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Comment by jccalhoun | Hacker News Reader

I am amazed at how non-techy people use the internet. I teach college and I will sometimes have students go to some web site. I am amazed at how few use adblocking and just accept all the ads and popups and overlays and crap. Even more than that, I will see them using something like google docs and google will put an overlay for some new feature and they don't click the X to close it. They just type away with that overlay in the corner. That drives me crazy. I don't know how they do it.

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You all but certainly overestimate typical technological literacy.

About 5% of computer users have "advanced" literacy, defined as "Some navigation across pages and applications is required to solve the problem. The use of tools (e.g. a sort function) is required to make progress towards the solution. The task may involve multiple steps and operators. The goal of the problem may have to be defined by the respondent, and the criteria to be met may or may not be explicit"

https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/106841164116074208

Even just general literacy and numeracy are ... far lower than you'd expect: https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp

An OECD 20-country survey gives the 5% "advanced" technological literacy statistic: http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/9789264258051-en

Jacob Nielsen discussed that at the time: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/

This is a substantial aspect of my "Tyranny of the Minimum Viable User": https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...

This data is incredible. I cannot believe how the most powerful/richest/most influential country in the world has these kinds of numbers. I notice that it tends to follow a standard distribution but even then, I was expecting the window to be more towards highly educated.

This is so depressing. I have been wondering for a while as to why ~40 percent of the country rarely if ever votes in elections. This might help to explain it.

This also shows that technology people are amassing an unbelievable amount of power in their knowledge of how these systems work and operate given that the masses don't know how to weld that knowledge.

Note that most countries report only basic literacy rates, not functional literacy levels.[1] The apparent poor performance of the US here is largely a function of its own investigation and reporting of of the full extent of literacy.

Note too that lack of English literacy is pronounced in regions with a high immigrant or migrant workforce and population. Illiteracy can exceed 30% amongst Texas counties bordering on Mexico in particular. It's possible that many of those testing with no English proficiency are at least somewhat literate in Spanish or other languages.

But you're mostly confirming my earlier statement: you very likely overestimate typical technological literacy.

________________________________

Notes:

1. That I'm aware of. If anyone has references on comprehensive functional literacy assessments elsewhere than the US, I'd appreciate it. I've not found any on a somewhat cursory search.

>https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/106841164116074208

Fediverse is usually hardcore web 2.0 "runs only in latest Chrome" "I remember entire caniuse.org" sort of stuff, not much different from facebook. So its first adopters can be only non-technical users, but they can't be first adopters of new technology.

Sorry? I'm not understanding the connection here.

Not only that but some of them actually think there's a moral problem with blocking ads.

Perhaps if the advertising industry didn't already prove for 20+ years that they are entirely made up of scum, I would agree. People use ads to make money. I feel bad that they aren't making money passively that way.

But I grew up with ad networks, including Google themselves, turning a blind eye to deceptive ads, bait and switch, fake window popups, and outright scams. The online advertising industry has done everything they could to fuck us over and big tech companies were complicit in the crime.

So that's why I don't care about running an ad blocker. Maybe the advertising industry will have a code of ethics after I'm dead, but until then I'll keep using uBlock Origin and NoScript (and other extensions) to screw with the ad business as much as possible.

Putting aside the ethics, advertising turns the internet into a race to the bottom. Ad blocking is good for the internet because it means that your ads had better be good, minimally intrusive, and also be integrated with the content you are providing. In other words, do things like preroll and midroll sponsorships and referrals rather than slap a bunch of banners on your site that peddle crap du juor.

how are ads passive? Sites have to actively generate new content to get more views.

Bear in mind that many younger people grew up with mobile computing first. So they're not as familiar with the "power user" desktop computing behaviors us older people have developed.

Not dismissing that Google Docs overlay may be explained by any of the following: (a) learned behavior from mobile computing that very few things are configurable (mobile apps tend to have far fewer preferences on how things are displayed; (b) pop ups on mobile often don't close when clicked; and (c) they are used to operating with very tight screen real-estate. I think (c) is most likely.

