The Internet is Hard (RWW on users vs geeks) | Hacker News Reader

The Internet is Hard (RWW on users vs geeks)

readwriteweb.com

40 pointsdavidmurphy17 comments

I read this with a cringe the whole time. I actually found it a little depressing. I just want to say "Really...?! REALLY?!"

It's easy to write these kind of users off as idiots, but this reminds me that any time you mess with a users' interface by trying to improve it, you have to tread carefully, or you'll confuse the kind of folks that can't tell the difference between a random blog and the #2 website in the world (and who get there by typing "Facebook login" into "the internet").

I can't even try to make a serious comment without a tinge of bitter sarcasm. This disappoints me way more than something like this should. It's so irrational to care that much.

But they're just so frustratingly dumb.

I tried to explain to my wife why this story was funny yesterday. It was hopeless. She simply could not get it. Her sympathies were with the FB users, "Oh yeah. Facebook is constantly changing their interface. It drives me nuts too." Huh?

A few weeks ago, she really helped me understand this gap when she said, "I used to use email, now I use Facebook." I desperately wanted to explain the difference between a protocol and a web app, but then thought, why? She does not care. For her, FB is simply email plus.

I think it's a mistake to generalize from those RWW commenters to "normal users." Of the millions of people who logged on to Facebook yesterday, many thousands probably got there via Google, and fewer than fifty ended up commenting on that post (though there were probably many more who clicked the post but didn't comment). The commenters are not normal computer users; they are a very aggressively filtered 99.999th percentile of the users who have the most trouble navigating the web.

And this is why phishing actually works...

This also shows that the phishing page doesn't even have to look like the original page. An username and a password field would do the trick.

As long as you have google referral juice.

This is the funniest story I have read in such a long time. If you didn't believe it before believe it now. People are idiots.

Those users generally don't pay, they are interested in wasting the rest of their time on the Internet and will run quickly from your site.

However, developers and techies have the money and will pay for great services you build (if it makes them more productive or help them handle awkward tasks).

I don't know. As sjs382 says above you, "normal" people are the reason that phishing works. Or spam still happens.

It's also about market, right? Even if 10% of non technologically inclined people buy something, it's probably more than if 50% of the techies did.

Also, these people are a great reminder of why the iPad is going to sell like hotcakes.

We (geeks) are immersed in technology and have no idea of the disconnect between our perception of the interface and the "farmville" population.

Once in a while, specially when I get flustered at family members who can't tell the difference between the browser, email, and what-not ("the internet"), I find it useful to remind myself of my initial encounter with the 'machine' (15 yrs old, few decades ago). The distinction between the OS, command line, and the actual application (the Star Trek game on a terminal system) was entirely lost on me: The paradigm of a layered system simply was not in my conceptual toolkit and it was initially a completely seamless experience.

I wish I was able to properly do that. A lot of times, it's really hard for me, as I started with BASIC when I was 7, and so I can't really remember a time when I didn't code. That whole experience is essentially lost for me. It's like saying, "Try remembering how hard it was to learn to read."

So I try to just be extra cognizant of the fact that most people just don't _get it_ like we do.

> So I try to just be extra cognizant of the fact that most people just don't _get it_ like we do.

Your experience actually strikes a hopeful note. The latest generation is born into an information society (unlike yours and mine). As long as we (geeks) do not demand [from] the users to code to interact with the software, it is highly doubtful that this batch will have any problems with intricate UIs, and that the problem highlighted by the OP is transitional.

The iPad wouldn't have helped these people. They can obviously launch a browser successfully, but having done that they have no clue that there are sites other than Google and Facebook. Unless Apple's next brilliant innovation is to remove Safari's URL bar and have giant buttons mapped to the top 10 sites. And no you can't configure them, only geeks would want to do that...

That's actually a great idea. If people don't get the address bar, you might as well take it away and get more viewport. A couple buttons could actually do the job for that segment of users. On top of that, you can sell an app that enables users to map those buttons to other sites.

The iPad is perfect for these people. They'll just download "Facebook", "Google" and "Amazon" from the App Store and never even open Safari.

Doesn't the new Safari have something like that? Those big "top site" previews that appear when you start a new page. Chrome too, only they don't pre-populate the list of sites for you.

In my experience, the opposite is true. Technologically savvy people are used to the idea that stuff is free--they will search for torrents and keygens before paying.

Other people won't.

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