Tracy B.

Instructables used to have decent content, diy that was actually diy and not just misleading titles like 'make your own sensor crom scratch' where step one is 'buy premade sensor breakout boards' step two is 'plug jumper wires into board' step three is something convoluted like 'now plug jumper wires into Arduino then connect via serial over raspberry pi and connect to the raspberry pi through ssh to access your diy i2c sensor' along with a long drawn out explanation of setting up ssh for some dang reason... Of course the last step is some uncommented code, either highly optomized therefore unreadable unless you're familiar with those specific esoteric commands or just straight lazy lowest hanging fruit code with no explanation of capabilities for further learning. Literally lure you in promising to show you how to scratch build something, and its just lego with adafruit products.

The other thing that ruined that site is the people that use the site as a blog or for build logs. Not INSTRUCTIONS how to build something like the site name would imply, just 'watch me talk you through this thing I made, arent I clever? It makes noise, uses some code I found, and is made of legoed breakout boards! Praise me! Because anything else would be bullying!' Its freaking ridiculous. Almost as bad as the downfall of hackaday...

Oh, and lets not forget the swaths of people, mostly from a certain area between France and Vietnam that post asking for help appropriating the thing in the instructable as their finals project for college, or for someone to build it for them...for pennies. Or worse, expect their hand to be held because they want to be cool but dont have the gumption to actually try building it...

Its gotten to the point I avoid instructables most of the time because I just know whatever the algorithm thinks is relevant is just hipster quick pat on the back garbage.