As someone brought up on desktop computing, I fight to eliminate anything that needlessly wastes screen real-estate such as bloated window chrome. But I think someone brought up on small screens might actually feel agitated by "too much" space.

I think there might be a 4th option, which is that users are trained that clicking on anything other than links will result in pain. Clicking a dialog you didn't read may take you to another page and ask you to enter information. Or it may opt you in to something you don't want or need. It's just a needless distraction. This gets back to what I was saying about "cookie consent" dialogs a few weeks ago. I never click on them. I usually read in Reader view to not even see them. If I can't get the content without clicking something additional, I simply press the back button.

I know a CTO with plenty of wealth and space that sits at a kitchen table with a laptop instead of setting up a home work station.

I know information workers who have workplaces that would gladly pay for nicer monitors or keyboards but don’t bother to even request them.

I know a couple with a brand new house that has a miserably squeaky front door that could be silenced a half dozen ways in under a minute.

People of all kinds contortion themselves into knots, giving little notice to the daily, near constant twinge of their circumstances but don’t improve them.

Tolerating ads is just one example of this.

A kitchen table? That's way more fancy than I bother with. I do most of my programming work from a couch or a hammock. It's a feature, not a bug. I have a workstation with a fancy dock, keyboard and trackpad, but I never really feel like using it. I will, however, close every unnecessary popup that comes my way.

I'd love to work from a hammock, but I get crazy neck and wrist pain when I use a laptop for several hours.

One contracting job I had, on my first day one of my tasks was to do some grunt work right in front of the bathrooms. The men's door was squeaky as all hell.

"Oh don't worry, it's always done that."

I lasted as long as I could but I finally walked over to the shop crew and asked if I could borrow some WD-40. "I'll bring it back in 10 minutes."

10 minutes later it's all "Thanks guys!", "No problem", and "Wow you really did mean 10 minutes!". [Note: I'm a man so there was no problem me stepping into the men's bathroom to make the repair myself].

And the door never squeaked again. My sanity was saved; it turns out I would be doing a decent amount of grunt work in that same area over my contract.

If anyone else ever noticed, they never said a word. The door had always squeaked and literally everyone either didn't care or did nothing about it; it just was how it was.

As an aside, next time, see if there's a silicone lubricant or other lube spray available. WD is good for what it was designed to do, and is barely acceptable as a lubricant. Better than nothing though!

I don’t use adblocking because if a site is so revolting that it requires adblocking to make it usable, I just don’t visit the site at all.

I used to use adblocking but the tiny site Distrowatch made an impression on me. The owner rigged something so that those using adblock also would not see non-ad images. He said it’s really not fair to visit a free site and then block the thing that allows it to be free.

Also, I then read that one of the adblockers would take payments from advertisers to unblock their ads. What a racket.

So I block no ads. This does mean that I don’t look at the vast bulk of news sites because they have obnoxious ads. However, most decent news sites are now pay walled, and those that aren’t are junk anyway. I get my news from some sites I pay for, and from non-profit email newsletters, and from sites my employer pays for. These have few ads.

So I have found no loss from not using adblock. Adblock is like putting on a bulletproof vest to walk through a warzone. Better to just keep out of warzones.

Adblock is like having a bodyguard running ahead of you, making sure the neighbourhood is still safe to walk, just in case someone shady moved in. Added bonus is he drags you along on a rope so you can move faster and bring more groceries from the store.

Adblock makes my slow computer and phone bareable to use on "modern" homepages. Without them the load times multiplies.

My phone isn't even slow and ad blockers are required for most sites to be usable.

Even with an ad-blocker, there are still huge cookie and "join our email list" banners. Banner blindness is just the way things go for most people. Fun little anecdote, in high school I had to work at a pizza joint but the screens where they showed the orders had a gui that looked just like a website. Thanks to banner blindness, I missed important info all the time because it was in places that brain had internalized as looking like ads. I had to really focus on it.

Last year I was building a "Cookie Consent" banner for one of my sites. I wanted to be transparent as possible with it so I had this box come up in the corner to ask for permission, big blue button for OK, big red button (of the same size) to decline, zero dark patterns.

