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by alleyshack 2653 days ago
This requires a lot of things which aren't obvious:

1) the person to realize the site is broken because of something on their end (as opposed to the site being broken because of something "on the internet")

2) the person to realize the cause of the breakage is ublock

3) the person to be able to find the ublock logo (not always obvious; some browsers hide extensions, sometimes people don't know where to look, sometimes they don't know "the little red shield" == "the ad blocker causing my problems")

4) the person to understand what the big power symbol does - if you only click the ublock logo, it's not obvious to a layperson that the power symbol is a button

5) the person to be comfortable clicking the button, and not more afraid of "breaking the internet" than they are desiring to fix the issue

I do informal tech support for family members who could not get past steps 1 or 2, even if I've explained it to them. We who spend our lives on the Internet take a lot of the things we grok about it for granted, but someone who only occasionally uses a computer won't necessarily have the foundation to make the connections we do when faced with a problem like this.

1 comments

At multiple paying day jobs with HN-class expert technical users, I have found that 2) is precisely correct here: it simply doesn't occur to them that [non-advertising non-tracking site feature] could be breaking because of [advertising tracking blocker]. The most recent instance of this was Tuesday.