Hacker News Reader

Comment by Invictus0 | Hacker News Reader

Home Depot sells a service where you can pay $100 to have a professional handyman come to your house and knock four nails into your wall to install a shelf. People pay this because the level of complexity of using a hammer is too high. I have seen the light go out of the eyes of people with a non-technical background trying to explain even the most basic of engineering concepts (most recently, why I can't get a 10lb meterlong brick to magically lift itself out of its packaging). HTML might be the most simple language we have, but it's not simple in an absolute sense, and nothing about setting up a website outside of the platforms really is. Ask your non-technical friends: I bet most of them are not even familiar with the concept of hosting a site.

View on HN

I am abundantly aware of the skills of most people. I even addressed exactly what you said in my response numerous times. I specifically said you can pay someone to host your site using site builders, templates, etc. None of that prevents someone from hosting their own site. You seem to be conflating hosting your own site from building a site from scratch. Chances are if someone doesn't have the ability to even pay someone to host their site, they aren't the target for this conversation and your point is essential moot.

No, you're just not grasping the difficulty here. Every time you introduce a new vocabulary word, you add cognitive load to learn that definition. Google "what is hosting" and you will get even more confused when they start talking about servers. Then they add extras: privacy guard, mail, SSL, even just getting a domain. To complicate things more, if you ask anyone vaguely technical for help, they will start talking about how you're getting ripped off and recommend S3 buckets and FTP access etc etc. These are not simple things; and I'm not saying all that to say oh, there's some idiots out there that can't do it; I'm saying this because when I built my own website, at 17 years old and with absolutely no CS background, my personal experience was that it was a very big learning curve and I think the average person just will not make it.

With a platform, you just... write. And it just works.

I stand corrected, you have proven that it is impossible for some people to grasp even basic concepts when determined to do so. I yield that my front line support for end users of over 13 years provides me no insights into the average, or even below average user and that your experience setting up a website at 17 trumps everything. There's just no possible way with good support some people could set up their own website, blog, or otherwise despite the fact that so many actually do it every single day. Congratulations on winning.

There's a weird bug in human psychology where anything we can easily do ourselves is considered "easy" in an absolute sense, even if we've literally spend years or even decades acquiring the skills that make it so easy. No patch is forthcoming and the issue has been marked WONTFIX in the tracker.

If you can't point and click then you cannot use a computer and you're not hosting a blog, you're probably not using a computer. There's no one who can post to Facebook that doesn't have the capability to host their own website.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com