Looking at the analytics after the fact made me realize why these cookie consent boxes use so many dark patterns. My acceptance rate for the box was like 4%, I tossed out cookies (and the banner) in the next update.

I never click on cookie consent banners, period. It has nothing to do with me not noticing them. I just leave them where they are unless they are too intrusive. If they're too intrusive, I leave the page.

The reason that I don't click on them is because I've had bad experiences clicking on them in the past.

Zapping them with uBlock is also a good option.

True.

I've been using an old version of Waterfox until recently, when I finally had to change to a modern browser. Looking at the alternatives, I chose Firefox as the least bad of the available options. On the plus side, this means that uBlock/uMatrix is an option for me now.

Big game changer that, right-click what is bothering you and choose "Block element", then drag sliders to get it perfect. Done.

Nice, hadn't seen those sliders before. Must be a new feature.

It's been around for some time. Not sure how long, but I don't remember it ever not being there.

I still don't see those sliders. Is it something you have to enable in the preferences? Is it mobile-only or something (I don't use a browser on my phone at all, so I wouldn't know...)

I see them now with Firefox on desktop, didn't enable anything specific. They definitely weren't there when I last used the blocking feature, which was probably some time last year.

The best cookie banners have a small neutral button labeled OK to accept only required cookies and then, on the right, a happy big blue button to Accept All. Transparency!

https://how-i-experience-web-today.com/

The best way to prevent that is by disabling JavaScript. Generally, JavaScript is what enables such banners to popup and obstruct your vision with newsletter requests.

The best way is to install uBlock (or your preferred ad blocker), not to disable javascript.

Javascript is like a knife. Do I want people who know how to use a knife in my house? Yes of course. Do I want people that stab other people in my house? No. Nowadays there are tools to leave those people outside your door.

It's time to end the association between javascript and bad web practices.

I use uMatrix. It allows me to block all third party scripts by default, easily unblock them one by one if I need to, and save my changes for sites I visit often.

And well upwards of 95% of all Web users (and I'm willing to bet closer to 99%) ... will not or can not use such tools.

(I support several. Tuning sites where uMatrix or even uBlock breaks stuff is a constant chore.)

Yes, many people can't or won't use uMatrix. And yes, it's a chore to tune sites. But we live in a digital jungle, it's program or be programmed.

An answer to a systematic and institutional abuse relying on individual actions which the overwhelming majority of the population will not or can not undertake ... is inherently unjust.

I use uMatrix. I appreciate the hell out of uMatrix. uMatrix is not the solution to the present level of abusive dark Web patterns.

NoScript goes a long way to fixing this. Yes, it's a chore, but it's less of a chore than the modern web.

There are cosmetic filter lists that filter out most of that stuff, e.g. Fanboy’s Annoyances.

Yes, and it goes further than that: "Should I add an ad-blocker to your browser for an ad-free internet experience.. it'll only take 2 sec." and they respond: "Nah, not needed".

And also "You are using the worst browser available to you (Samsung), shall I install Firefox?" and then "Nah, don't care".

The Samsung browser isn't actually that bad at all. Has some neat features that can't be found in Firefox or even Chrome, like the enhanced video playback tools. Plus it supports adblocking plug ins (though only FF has the much better ublock origin). Keep in mind that tons of website just outright won't work with Firefox mobile too, and it has a very annoying bug that has been known for years where all your tabs will very oftem reload whenever you switch to another app and come back. And that's regardless of how much free ram you have. Samsung browser just... Works.

> Keep in mind that tons of website just outright won't work with Firefox mobile

I know this anecdotal but I'm using FF on Android (Lineage OS without google apps/micro g etc. - only F-Droid) and the only site that causes issues is google.com. For some <sarcasm>unknown</sarcasm> reason it servers images in much lower quality. Of course it's not a technical limitation. If you change your UA to chrome everything goes back to normal. That was the biggest reason I moved to DDG.

> it has a very annoying bug that has been known for years where all your tabs will very often reload whenever you switch to another app and come back

I definitely don't have this issue. I have over a thousand tabs opened, it definitely doesn't reload all of them while I'm switching between apps.

