when the person found a solution and never posted it. "it works now!" What did you do? We'll never know.
I agree, in the main, but there is a responsibility for people to at least put in a little effort to research so occasionally the 'JFGI' response is justified.
We'd get snowed under with requests for help for things people just couldn't be bothered to make the effort to research otherwise (thinking of one forum in particular where it seemed every third request was a plea for information on how to calculate LED series resistors).
I think we're all guilty of it occasionally though, it's really difficult to come up with appropriate search terms if you're unsure of the terms used in a subject, setting out with your first TE purchase is a big deal but there's a responsibility again to do at least some research for yourself which has obviously not been done in many cases.
Again, I agree, when help is offered it's only good manners to post the conclusion and some detail of the resolution.
I really appreciate all the people who make an effort to share their work on the 'net, doesn't matter if it's a teardown on youtube or a fully documented design and build of a highly complex piece of advanced electronics, it's all useful and contributes to the sum of knowledge so thank you to everyone who does that.