Skip the Tutorial. Break Everything. Learn Something.

The first thing Marcus Oyelaran does when he installs a new piece of software is close the welcome screen. Not minimize it. Close it. Then he opens the documentation — if there even is any — and starts reading from the top like it's a novel he picked up at an airport.

"Everyone thinks that's insane," says Oyelaran, a systems administrator based in Columbus, Ohio. "But I've learned more from a 40-page PDF than I ever have from a three-step onboarding wizard that holds my hand to the exact four features the company wants me to notice."

Oyelaran is part of a loose, largely self-identified community of users who call themselves manual readers — people who deliberately opt out of the guided, gamified, friction-sanded onboarding experiences that define modern software. They read wikis. They dig through changelogs. They break things on purpose and figure out why. And they're increasingly convinced that the rest of us are getting dumber because we won't do the same.

The Onboarding Industrial Complex

It would be hard to overstate how much effort goes into making software feel effortless. UX teams at major tech companies spend months designing onboarding flows — the sequence of tooltips, modals, progress bars, and celebratory animations that walk new users from zero to "aha moment" as fast as possible. The logic is sound from a business perspective: the quicker someone feels competent, the less likely they are to churn.

But competence and the feeling of competence are not the same thing, and that gap is exactly what bothers people like Oyelaran.

"Onboarding teaches you the product's version of itself," he says. "It shows you what they want you to see. You never discover the weird stuff, the edge cases, the actual power. You just get a curated little tour and then you're on your own — except you're not really on your own, because now you only know how to do the four things they showed you."

That critique lands harder than it might seem. When a tool teaches you to use itself, it also teaches you to depend on it. You learn the interface, not the underlying logic. You learn the button, not what the button is actually doing.

Confusion as a Feature

Dana Whitfield teaches computer science at a community college in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and she's been watching this dynamic play out in real time with her students for years.

"I have students who are genuinely fluent in TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat — apps with incredibly sophisticated interfaces — but they fall apart the moment something doesn't have a guided flow," she says. "They've been trained to follow prompts. When there are no prompts, they freeze."

Whitfield has started deliberately introducing what she calls "underdocumented" tools in her intro courses — software with sparse interfaces, minimal tooltips, and learning curves that require actual exploration. The frustration is immediate and, she argues, necessary.

"Confusion is information," she says. "When you're confused, you're at the edge of what you know. That's exactly where learning happens. The problem is we've built software that never lets you get confused, and we've trained an entire generation to interpret confusion as failure instead of as the beginning of understanding."

This is the core argument of the manual-reading crowd: that friction isn't a design flaw to be eliminated. It's the mechanism through which real understanding develops. Sand it away and you get users who can navigate a specific product's happy path and nothing else.

What Gets Lost in the Smooth Experience

There's a practical dimension to this that goes beyond philosophy. Power users — the kind who bend tools to do things their developers never imagined — almost universally report that their capabilities came from documentation, experimentation, and failure, not from onboarding.

Rachel Tran, a freelance data analyst in Portland, Oregon, built a significant portion of her client workflow around obscure features in tools she'd spent weeks genuinely learning, not just getting started with.

"There's a feature in one of the apps I use every day that I guarantee 95 percent of users have never found," she says. "It's not in the onboarding. It's not in the tooltips. It's in a forum post from 2019 and a paragraph buried in the advanced documentation. It saves me probably four hours a week. I found it because I was bored one night and just started reading."

That kind of discovery, Tran argues, is structurally discouraged by modern onboarding design, which funnels users toward a standardized experience and away from the messy, exploratory process that leads to genuine fluency.

The Developers Who Agree

Not every developer is on board with the frictionless gospel, either. A small but vocal contingent of indie software builders has been pushing back against the assumption that onboarding should be invisible and effortless.

Jordan Hess, who builds productivity tools as a solo developer and sells them through his own website, made a deliberate choice to ship his latest app with what he describes as "honest documentation" and no onboarding flow whatsoever.

"I wrote a real manual," he says. "Not a marketing FAQ. An actual manual that explains what the software does, why it does it that way, and what you should know before you start. Some people hate it. But the users who make it through that document are the best users I have. They get the tool. They don't file support tickets asking me to do things the software already does."

Hess acknowledges this approach costs him users at the top of the funnel. People who expect to be up and running in five minutes bounce. But the users who stay, he says, are more engaged, more creative with the tool, and more loyal.

"Onboarding filters for people who want to be led," he says. "Documentation filters for people who want to understand. Those are different users, and they have a different relationship with the product."

Reading the Manual as Resistance

There's something almost countercultural about the manual-reading stance in 2025. It runs against the grain of an industry that has staked enormous resources on the idea that technology should require no learning — that the best interface is the one you never have to think about.

But thinking about your tools, these users argue, is precisely the point. Knowing how something works gives you leverage over it. Not knowing — being comfortable in a guided experience you've never questioned — makes you dependent in ways you might not even recognize.

"I don't trust software I don't understand," Oyelaran says. "And I can't understand software that won't let me explore it. The onboarding experience is designed to make me feel capable without actually making me capable. I'd rather feel lost for a week and actually learn something than feel confident immediately and stay shallow forever."

That's not a sentiment you'll find in any product roadmap. But it might be the most honest description of what technical literacy actually requires — and what we keep trading away in the name of a smoother experience.