The Death Of Coding Tutorials

00:00:00: Yesterday, I stumbled across a quite interesting

00:00:04: video on YouTube, and since I was mentioned in that video

00:00:08: and was called out, I thought, well, I'll just react

00:00:12: to it. The video is called No one watches YouTube

00:00:16: course, I'll put a link below this episode.

00:00:18: It's by Melki, Melki, uh, I don't know.

00:00:21: But I don't have to pronounce him correctly because he did not pronounce,

00:00:24: correctly either. And in this video, he argues that there

00:00:28: are no coding tutorials out there anymore, and I can definitely relate and I'll

00:00:32: share my thoughts on that. But let's first, uh, hear what he has to

00:00:36: say.

00:00:37: You see, when I was learning, I would rely heavily on channels like

00:00:41: or Ben Awad, or even this individual, Maximilian, uh,

00:00:44: Schwarz Mueller. I won't even pronounce his name,

00:00:47: Yeah, it's Schwarzmuller, and I think it's a super easy name in

00:00:51: so I don't know why you did not get this right.

00:00:54: Where he made a lot of courses on stuff like Udemy about

00:00:58: React and other things, and so did Ben and so did Traversy.

00:01:01: And now if you look at their channels, you will see something very different.

00:01:05: And the major thing on Traversy Media's channel now is learning to code has

00:01:08: changed, where he goes into detail of why things

00:01:12: have drastically changed for new junior developers

00:01:16: or even just people on their approach to learning how to code.

00:01:20: And you can even see through his channel, there's not that many

00:01:24: crash course or tutorial videos. It's coding before AI was in the Stone

00:01:27: Age. The junior developer will look different

00:01:31: It's a bunch of different things where it's people explaining their

00:01:34: tech stack, their decision, and just giving their opinions on certain

00:01:38: tech-related topics. Ben Awad doesn't even make videos

00:01:42: anymore, so he's just no longer doing this.

00:01:45: Um, this individual, Maximilian, if you go to his channel and you go to his

00:01:48: videos, there's absolutely no more tutorial videos

00:01:52: because they don't generate views because people no longer watch

00:01:56: that type of content.

00:01:58: Yep. And that's exactly the point, but again, I'll share more thoughts

00:02:02: on this. He's absolutely right though.

00:02:04: Of course coding tutorials have had better times,

00:02:08: let's be totally honest. Now, I will say that on

00:02:12: this very channel, if you're watching this on YouTube,

00:02:16: was founded, I created this channel to share my

00:02:19: opinion. The channel where I used to

00:02:23: share tutorials is the Academind channel, but of

00:02:27: course, let's be honest, if you take a look at this channel, it

00:02:30: has seen better days with more activity.

00:02:33: I'll be totally honest, and you have to scroll down quite a bit

00:02:37: to see those old school tutorials there.

00:02:40: Now, I have some plans for this channel. I'll share them.

00:02:44: And I, uh, don't just have plans. I already got some, I think,

00:02:48: exciting new tutorials lined up on this channel, but

00:02:51: still, tutorials, coding tutorials and maybe also

00:02:55: tutorials in general are maybe not

00:02:58: dead, but they might be dying or they definitely had better

00:03:02: days. And just to be clear, you still have

00:03:06: plenty of high quality coding tutorials out there.

00:03:09: I mean, you've got Code With Antonio with his

00:03:13: courses essentially, though, um, if you take a look at those view

00:03:16: numbers, the question is if it's worth it, but that is for him to

00:03:20: decide, but you definitely got him.

00:03:22: You will find high quality tutorials on

00:03:26: Python, any coding, uh, language or programming language

00:03:30: you, uh, are interested in, obviously.

00:03:33: You got FreeCodeCamp, though there too, you can see

00:03:37: those view numbers are not necessarily what they used to be.

