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Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

This.

The "files and folders" metaphor never worked even in the heyday of computer literacy, most people never understood it and just dumped all their crap on the desktop.

Seeing as the metaphor did not, does not, and will not work it is only reasonable that personal computing is slowly moving away from it and towards something the users actually want: One singular place to store everything (and I mean everything) and a one-stop quick way to find something in there, organization be damned.

Email is perhaps one of the earliest manifestations of this user desire: Everything goes in the one singular Inbox, and you search for whatever mail you need.

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> a one-stop quick way to find something in there, organization be damned.

I understand the desire, and clever search indexing allegedly solves this, but it's fundamentally an impossible tradeoff. Organization is essential to finding things.

I'm tired of people pretending search and AI can solve that problem. It can help, but it can't tell you what x or y thing you want is. I find myself typing nonsense like "what's the thing that's important in speaking" if I watched a video about how to give a good talk and am wanting to watch a part of it again. I haven't given it a title relative to how I think about it, I haven't thought about how to categorize it, and I haven't let a "place" for it settle in my head, because I didn't bookmark it or add it to a playlist.

I prefer being able to find stuff.

Tags or folders, I don't care. But I need some kind of organization. A giant pile with a crappy search box that hardly works does not cut it.

>Tags or folders, I don't care.

My point exactly. The people who cry that the young today can't file-and-folder fail to understand bloody nobody, neither young nor old, cares for file-and-folder.

The problem is that mobile devices lack competent tagging on most things and don't let you organize with folders either.

And folders are a very simple concept. If you can't handle them on a system that uses them, that's bad.

>And folders are a very simple concept. If you can't handle them on a system that uses them, that's bad.

Simple to us. I've seen accountants, aka people who deal with files and folders as a matter of their god damn line of work, fail to understand or care for files and folders in computers. They still put everything on the desktop.

Fact of the matter is people do not care for files-and-folders. It's high time we admit most people do not want it, do not care for it, and just want to store everything in one place with an easy one-stop way to find what they want. Most people don't care about file systems, and both iOS and Android are right for abstracting away something nobody cares about.

Putting things on the desktop or not caring for folders is different from not understanding the concept.

> just want to store everything in one place with an easy one-stop way to find what they want

That's a pipe dream. If you want good search results, then you need to put in organizational effort. Whether or not you're using folders.

>Putting things on the desktop or not caring for folders is different from not understanding the concept.

Yes, but whether they understand or not they still clearly don't care.

>That's a pipe dream. If you want good search results, then you need to put in organizational effort.

The thing is people will not put in effort, whether out of neglect or ignorance. "It's in the 'puter." is as far as most people will care, and operating environments that respect this attitude end up having the widest mainstream appeal and adoption.

It's like manual and automatic transmission in cars. Most people drive their cars to get from A to B, they couldn't give a flying banana how it works. The enthusiasts arguing over stick shift are martians, the people just want a bloody car to get them where they want to be and car manufacturers will and should oblige the people.

Automatic transmissions actually do a good and thorough job. File search, if the user hasn't done any sorting at all, will fail a lot. That's why it's a pipe dream. People can always refuse to sort but they won't get the experience they want.

I like file and folder. I like tags. I need something.

Yeah, and that something for most people is the search box.

For another example of this "I refuse to file-and-folder" phenomenon, try and recount how many people go to Amazon by going to the address bar, typing www.amazon.com, and hitting enter instead of going to Google, searching Amazon, and clicking the first listing.

Fact of the matter is people don't fucking care for file-and-folder, people don't fucking care for locators. For most people, a given something is "in the computer" and that is as far as they can be bothered to care. Abstractioning of file systems and similar constructs to improve end-user usability is the correct decision, given this situation.

Yes, the small handful of us that understand and use file-and-folder and Universal Resource Locators hate the abstraction, but we are Nobody. They (most people) are Everyone.

The Photos app dumping all photos into one singular location with no hints as to where it's located in the file system is better usability for everyone. That's the brutal-to-nerds reality.

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