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Comment by nucleardog | Hacker News Reader

Yeah like, I don't wanna point out the typical HN problem but...

Imagine explaining this to someone's grandma.

"Click this Amazon shortcut, type your book name up here, click on it down below, press 'buy now'. If it doesn't show up right away, wait 5 minutes and check again."

Versus... something to do with trying to download mobi files (from where?), starting calibre, starting an import process, locating said files (this is seriously harder than you think for most people), plugging your reader into your PC, running a sync process...

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You're presenting it as if Kobo doesn't have its own store. It does: https://www.kobo.com/ww/en/ebooks

You can access it via Kobo e-reader, same as accessing Amazon's store on a Kindle. Somewhat more limited selection, but both contain Big Five publishers (Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, Simon and Schuster) that own hundreds if not thousands of imprints.

Calibre/OPDS server/custom software (like koreader) are an added bonus for the techies, but it's absolutely not a requirement. If your requirement is ease-of-use, there's no difference. If your requirement is a hacker-friendly device, you can do it on both, but it's in my experience somewhat easier to do on a Kobo.

99% of this difficulty goes away if Grandma uses her phone or tablets browser to download unlimited free books from zlibrary and reads them on the same device.

Honestly the grandma example is starting to feel dated. When I was born in 1980 a 50 year old grandma was born in 1930 and probably didn't own a TV until they were raising their own family.

The same 50 year old today was born in 1972 and would have been 5 when the Apple II hit the scene. At what point do we realize that eventually old folks will be those that only grew up with iphones and stop assuming that anyone with grey hear needs to be assumed to be technically incompetent.

Don't know why you're being downvoted.

This born in '69 53 year old right here is programming backends and frontends for websites, and PySide5/6 Qt5/6 applications.

I'm still sharp as a pin.

Like you say, there has to be some point at which those younger than I stop thinking someone in their 50's isn't as hopeless with technology as they assume.

Of course not everyone in my Gen X'er group will be like me, then again, I know of folks in their 20's who struggle with anything IT.

Quit with the ageism, people. It's getting old ;)

I got yelled at at a conference for using my mum as an example of a user who wouldn’t use some complex software solution. I was told off for being sexist, or ageist or something.

They didn’t get it. My mum is super smart and prolific. She has a PhD in international development and has helped tens of thousands of disadvantaged kids go to school.

It’s not that she’s not smart enough. She just doesn’t care about the technology. She’s not going to spontaneously get comfortable with the terminal and learn rsync. But she can install Dropbox no problem. If a kindle just works and has all the books in easy reach, that’s what I’ll recommend to her. She’s too busy to bother with software that’s not user friendly.

That’s not ageism. I think about her a lot when I build software because I respect her. She deserves to spend her day thinking about her job, not thinking about stupid tech problems.

I agree with what you say. I've witnessed more than enough software with absolutely abysmal UI/UX and don't have time for that myself - except for when I really need to, like this one truly abysmal phone app for an energy company which I need to use to pay for my energy.

It looks and acts like it was designed/coded by idiots; additional popups to remind me to rate the app (already did and it was very negative!), a popup with an "okay, got it" prompt - the only prompt - which instead of setting that yes, I actually did get it, just pops up again the next time reminding me to use some feature I don't want to use.

And so on.

That's obviously the fault of the people involved in vomiting out the abysmal application(s).

But yes I agree, most people simply don't care about the technology, they just want a Thing to do the thing they want it to do, no muss no fuss. This situation has always been the case and I can't envisage a time when it will change.

Nearly 100% of the complexity is DRM and the need to use one device with an LCD screen to browse and one with an eink screen to read and sync from A to B.

DRM free content consumed legally or illegally on the same device is simple as netflix.

Back when Netflix first started, and they were sending out DVDs instead of doing streaming, my stepdad, who is now in his mid-80s wanted to get his money worth. So, he started ripping the movies immediately and returning them the same day, ordering more as quickly as he could. When I went to visit he'd always have added more to his bookcases of DVDs. He recently setup a NAS and Plex and copied them all over. They, my parents, have a streaming service, but they live in the boonies so the connection isn't great, and having thousands of movies and shows ready to go is great for them.

Some old people know a thing or two.

"Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger."

