Once upon a time, the industry had a brutally efficient support strategy: RTFM. It worked because people actually did.

How We Lost the Art of Reading Documentation

Somewhere between the rise of cloud platforms and the triumph of the tooltip, humanity quietly abandoned one of the most basic skills in technology. Reading documentation. Not writing it, not improving it, simply reading it. The practice has all but vanished, replaced by a strange mixture of guesswork, impatience, and the kind of wishful thinking normally reserved for lottery players.

Modern users have developed an almost allergic reaction to anything longer than a short hint bubble. Present them with a paragraph and you will see visible discomfort. Present them with a page and you might as well be showing them ancient Egyptian funerary texts. The irony is that we live in a world where information has never been more available, yet the willingness to absorb it has never been lower.

The excuses are familiar. Documentation is boring. Documentation is outdated. Documentation is too long. Documentation is unnecessary because someone on a forum probably posted a three sentence answer twelve years ago. There is always the hope that a helpful stranger has distilled an entire system architecture into something that fits under a single screenshot.

The result is predictable. Users struggle with basic tasks, because they never learned how the system works. Developers reinvent features that already exist, because nobody checked the reference. Administrators click their way through interfaces like tourists in a foreign city who refuse to read signs. And when something goes wrong, the blame bounces from one place to another because no one can be bothered to follow the instructions that would have prevented the problem in the first place.

Documentation is not glamorous. It is not exciting. It is not the thing anyone boasts about reading at parties. But it is the foundation of technical literacy. It teaches precision, structure, and the simple discipline of understanding before acting. In a healthy technical culture, documentation is not something you use as a last resort, it is something you consult before you begin.

What worries me most is that the next generation of tools, frameworks, and platforms increasingly assume that users will not read anything. Interfaces hide complexity instead of explaining it. Features are simplified to the point of distortion. The emphasis has shifted from understanding to merely coping. And once that shift is complete, everyone becomes dependent on guesswork, trial, and whatever the application does by accident.

We lose something essential when we treat documentation as an inconvenience. We lose clarity, autonomy, and the ability to solve problems without waiting for someone else to do it for us. Reading documentation is an act of independence. It is how you become competent. It is how you learn to think like an engineer rather than a consumer.

So this is a small eulogy for manuals, guides, and carefully written reference texts. For the people who once explained systems with precision. For the users who took the time to read them. And for the simple, almost old fashioned idea that knowledge is worth acquiring.

If we want to repair the growing gap between people and their tools, we could start with something remarkably simple. Read the documentation. It is not dramatic. It is not glamorous. It is not even difficult. It is merely the first step toward understanding the world we build and the systems we rely on.

A step that far too many people no longer take.