00:03:41: And one trend I think you can see

00:03:44: is all these coding tutorials are more and

00:03:48: more becoming super low level, even more low level

00:03:52: than they've always been. There is very little

00:03:55: demand for advanced content, and they're all

00:03:59: about entertainment, to some degree at

00:04:02: least. You have those projects

00:04:06: where people just, it feels like they wanna watch you build a

00:04:10: project. They don't really wanna learn how to build

00:04:13: project. So it all got a bit more

00:04:17: entertainment-ish and

00:04:20: project focused, which of course is something I

00:04:24: could also do and Brad could also do.

00:04:28: Just the content we created

00:04:32: doesn't really vibe anymore, and I think,

00:04:36: for example, if you take a look at those numbers on

00:04:40: fair to say that coding tutorials in

00:04:44: general don't perform that well anymore

00:04:47: and are definitely not on the level they used to be in

00:04:51: the past. And I think there are three main reasons

00:04:56: for that, and the first one is TikTok or short form

00:05:00: content in general. You see, TikTok of course, I had to look this

00:05:04: up because I'm not a TikTok user, but TikTok was introduced

00:05:07: in 2016 as it seems, nine years ago.

00:05:11: Quite a long time, but it really only took off

00:05:15: for me or that I really heard about it and people around me

00:05:18: started using it in I think

00:05:21: 2018-ish, 2019, and then of course

00:05:25: with the pandemic I would guess, and of course nowadays

00:05:29: it's all short form content. All the videos have to be short

00:05:33: form. And of course it's not just TikTok, you know that, but TikTok has pretty

00:05:37: impressive numbers. Two billion global users.

00:05:40: That's so much wasted time, really.

00:05:44: So much wasted time. Uh, two billion global users just

00:05:48: on TikTok, if you can trust the Google AI

00:05:51: overview here. And then of course it's not just TikTok.

00:05:54: It's also Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, for

00:05:58: example. YouTube Shorts alone, uh, exceed more

00:06:01: than 70 billion views every day. Again, so much

00:06:05: wasted time and...By the way, there definitely also

00:06:09: are good shorts. I'm not doubting that.

00:06:11: And I have created shorts myself and I'll try to create

00:06:15: more because simply that is what people watch and if they watch it,

00:06:19: least try to create something that's helpful. Um, at least I can...

00:06:23: Well, I can try. But yeah, it's so much consumption.

00:06:26: Two billion monthly active users, uh, on YouTube.

00:06:30: Um, it's, it's, it's really mind-blowing.

00:06:32: So yeah, shorts are there,

00:06:36: attention spans got shorter and that of course has

00:06:40: implications. If you take a look at my channel here,

00:06:44: the same if you take a look at Brad's channel, uh, or other coding tutorial

00:06:48: channels, if you scroll down, if you go back a couple of years,

00:06:52: you will see that, um... Let's see, this one here is

00:06:55: around 2020, so right when the pandemic hit of course.

00:06:59: And if you take a look at those numbers, sure, there are some

00:07:03: weaker vid- videos, also some videos were just announced stuff, but overall

00:07:07: got pretty good consumption on most of these videos.

00:07:10: And most of these videos are good old tutorial videos

00:07:14: where I simply share certain

00:07:18: approaches, tips and tricks, teach stuff, right?

00:07:21: So we got amazing consumption. If you scroll down even

00:07:25: further, if you go back to, uh, I think around 2018,

00:07:29: '19, back then I used to be able to

00:07:32: create series where you would

00:07:36: have, um, one topic, uh, for example here, Node and, and

00:07:39: GraphQL, and I would create a bunch of videos on

00:07:43: And sure, every video on its own would probably only

00:07:46: 20,000 views, or maybe when I released them just 5 to

00:07:50: 15,000 and then over time they gathered up those views.

00:07:53: But of course those were easy to produce and I was

00:07:58: able to show a, a kind of real

00:08:01: project. I was able to dive deep. That's the main takeaway because

00:08:05: all these videos were half an hour long.

00:08:07: That's essentially a free course I published on

00:08:11: YouTube. And the entire course of course did get

00:08:15: quite a lot of views as you can see. And then you had those

00:08:19: single videos, um, where you talked about one specific

00:08:22: topic, a- and you got a lot of views on that too.

