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Comment by LAC-Tech | Hacker News Reader

The Big Web has “users” – a term Silicon Valley has borrowed from drug dealers to describe the people they addict to their services and exploit.

This doesn't seem like it's true. I feel like it came from the unix culture. Unless they got it from drug dealers...

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This is so painfully bullshit. Imagine the scientists and engineers at bell labs thinking that the operators of their machines are akin to drug addicts.

The common quip is from the mid 90s, usually attributed to Edward Tufte but apparently the real source is "a guy from Wired":

> And o there is this incredible remark which a guy from Wired told me, that there are only two industries which refer to their customers as users, drugs and computers. "I've just got to have release 7.2", right!

[0] https://cryptome.org/jya/tufte.htm

Well they did start development in the 60’s, it wasn’t all pot and acid back then.

Oddly relevant to social media nowadays though.

"Users" was a common term for people at PCs in my early networking days (Novell, early '90s), so it's actually much older than the Web. We made jokes about it being the same term used for junkies, but we certainly never meant it in that context. The people who were "addicted" were the ones running the network; the users were happy to leave it all at the end of the day.

Back when computers were just a piece o your life. Video games the same. It was a corner in your room. Now it's both center an floor.

That's why I haven't bought a console in a decade! It's such a huge time sink when you add it all up; virtual chains that you wear willingly.

That's part of why the metaverse is such dystopian bullshit. Like I need my entire field of view taken away too, so Lord Zuck can sell more ads? Ew, gross, no.

Well the drug dealers were certainly there first, etymonline.com has this to say of "user": Of narcotics, from 1935; of computers, from 1967."

I am struggling to find a source for who first called users "users" back in 1967 - Actually I see it being used in the 1965 "Multics" papers [0] and the 1964 article in The Atlantic "Computers of Tomorrow" [1], as if it was already a term-of-art.

[0] https://multicians.org/history.html

[1] https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~traister/greenbf.html

OED gives the following usages, the first of which suggest users predate computers:

1950 Science 112 732/1 Analog machines..are enthusiastically supported by their users.

1959 E. M. McCormick Digital Computer Primer x. 139 The number of instructions which can be executed by a computer represents a compromise between the designer's and user's requirements.

Thanks for a good reference! It makes sense that "users of a service" or "user of a machine" slipped its way into computer jargon, no need to be coined or anything.

I'm tempted to pick up a copy of Digital Computer Primer on ebay, I love the old explanations of what these machines even are.

There’s a lot of ideology in that article that I find appealing… but then they tie it to specific tech in a way that doesn’t make sense.

Same reaction. At first I thought I was reading something about small websites and wresting control from centralized cloud and social media companies, and suddenly it turns into something about some JS package? Tangling with anything JS does not strike me as the simplest way to host your own small site.

at least they're not calling them 'lusers' as was so common back then

A 1996 definition and a 2003 version of that definition.

   151 "user" jargon "The Jargon File (version 4.4.7, 29 Dec 2003)"
   user
   n.

1. Someone doing "real work" with the computer, using it as a means rather than an end. Someone who pays to use a computer. See {real user}.

2. A programmer who will believe anything you tell him. One who asks silly questions. [GLS observes: This is slightly unfair. It is true that users ask questions (of necessity). Sometimes they are thoughtful or deep. Very often they are annoying or downright stupid, apparently because the user failed to think for two seconds or look in the documentation before bothering the maintainer.] See {luser}.

3. Someone who uses a program from the outside, however skillfully, without getting into the internals of the program. One who reports bugs instead of just going ahead and fixing them.

The general theory behind this term is that there are two classes of people who work with a program: there are implementors (hackers) and {luser}s. The users are looked down on by hackers to some extent because they don't understand the full ramifications of the system in all its glory. (The few users who do are known as real winners.) The term is a relative one: a skilled hacker may be a user with respect to some program he himself does not hack. A LISP hacker might be one who maintains LISP or one who uses LISP (but with the skill of a hacker). A LISP user is one who uses LISP, whether skillfully or not. Thus there is some overlap between the two terms; the subtle distinctions must be resolved by context.

   .
   151 "user" foldoc "The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (30 December 2018)"
   user

1. <person> Someone doing "real work" with the computer, using it as a means rather than an end. Someone who pays to use a computer. A programmer who will believe anything you tell him. One who asks silly questions without thinking for two seconds or looking in the documentation. Someone who uses a program, however skillfully, without getting into the internals of the program. One who reports {bugs} instead of just fixing them. See also {luser}, {real user}.

Users are looked down on by {hackers} to some extent because they don't understand the full ramifications of the system in all its glory. The term is relative: a skilled hacker may be a user with respect to some program he himself does not hack. A LISP hacker might be one who maintains LISP or one who uses LISP (but with the skill of a hacker). A LISP user is one who uses LISP, whether skillfully or not. Thus there is some overlap between the two terms; the subtle distinctions must be resolved by context.

2. <jargon> Any person, organisation, process, device, program, {protocol}, or system which uses a service provided by others.

The term "{client}" (as in "{client-server}" systems) is rather more specific, usually implying two processes communicating via some protocol.

   [{Jargon File}]

   (1996-04-28)

.

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