Your stepdad sounds awesome :)

I remember Netflix quickly putting a stop to that by delaying sending out new discs when you got above some weekly threshold. I would drop off my Netflix returns at a huge, regional post office sorting facility, and I knew the discs got back to Netflix in less than 24 hours, yet they would claim they did not receive them for days. Instead of admitting to throttling, they played a shady game.

Yeah. I was born in 1957 and took my first programming class in 1973, assembly language on a PDP-8. Admittedly I'm not a typical 65 year old.

Pfft. Youngster ;). I was born in 1955, I didn't really learn to program until 1980 (and have never programmed professionally), but am plenty tech-savvy. People just have to have the need or interest to be "good" at tech, no matter their age. My mom, who is now in her mid-80s and in memory care, was able to keep up a very active life via email well into her 70s; my wife, who's a couple years older than me, knows enough to use her iPad to read, research and buy stuff online, but hands the device to me for anything more.

I highly doubt that people are thinking of 50 year olds when they're talking about grandmas.

But in answer to your question, I suspect the cliche will slowly die out when most of the 60/70/80 year olds we meet are tech savvy.

A ton of kids these days aren't that tech savvy. I work with high school kids and many have a real lack of understanding about how things work. A large number have no idea how to much with software outside of browser, believe that internet traffic travels through satellites to get between continents, and can't even debug simple printer jams.

This is my gen z experience, I hope you find it somewhat insightful:

- Your first computer given to you was probably a Chromebook at school. It is your browser. Every app is a web page. Docs, Sheets are all web pages. If you were rich or privileged you might have gotten a Macbook at school instead. But nearly everything is a web page. You use Google Docs with your friends and for group projects. I can count the people that had desktop versions of Word or Excel on one hand. You upload your videos to YouTube, presentations to Canvas or Google Drive, you don't bring in a flash drive. If you plug in a flash drive it might just show up as "External Storage (128 GB)" and not /sdcard or /media/USB0 or whatever. Even then, you don't really folder it up. You might use it to copy one file or a ton of images from one thing to another, then you format it when you're done. You don't just keep one around to build stuff up on, why bother, it's on The Cloud.

- You grow up with no hierarchical file organization. Imagine mobile. You have a "Pictures" tab I guess, and a "Downloads" tab? What else is there? You don't have album folders with FLAC files or anything; all your music streams, all your content streams, none of the apps that serve that content allow you to download them into the filesystem, if anything they do their best to prevent that. You don't have a filesystem path on iPhone. You have maybe tags and categories on Google Drive and you don't keep anything on it other than Sheets and Docs stuff that is listed by name, sorted by recent usage, and do not physically exist as files on the filesystem. Tap to select by thumbnail and Most Recent do an insane amount of work to hide what a folder is, nearly nothing but F/OSS f-droid apps on Android will expose things like /sdcard/Something or /sdcard0/emulated/Downloads. You get a selector of thumbnails.

- Mobile is first, always. Phones are cheaper than computers. Every kid has a phone, whether it's for legitimate use or for parents to abusively track them and monitor and record everything they do. Internet is always just kind of around you in the air, magically. You've never really had to think about how continents were connected, there never was a time in your life where the internet wasn't just magically all around you apart from during no signal areas. If you go to a location you ask for the wifi login. You don't ask where you plug in your ethernet cable. When you sign up for internet, unless you are specifically an enthusiast, your ISP gives you mesh wifi pods/gateway/whatever as the default. When you travel, hotel, coffeeshop, class, library, you get a wifi login. If you don't have wifi you use your phone or tether your laptop to your phone wifi.

- Rarely have a printer. If you print in class you weren't allowed to resolve paper jams yourself, and pro-tier laser printers almost never jammed even if you were doing 50+ pages at a time. When was the last time I had to print something? Your presentations are on Google Classroom/Google Drive/etc. Your homework is turned in online. Your concert tickets are on your phone with a moving barcode to prevent screenshotting (hope you have mobile service and it isn't too contended). Amazon returns are just dropped off and show them QR code, you don't print a label and they actively discourage you from choosing an option where you have to print a label.

You have to very actively seek out these things and want to learn, you can't passively pick it up like presumably in the past you had to tinker at least a little - tablets and phones are meant to force you to shut up and consume, not know about it. Chromebooks are intentionally locked down as hard as possible. Every app you use is probably a web page or a web page in a CEF wrapper.

Thank you for this. I've heard little bits and pieces of it before, but I think you've done a great job of summarizing modern "computing" for the vast majority of people.