00:08:25: And I'll be very honest, I loved that

00:08:28: time, um, because sharing knowledge is what I

00:08:32: love. I, I think I'm also good at it hopefully,

00:08:36: what I enjoy. I, you know, I learned it all on myself, the coding

00:08:40: stuff. I mean, I did not study that.

00:08:42: I studied business, uh, administration.

00:08:45: Um, but I started to code when I was around 12, 13, something like

00:08:49: that. And back then of course without the

00:08:53: learned to code by reading books, by just trying out stuff.

00:08:56: I do remember that one of my first projects when I was,

00:09:00: well, 13 or so, was to build my

00:09:04: own documentation written with raw HTML and CSS

00:09:08: for Warcraft III. And I know not programming languages,

00:09:12: point. So that is where I'm coming from.

00:09:15: I do enjoy sharing knowledge and yeah,

00:09:18: that was what you could do back then.

00:09:20: By the way, back then I also already had these opinion

00:09:24: developer and they did great too, and that's why I created this channel here

00:09:28: I wanted to just share opinions because of course, you know, YouTube changed.

00:09:32: YouTube changed. Back then you could have it all in one

00:09:35: Subscribers were very important.

00:09:38: Um, nowadays subscribers are a nice number, but it's

00:09:42: all about grabbing attention, making it through or into the

00:09:46: YouTube algorithm and therefore of course you got to have

00:09:50: challenge, uh, channels. You have one channel for your opinions,

00:09:54: one channel for your livestream VODs, one channel for your

00:09:58: tutorials. That is how it seems to work these days

00:10:01: and you get kind of punished if you don't do it like this.

00:10:05: That's also why you got the face on all these thumbnails, though I can see I

00:10:09: already d- did that back then. But nowadays it's even more important.

00:10:12: You got to look shocked on those thumbnails, um, or, or something

00:10:16: attention-grabbing. So yeah, that is the current state.

00:10:19: And this, by the way, just to be very clear, is not...

00:10:23: I'm not saying this to, to whine about it.

00:10:26: Yeah, I do miss it. I, I liked those old days, but I'm getting

00:10:30: older, right? So that, that's just what it is, but I accept that

00:10:34: things changed and I of course try to change with that, which

00:10:38: is why this channel here has quite a lot of

00:10:41: activity and why I'm struggling with this Academind channel is

00:10:45: as you can see if you scroll up. And if you scroll up, you can see those

00:10:49: videos, those tutorial videos here, like this Remix Crash Course, yeah,

00:10:53: 130,000 views. It's a lot but this was released it says

00:10:57: three years here, it's almost four years ago I think, um, or

00:11:01: it might be three years. But this is the number over three years

00:11:05: some videos here like these AWS videos which were a lot of effort

00:11:09: which don't even have 10,000 views after three years.

00:11:12: And these actually are almost four years.

00:11:14: So you see those numbers are declining for

00:11:18: the good old tutorials and, uh, one reason is

00:11:21: definitely the attention spans. But that's of course not the

00:11:25: only reason. The other big reason I think is

00:11:29: macroeconomics. You might know this chart

00:11:33: here, this quite depressing chart, uh, which shows

00:11:37: the software development job postings on Indeed in the United States.

00:11:41: So not worldwide, not all platforms, but still it

00:11:45: kind of... It, it shows what it feels to us, right?

00:11:48: So you can see we, we had that huge high during the

00:11:52: pandemic and unfortunately the chart doesn't go back any further than the

00:11:56: early 2020s. Uh, so, uh, February 2020.

00:12:00: So we don't really have a lot of pre-pandemic data in there

00:12:04: came from here. Then we had a drop when the pandemic hit and then we, whoa,

00:12:07: we s- we shot up to high, uh,

00:12:11: spheres.... the pandemic, of course, not.

00:12:15: But that time was amazing from the

00:12:18: perspective of a content creator because, of course, everybody was learning to

00:12:22: code. So creating courses, which I do, which I still do, and which I'll keep

00:12:26: on doing, by the way, that worked really well.

00:12:29: But also, on YouTube, you got a lot of attention.

