[3np]

> The "learned helplessness" here is on us, not the users.

I think the big problem here is everyone of the big players “giving up” and trying to obscure and abstract as much as possible rather than make things clear.

Most people understand a phone number +[country] (area) (number).

Basic URL parts like (http/https)://(server)/(address) is not that much more complicated, is it really?

Google and Apple have really set the trend here in making it feel more difficult for users. Things like “unified bar” and hiding the address are just two concrete examples in two decades of “making it easier”.

[Majromax]

> Basic URL parts like (http/https)://(server)/(address) is not that much more complicated, is it really?

Yes. http[s]://www.facebook.com/my/profile?token=goes_here&other_params and http[s]://evil.co/facebook.com/my/profile?token=goes_here&other_params are very different things, but naïvely presented the visual weight is not on the important parts.

[piperswe]

[phone] and [phone] are also very different things, with one being toll-free and the other being pay-per-call, and people seem to be able to understand that

[presentation]

A lot of people don’t, I didn’t even know that 900 means that. But ignoring that, you’re able to verify that the person on the other line almost certainly isn’t who you intended by just having them say anything, whereas evil.co might look literally identical to Facebook. There are security and performance issues that are totally invisible to you when you use http vs https, and the errors you get aren’t just a “that number you dialed is unavailable” but instead some arcane issue about SSL certificates or something, which you didn’t know even existed, whose error page is designed to make you feel literally unsafe. The length of a phone number in a given locality is generally constrained, whereas URIs can be extremely long and complicated, and the effects of a different URI or query parameter are unbounded and differ from website to website based on no consistent pattern, and on top of that as you’re navigating a site you don’t explicitly interact with the URL at all whatsoever, whereas with phone numbers the input pretty much ends the moment you connect your call.

So yes, URLs are way more complex.

[incongruity]

> Most people understand a phone number +[country] (area) (number)

I’d wager most Americans don’t know what our country code is or what country codes are. Just say’n.