Thanks, I hope it was useful! The printing thing is an interesting point, because I hear from older people that everyone used to have to type up and turn in their assignments printed out, and handwritten items were refused.

For a long time now, they don't want typed and printed assignments; in fact some of my instructors in primary school would actually look upon these suspiciously - the default assumption is that if you are printing it out you are trying to bypass the anti-plagiarism system. That's also partially why every assignment is turned in online: your writing is run through one or more anti-plagiarism systems (and saved for later use against yourself and others).

Yes, when I was in college (mid-1970s), turning in anything handwritten was forbidden, you had to use a typewriter. Electronic anything, of course, was unheard of; back then the only computer was the big IBM in the computing center and computer science was a subgroup of the math department.

Nowadays the most common use for my printer at home is making Amazon return labels.

High school kids have a lack of understanding of how things work? We should put them in a school or something :P

It sounds like you're the person who could be the one to teach them this stuff, is that not an option?

Larry Ellison is 77

Bill Gates is 66

Jeff Bezos is 58

I think they're doing ok.

> But in answer to your question, I suspect the cliche will slowly die out when most of the 60/70/80 year olds we meet are tech savvy.

Most younger people are also really bad at using computers.

No, not because they're ruined by smartphones—because most people seem to find most current operating systems and computer systems in general unintuitive and hard to understand. They always have and seemingly always will, unless/until UIs and core metaphors in computer interfaces change significantly.

The typical experience of most non-nerds using a computer, no matter their age, is repeating some steps they memorized and hoping the right thing happens. They don't make connections between functionality (say, thinking to try copy-pasting a file, not just selected text), they don't experiment because it usually gets them in some state they don't know how to get out of without help, and any change to UI layout or any kind of pop-up notification confuses the hell out of them. Desktop computers are mysterious, frustrating things. Observe some workers in a non-tech office using their work computers for a while and you'll see what I mean.

Grandmas are 70-90, not 50. At that point we're still close to the second world war, which is a very different path. Those folks simply cannot be expected to have any competence.

As an aside, I work with many folks around 50 and most of them are functionally technologically illiterate. It doesn't seem like such a strange assumption to make from where I'm sitting.

If you're just talking about old enough to have a grandchild, 50 is plenty old -- indeed, old enough to have gotten married after college, had a kid who got married after college, and that kid now has a kid of their own. At least one of my high school classmates did that. (I'm 51.)

If you're talking old enough to be, say, a college student's grandma, then obviously your 70-90 estimate is much more likely.

(Bigger picture: I've been professionally programming for three-and-a-half decades. I find myself more and more annoyed by the user-unfriendliness of tech as I age. As an on-topic example, earlier this month Amazon's mail-to-Kindle feature rejected an EPUB I sent it, and when I used Calibre to convert it to MOBI and sent that instead, lectured me that MOBI was obsolete. I guess this is especially annoying because it seems like they're replacing a service which basically never failed with one that is failing like 10% of the time I try to use it...)

> Grandmas are 70-90, not 50.

To a reasonable approximation:

  - Grandmothers of infants are between the ages of 40 and 80
  - Grandmothers of HN commenters are between the ages of 55 and (dead for decades)

> I work with many folks around 50 and most of them are functionally technologically illiterate

Most people of all ages are functionally technologically illiterate.

Many people around 50 are functionally literate in different technologies than you are. Those may be less relevant, or merely invisible to you as a user.

My son's grandparents are 55-63, and his one great grandparent is 76

The most common child bearing years are 18-25 ergo most people become grandparents between 36 and 50 while only 43% will live into their 70s

1. Turn on the reader.

2. Go to "Kobo Store".

3. Look for a book.

4. Click "Buy".

5. Click the book to open it.

Thats about my workflow in the kobo, assuming I didn't drop a file on there via usb.

A grandma might be pushing it, but my SO learned how to use Calibre and she isn't very tech-savvy.

Also, Amazon isn't as easy as it sounds - I used it a few times and found it quite confusing to get it on my Kindle after purchasing on Amazon. And its a nightmare as I moved country and would prefer to purchase a larger selection of ebooks in English from my home country etc. but I have a separate Amazon account and stuff.. that was even more confusing.

- turn up e-reader

- click apps (if it's not the default screen)

- click "whatever has store in the name"

- buy the book

- rinse and repeat

I'm sure anybody can learn how to do it, even if the brand it's not Bezos's.

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