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Comment by saghm | Hacker News Reader

My favorite story of just how little people who aren't as tech savvy don't differentiate between different parts of the browser UI (which naturally leads to clicking things that are best left unclicked) is when my grandmother told me her "internet was broken" and asked me to fix it. I was mentally preparing for a call to Verizon or something, but no, when she finally showed me, it turned out that one of the bookmarks on her toolbar in Safari had gone missing (presumably she accidentally deleted it). After I added it back and she clicked it to see that it opened properly, she was satisfied that I had fixed the internet. To her, when she opened Safari, it was all just "the internet"; she didn't differentiate between the local browser UI and the web, let alone different elements on a single webpage being from different sources.

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It was even worse in the 90s/00s - on Windows, the IE browser icon was literally labeled “The Internet”

iirc there was a story in The Onion about someone who “accidentally deleted The Internet” on their Windows system and the whole Internet stopped working. They were so sorry, maybe it was in the Recycle Bin, there was still hope for the world, lol

This, Jen...is The Internet.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg

There’s this: [All Online Data Lost After Internet Crash | The Onion](https://youtu.be/lvpuT3aoypE?si=UI8wTzkNXdEKMO4x) which is pretty funny but doesn’t contain the idea of moving the internet into the trash bin… I feel like I remember that from somewhere too though

Peter's Computer - Desktop Cleanup https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_XaJdDqQA0

Had a kid suspended for changing the icons on the Mac computers at school. He jsut wanted them to be prettier and was a wiz at pixelart.

Teacher claimed he hacked the computer because she couldn’t find icon and refused to admit she was wrong. Everyone hated her. Wonder why….

Any way kid became a legend after the suspension.

This isn't about users not being tech savvy enough. Ad Blocking has always been a safety issue. Many of the ransomware infections in enterprises were actually drive by ad driven exploit networks.

Sandboxes get better, yeah, but this is akin to leaving your door open in a neighborhood with violent crime and then saying I built this awesome laser guided Kevlar chamber that scans introducers upon entry instead.

No disagreement here! My point is more that the bar for what's enough to be a safety issue in ads is actually extraordinarily low, which is exactly why I don't have any qualms about using the strictest measures possible to block all ads even as someone who, at least in my own perception, is pretty tech savvy.

In my mind, the entire ad industry is basically not worth enabling. I'm not nearly as concerned with the hypotheticals of "what if literally everyone started using ad blockers and ad-supported content disappeared?"; that's firmly in the "I don't know, but it's a problem I'd definitely prefer to have to what we have right now" bucket.

That hypothetical isn't even a problem. That we need ads to support freely available stuff online is a myth that the advertising industry wants you to believe but people have been sharing their creations long before everything came with an ad. And much of what you see on ad-supported sites today isn't even funded by those ads, only the hosting is.

Low resolution conflation of things is a very understandable outcome. It’s a lot of vocabulary to absorb to speak precisely about UI in general. I’m glad your grandmother has someone like you in her life.

Not at all evident from the story I told, but she had a stroke a few years ago and then only survived another year after that. She lived a long and from what I could tell happy and fulfilled life though, and to the end seemed far more concerned about how others were doing than herself (during my last conversation with her, the first thing she wanted to know about was how my then-girlfriend-now-wife was doing because she had developed an autoimmune issue out of nowhere around the time that they had met a few months prior).

On the whole, she was actually pretty admirable in how gracefully she aged. In her 80s she decided on her own to move into an elder living community not because she actually was having any issue doing things on her own, but because she knew that it was inevitable that she would start needing help and wanted to make sure she was somewhere that was equipped to handle it when it happened. She also decided on her own to surrender her license because she didn't think she should be allowed to drive anymore and took advantage of the community's shuttle buses when she needed to go places. I think she would have been the first one to say that she did not think she should not be the one trusted to make sure that she could use her computer safely and that systems that required people like her to know what to click are unethical!

My girlfriend worked in IT and people would frequently complain that Microsoft was down whenever something went wrong.

I once was asked why the internet went away when he closed Internet Explorer. I really didn't know what to say.

I’d have probably have said that the Internet hasn’t really gone away: it’s still there in the same way that the outside street doesn’t go away when you close the curtains of your front room. That’d be my simple analogy.

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