00:12:32: Still, of course, we still had the effects from the, uh,

00:12:36: span and TikTok and so on, but that made more than up for

00:12:39: it. And then things changed, and that's not

00:12:43: AI, by the way. Here we, we started declining before

00:12:46: ChatGPT was released. So we went down steeply because

00:12:50: companies over-hired. During the pandemic, everybody thought that this is the

00:12:54: new normal and, um, w- we'll need like five times

00:12:58: the software engineers forever, and it turned out that's not the case.

00:13:01: And it's not just in web development, it's software development in general.

00:13:04: It's also in game development, for example.

00:13:06: Um, if you're a gamer, I am to some degree, um,

00:13:10: of studios that got closed or that are struggling.

00:13:13: So it's a, a software development

00:13:16: crisis, you could say. Now, at least it looks like we now hit

00:13:20: the bottom, um, but of course, um, yeah, we still got that

00:13:24: AI thing and I'll get back to that. Um, but that is, of course,

00:13:28: one other major factor. The demand for these tutorials obviously

00:13:32: decreased. And combine that with the effect of shorter attention

00:13:36: spans and those long-form tutorials not working that well,

00:13:40: that's just another hit. And then, of course, we have

00:13:44: AI as the large third main

00:13:48: reason here. And by the way, just a little shameless plug, I created

00:13:52: this graphic here just by drawing it here in this ugly

00:13:56: form on Excalidraw, but I could've also used a piece of paper.

00:13:59: And then I went to my site, buildmygraphic.com, and there I chose

00:14:03: custom content, selected photo, uploaded that, uh, drawing,

00:14:07: and added some little extra instructions.

00:14:10: Picked my preferred style, watercolor, and generated

00:14:14: this graphic. So if you also need some graphics,

00:14:18: other kinds of graphics, you might wanna give that a try.

00:14:21: I'll put a link below the video. But AI, that

00:14:25: is the third main reason, and, of course, it started

00:14:29: slow in November 2022 when

00:14:32: ChatGPT was released, but obviously, AI is a huge

00:14:36: thing right now and it affects basically all aspects

00:14:40: of life and learning, and online learning is definitely one of

00:14:44: them. Why watch a 30-minute tutorial if you

00:14:48: can just ask ChatGPT? Well, there are good reasons why you

00:14:52: might wanna watch a tutorial, because there is a difference between

00:14:56: for something and possibly getting AI hallucinations or

00:15:00: outdated information. And on the other hand, having someone

00:15:04: guide you through a topic you might not even know already.

00:15:07: But of course, I still get the point and I do it myself.

00:15:10: We can learn rapidly or at least

00:15:14: feel like we're learning to some extent with ChatGPT

00:15:18: or Gemini, or whatever your favorite AI chatbot is.

00:15:22: And of course, there are advantages, because you can ask just the follow-up

00:15:26: questions you have. If you're watching a tutorial

00:15:29: something, you're kind of out of luck.

00:15:32: You have to do your own research, which, by the way, (laughs) is not necessarily

00:15:35: bad, but that's a different story.

00:15:38: But of course, yeah, it's more convenient

00:15:42: result quicker if you can just ask.

00:15:46: Let's be totally honest though, is ChatGPT really that great for

00:15:50: learning or is it good for getting

00:15:53: results? Just as you can use Cursor or Claude

00:15:57: code for agentic engineering, so as

00:16:01: assistants, or for vibe coding or kind of

00:16:05: vibe coding. One of the two is more work.

00:16:08: You can use ChatGPT for learning, but that involves

00:16:12: thinking about the responses, still doing your own research,

00:16:16: trying out stuff, coming up with smart follow-up

00:16:19: questions, diving deeper, reading official documentations from time

00:16:23: time. It's complex, and it always will be to some

00:16:26: extent because these tools can make it easier, but learning is all

00:16:30: about wiring up those neurons. That doesn't come for

00:16:34: free. But of course, it is super convenient to just ask for

00:16:38: something, get a solution, use it, and move on.