I've had some issues with layout mostly and I never use google products on Firefox, but that may be due to ublock being aggressive with it's filters. And yeah the tab reloading is weird because it only affects some people and when it does it's very constant. Honestly I didn't mind since I'm not affected by the bug anymore since I've upgraded my phone.

The real problem was the add-on removal. I know you can still get them through the collections work around on Firefox nightly but... It's a pain and I'm still honestly baffled that Mozilla would just remove one of the only "selling" points for their mobile browser. I'm not averse to change and I get that it is sometimes needed to cut complexity, so I got why they needed to depreciate stuff likd XAML. But in this case afaik nothing was communicated, the new engine already supports the add ons... but only on nightly? Very puzzling

Ah, could be. But I was not really referring to how good the browser is, but the extent to which I trust Samsung to protect my privacy. They are particularly greedy for your PII on their mobile phones. For instance, after I minimised permissions for my apps, the Samsung Gallery app suddenly popped an "Allow location data" dialog coming from Foursquare.

Edit:

Here's a video showing the Foursquare dialog https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_e-P0hy5QY and also:

"For Korean phone giants Samsung and LG, Foursquare's API will be used in some of their default apps. If you take a picture using a Samsung Galaxy S8 or S8+, the phone will tag your location based on Foursquare's Places database."

https://mashable.com/article/foursquare-asia-tencent-samsung

I don't trust any Samsung software to respect my privacy.

Technical literacy among young people is so depressing. I'm 36 so I grew up in the last of the non-digital native cohort - I vaguely remember life before the internet. But growing up surrounded by computers and the internet, but seeing many of my peers miss out, I was certain that the next generation would be so much more tech savvy. As full digital natives they will learn to code, understand the protocols on which their primary communications are built and just be steeped in this stuff from birth.

How naive I was. No one actually cares. It was like assuming everyone born after 1908 would fully understand how cars work.

I was doing some pair programming with a colleague not too long ago, and after several minutes he was said something to the effect of "Could you close that [expletive] dialogue?" that had popped up to tell me that VS Code couldn't deal with some file extension or other. It had apparently been there the entire time.

I hadn't even noticed it (at least not consciously). I've apparently been trained somewhere to ignore dialogues, and I would hazard a guess that it has something to do with the prevalence of hostile UX patterns.

I'm a very techy person and I interact with modals as little as possible, even if that means ignoring a chunk of my screen. I have a probably-unreasonable sense that it's only going to trigger a bunch of JS or something unsafe [1].

[1]: https://archive.is/TZ7oe was the best, but is kinda dead now. https://blog.malwarebytes.com/threat-analysis/2016/01/clickj...

Why are you directing your students to ad-laden sites that are burning CPU?

I don't use an ad-blocker, and nor do I accept sites with unreasonable ads. I block the whole site by closing the tab or hitting the back button.

We had to make an adjustment on our site to account for that second one. I had just assumed if you have some kind of notice that can be closed, people would close it after they'd had a chance to digest the info (or decided they didn't care, or whatever). But no, turns out the vast majority never close anything unless it's physically preventing them from using the site. (Of course the vast majority also never bother to read anything that doesn't prevent what they're trying to do either, but we already knew that.)

I hate those tutorial popups and refuse to engage them.

In terms of product tours, I'm totally on-board with your students. I don't know how to access that product tip later on, often times revisiting a product tip later on is not even implemented so I'd rather have it stay in place until I have some time to study it. Hopefully I'll be off of the website before I need that.

Oh it's not just non-techy, I think you/we overestimate the techiness of techy people.

I have yet to meet a single person, and yes they are all in the Bay Area tech industry, who knew about pi-hole before I told them.

Been blocking pretty much all advertising on mobile and desktop for years and I couldn't go back. At work I see how the internet is SUPPOSED to look like and it is horrible.

Why don't you use adblocking at work too?

there are too many popups, especially now with how many cookie pop-ups work. So the easiest way is try to ignore it if possible. Ok, yeah, the best way would be to block it completely but as this shows again: humans are lazy creatures. Every click is a click too much.

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