Hacker News Reader

Comment by scandox | Hacker News Reader

I'm against this. But: it's 2020 and still a huge number of people I deal with every day type the name of our product into their search bar and then login at the first site returned. Most don't know the difference between a browser and a specific website. It's all just a big Smush to them apparently.

View on HN

Remember when ReadWriteWeb wrote an article about a new Facebook login feature and users who usually Googled facebook login and pressed the first result got all confused and angry? I don't think the average user today is any more knowledgeable about URLs.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/feb/11/face...

Services that cater to the very lowest tier of users should also factor in the risk of that if they want to reap the rewards too. And it's a great thing about an open platform such as the Internet.

I'm also against this in theory, but in practice I don't care much. We shall see.

It's $current_year is never a good excuse. $people not knowing stuff should not mean that everyone should get dumber to match $people.

I agree. What I'm saying is clearly if you want to defeat this then a totally different approach needs to turn up because 20 years of mainstream internet use has resulted in zero user education.

I doubt that. You mention in your parent post that people don't know the difference between a browser and a specific site. I think most people do. At least if they use more then 1 site.

What I meant was that in a tech support context if you ask people what browser they're using they will often say something like "I went to Product Name" or "I'm on Product Name". Then ask them what actual address they visited or again ask them what browser they are using and they will say something like "I went to the Internet".

I am not calling anybody dumb. I'm saying they don't care and don't know there is any reason to care.

I still doubt that. People know how to enter URLs. They chose not to because it's oftentimes easier just to search where you want to go. Google Chrome hasn't gotten this market dominance by people not caring. It has to installed actively.

Even if, showing the URL bar changes nothing for them, so why hide it?

URLs are confusing though. I am a veteran URL user and I learned something about them from this thread. Hiding them isn't necessarily better but many replies here seem to be denying that they are imperfect.

Imperfect and stable+standardized is preferable to unstable+unstandardized, in my opinion.

> $people not knowing stuff should not mean that everyone should get dumber to match $people.

Exactly. We should push on the opposite direction (educate people and make the concepts clearer).

It feels like a long time ago people were talking of computing in context of educating and empowering users rather than accessing commercial services.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com