00:16:40: And to be fair, we did that even before ChatGPT with Stack

00:16:44: Overflow in certain situations. But of course, ChatGPT and those other

00:16:47: chatbots have drastically accelerated all of

00:16:51: that. And that kind of brings us to

00:16:54: today and the current situations.

00:16:57: All these factors are the reasons why

00:17:01: no one watches YouTube to learn anymore, and

00:17:05: why all these channels, including mine, have kind of

00:17:08: slowed down or entirely stopped in releasing coding

00:17:12: tutorials. And of course, I know there will be people that say,

00:17:17: "That's no problem. Tutorial hell was awful anyways,

00:17:21: and you just all create BS content." And

00:17:24: yeah, sure, haters gonna hate. There will always be people

00:17:28: you do, and obviously, it's also gotten worse on YouTube

00:17:32: internet because people are just so unhappy in the world,

00:17:35: But I get the point, of course, you could end up

00:17:39: in tutorial hell. You could watch tutorial after tutorial

00:17:43: and never get anything done. Learning is and was

00:17:47: always about applying what you learned.

00:17:50: If you watch a tutorial, if you gain some knowledge, it

00:17:53: that in some demo project, in a real project, whatever it

00:17:57: is. Now with ChatGPT and all these AI

00:18:01: chatbots, you have the stupidity hell problem

00:18:04: that you just ask for something, get a solution, never really question it,

00:18:08: understand it, and move on. And well, your skill level

00:18:12: will essentially be the skill level of the AI because you got no

00:18:16: skill on your own, and I'm not sure if that is a

00:18:20: better world. Obviously, you can use AI to learn and to

00:18:23: question things, and then it can be an accelerator, as I

00:18:27: said. But I think the best learning

00:18:30: today...... would be still to have that mixture of

00:18:35: human input, human guidance, getting that, that opinion

00:18:38: mixed into what you're learning, getting that extra

00:18:41: experience, those little side quests on which I

00:18:45: sometimes, uh, went in my tutorials where I explain

00:18:49: something related or explain why we're doing something in a certain way

00:18:53: instead of just giving you the solution because that's also

00:18:56: important. Depending on how you prompt AI, you might never hear about

00:19:00: alternatives. You might just get a solution

00:19:04: but it might not be. So for all these reasons, I think

00:19:08: there is value in human guided learning, and that of course

00:19:11: includes YouTube tutorials, just as it includes

00:19:15: blog articles, books, audio formats,

00:19:18: whatever it is for you. It is a mixture and I'll

00:19:22: work heavily also in the next year on finding

00:19:26: better solutions for this blended learning approach, and I'll

00:19:30: share more about that once I'm ready to.

00:19:32: I got some great ideas, I think. But yeah, I do

00:19:35: miss those old days. It just doesn't help.

00:19:39: It's, uh, it's a new world in which we're living now

00:19:42: and we have all these factors, and

00:19:47: let's be very honest, probably all three factors are

00:19:51: just going to accelerate. I mean, the macroeconomics only indirectly

00:19:54: influenced by AI but people are watching short form

00:19:58: content and I don't, I don't see that going away.

00:20:01: And AI is also here to stay. AI

00:20:04: is not going away, obviously, and

00:20:08: it... By the way, just to make that very clear, it is useful and

00:20:12: everything. You know that if you watch my videos,

00:20:16: I'm using AI heavily, but of course, it's having impacts and it's

00:20:20: having a lot of negative downsides, which I also regularly talk

00:20:23: about. Um, so yeah, I

00:20:27: wholeheartedly agree with everything Melkky Melkay said

00:20:31: in this video. I recommend watching it, and

00:20:36: I think we'll just have to adjust, and I'll definitely try to do that.

00:20:40: I'll keep on creating educational content

00:20:44: on Academind as well. I got some nice tutorials, actually one

00:20:48: full course for free lined up on that channel.

00:20:51: I got plenty of ideas. Time is the only issue.

00:20:54: And yeah, I'll share more once I'm ready.

00:20:57: Definitely please also share what you're thinking of all of that.

00:21:01: What are your thoughts on this or what did I maybe

00:21:04: miss?