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Comment by sumeno | Hacker News Reader

Registering a domain name may as well be magic to a large portion of the population.

Is it more complicated than buying and owning a car? A house? More complicated than filing your taxes, managing retirement savings, having a wedding, choosing insurance?

Learning the basics of something new, enough to get by, is part of being an adult, even if you won't ever be and have no interest in being an expert.

Given the number of bad financial decisions people make because they don't really understand those things I'm not sure that those comparisons are helping your case, but even so, for a lot of people it IS more complicated than those things because they are afraid of technology in a way that they aren't afraid of tangible things.

Solving 99% of technical problems requires nothing more than Google and following instructions in the first result, but people still can't handle it. Most people haven't given running a website enough thought that they would even know what to look for. A good portion don't even really understand URLs enough to type facebook.com into the address bar instead of Googling Facebook and clicking the first result.

I'm not sure those people are so willing to brand themselves online. If they are, they already have the capital to have someone else do it for them.

The process of registering the domain behind the scenes might be a bit magic but buying one and pointing it at a hosting provider certainly isn't.

You're ignoring (or overestimating) the enormous segment of the population who wouldn't even have an Internet presence if it didn't come with the phone, and getting the phone was already the one of the most mentally challenging things they've done in years.

Not really. I know people with zero tech knowledge who have done it. Anyone able to register a trademark. Art director, actors etc.

Right, and it's not like you couldn't ask a technical friend to get it done.

I'm not an advocate for anything that results in even more people bugging me to do "computer stuff" for them

I've read all of your comments in my subthread and I agree with everything you've said. Especially this! It was immediately what came to mind but I hit my post count.

This problem of getting people to care about alternatives to Facebook seems to be something you've given a lot of thought as well. Mind if I ask what field you work in?

I work at Google (with the standard disclaimer that my opinions are my own), with a history in the financial and defense industries. Nothing particularly related to Facebook, but I'm sympathetic to the concerns around Facebook. I just think HN tends to miss the forest for the trees when discussing alternatives

Understandably so, after all HN is its own little echo chamber. Technophobia is a real problem and we can't just tell people to "get over it" and join the rest of us, who have likely spent our entire lives working with computers for hours a day.

And asking someone to rely on their geek friend for deployment, education and support instead of relying on a stable platform like Facebook is just silly. Unless we can provide a similar, stable and feature-packed platform then there is just no perceptible incentive for people to make the switch.

I mean heck, Google couldn't even do it.

I think the problem needs to be attacked from multiple vectors. Simply building a technologically superior platform with better privacy control isn't enough. There needs to be a real shift in understanding about the dangers of big social media.

You've enlarged the scope of my comment tenfold, it was that you could ask a friend to help register a domain or move it, that might happen once or twice a decade.

But what about teaching them proper security practices, deployment practices, maintenance, all of those things that go into actually running a website? Even if its just using Wordpress or a static site generator? Registering a domain is the tip of the iceberg in hosting your own content.

The are being paid to do so. Also they see it as part of the job.

So what can we do to make this simpler? Make the technology easier to understand?

You could provide a one stop shop for sharing information with the people you care about that is easy enough to use that even people who are afraid of technology can handle it... also everyone they know needs to already be on it... but then you just created Facebook.

The ease of use is only one part of the problem, the other part is that you are trying to solve a problem that a lot of people who use Facebook just don't care about. Facebook fills their need and they really don't care about walled gardens or open internet or whatever else the HN crowd views as a dire issue.

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