Comment by RiderOfGiraffes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RiderOfGiraffes | Hacker News Reader

RiderOfGiraffes

This was posted some time ago, and the comments there are interesting:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=662105

I said in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=662151 :

  More and more, producers of programs are hiding the
  details, making it easier for people to just get on
  with things and solve their problems, without having
  to worry about the details of how it happens, and the
  machinery underneath.

  Then others, no doubt technical people, go and interview
  the users in order to show just how ignorant they all are.

  Did I get that right?

  If you want to make computers and services easy to use,
  you don't want people to be able to answer these questions.
  You want people to find your service, use it, and remain
  completely unaware of the technology.

So while it's true that you are not average, the ignorance these people are showing is exactly the ignorance being given to them, forced on them, by makers of programs. And said makers are proud of that - their programs are "easy to use" and "intuitive."

Don't laugh and deride people for becoming exactly what you make them become. Be proud that you've done your job so well that they don't know what a browser is.

Why should they know? Everything is "intuitive."

I worked on the online strategy of a non-profit campaign in my country.

The people I worked with were really smart, but when it came to writing web articles other people could read, they were blissfully ignorant.

The CMS I built had an intuitive interface with a WYSIWYG editor. I made the choice to have less functionality than TinyMCE because their already written articles were terrible ... no correct alignment, no intuitive paragraphs, verbose sentences that could make you yawn from the first 5 seconds, content that used medical jargon, and complete disregard for their audience.

I tried to write them emails explaining to them what one should or shouldn't do when publishing to the web. I trained them face to face. No effect.

I later discovered that they copy/pasted the documents from MS Word. The copied text carried over Word's formatting, and because it didn't look like in Word, they tried to make it look better by visual editing, or by totally ignoring the results.

One day I deactivated the WYSIWYG editor, telling them that they should learn HTML. Enough to say that they were so upset that I'm now no longer helping them with anything.

I'm not even talking about using technology here. I'm talking about basic skills you need when writing a clear essay ... kids are supposed to learn this stuff in school.

This is not necessarily about people being trained by us to be ignorant. This is something more deeper than that ... people are becoming lazier and more ignorant and disconnected from their work and the world at large. Maybe it's information overload. Maybe it's the paradox of choice. I don't know.

I see your point here and I mostly agree. However, as a software engineer I am constantly learning the "machinery underneath" and it frustrates me to see people make absolutely no attempt to learn even the basics. I mean "A piece of software" would suffice as a response to his question. I guess I know what my mechanic must feel when he deals with me.

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