Ask HN: Are Linux HowTos dead? Why?
The linked site isn&#x27;t where most HOWTOs were kept; they resided at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tldp.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tldp.org&#x2F;</a><p>Are they dead? Not <i>completely</i> dead, but there is only one or two people still maintaining the site + HOWTOs (they organize on GitHub and a mailing list currently). But there&#x27;s simply nobody volunteering to maintain them or write new articles.<p>Why is that? Because popular things get action and unpopular things don&#x27;t. HOWTOs aren&#x27;t popular.<p>Why is that? Because blogs and the invention of &quot;Q&amp;A sites&quot; made them unnecessary. Before you would use a HOWTO to teach yourself everything about a specific piece of software or technical thing. Now you don&#x27;t really need to learn an entire thing. You can just google the one question you have, get the answer, and move on. You still don&#x27;t know how 98% of that thing works, but you fixed your problem. Since this solves most people&#x27;s problems, they don&#x27;t see value in taking the time to write an entire HOWTO, which may take weeks to months for a really good HOWTO. Similarly, users don&#x27;t look for them because nobody&#x27;s writing them. There is no incentive anymore.<p>SEO is part of the reason that traffic began being moved towards blogs and Q&amp;A sites. But SEO alone didn&#x27;t bring about the cultural shift towards snippets of answers. It was simply a new generation that learned tech outside of the old OSS community, and developed their own ways of learning. Just like the old OSS community created their own way of learning different than their previous generation.