[anders_p]

"No one's that stupid"

99.9% of people are not like you.

They barely even know the difference between Windows and Google.

People who got online when smartphones entered the scene have a difficult time when I try to explain what "folders" and "files" are.

I do a lot of tech support for family and friends.

They NEVER enter settings or preferences for their OS or their browser.

They're afraid they'll "break something".

The disconnect between tech literate people like you, and what they think most users want - or even care about - is mind blowing.

Does anyone here remember the headache you'd get, when helping a family member, and you saw how many toolbars and viruses they'd managed to install, since you last checked their PC two months ago???

The lockdown is a feature - not a bug - in most user's minds.

And I has made my life so much easier.

I use Linux and side load apps.

But I'm so, so, happy that none of my family members are even able to do the same.

[lovich]

>They're afraid they'll "break something".

Right? I feel like my non technical social connections have an even greater learned helplessness from interacting with any sort of open to customization technology because they've learned that everytime they touch something the tool stops working in a way they don't understand. Most people are not going to spend days to weeks, and definitely not months to years learning how to tinker with and expertly maintain their technology.

I feel like technologists in this forum are acting like blacksmiths who would scoff at any of us for having purchased a hammer, rather than smelting the ore, forging the head, and carving the handle so we could have one that fit our needs perfectly.

[saurik]

I dunno... the way it feels on the other side is that y'all think people are too dumb to not hurt themselves with hammers--which is true!!--and so, rather than trust that people who are afraid of hammers will simply avoid using a hammer they should be actively prevented from even owning a hammer, or even letting their friend or a hired carpenter use a hammer to help them, which is kind of overkill.

[bzzzt]

Relying on people not being dumb doesn't work out in practice.

There's lots of stuff you're not allowed to do because we figured out the average person can't do it without endangering others.

[bombolo]

> which is kind of overkill.

But a profitable one

[klibertp]

Well, it's a fact that all that technology is incredibly brittle. Systems lack resilience, error recovery, and accessible debuggability, and when something breaks, there's a high chance it'll have disastrous effects. It's objectively safer to stay within the "works for me" happy paths that authors are likely to be actually testing/using themselves. Even this sometimes fails, sometimes seemingly without reason, only to later (maybe) start working again. It's a nightmare, a constant source of stress and another thing that people feel they have no control of at all. It's not strange users flock to authoritarian-style environments, managed by someone who do have the capability to control that chaos to some extent - even if they sell users' PII data to Sunday and back.

There are complex reasons for this, but the end result is simply that IT is not ready for mass adoption. Software is still in its infancy - I suspect that the broader the possible implications of technology, the longer it will take it to be ready to be mass adopted. We gave up all hopes of ever proving program correctness in the 80s, then in the last decade we've given up all pretenses that we know what we're doing... and nobody saw a difference. By all rights, software should be confined to research labs and garages of nerds for quite a few more decades.

The problem is that this technology is too useful. It has too far-reaching applications in almost all spheres of human activity. When the software (and all layers below it) actually works, it brings small miracles to its users, enough that they're willing to pay a lot for a product obviously unfinished, rushed, that'll probably get killed after few years. They think that, yeah, it breaks all the time and I'm afraid to breathe in its direction, but it's ok, I'm strong, I can deal with it if I'm able to do X or Y.

Tl;DR? I dunno. Maybe developers should put more effort into professionalizing the field, but this kind of thing is impossible to rush. Or maybe the users should get a grip and accept that it's not developers who force them to use their products. The massive amounts of money involved, along with the life-changing potential of IT products, skew incentives so much that, currently, both developers and users pretend that it's all fine, even though it obviously isn't, and then both complain. Users are stupid, developers are lazy, but neither can live without the other any longer...

[Dalewyn]

>People who got online when smartphones entered the scene have a difficult time when I try to explain what "folders" and "files" are.

Not just the grandpas and grandmas either:

https://it.slashdot.org/story/21/09/23/163212/todays-student...

[usrbinbash]

I wholeheartedly agree; locking down systems is a feature, not a bug.

I would go even further and say it's not just so in the users minds, it is also so in the admins mind, whether that's a business setting where we have to make sure thousands of workers don't accidentially brick their PC (or worse: cause an infosec issue), or a family setting.

Though I have to say, that lockdown-feature comes with a rather heavy price tag attached, because, well, the systems in question do a whole lot more than just make the locking down easy, do they?

It would be great if commonly used Linux Desktop Environments allowed for a switchable (with root-privileges) "Lockdown". I'm aware that this is possible already, but requires too many steps and is too error-prone. What I want is a simple on/off-cmd offered directly by the Desktop-Suite for me to issue as root.

That would allow people like you and me to setup computers for non technical people to use easily, whith the benefits of both an open system, and the stability a locked down system provides.

[trelane]

Isn't this just admin vs a regular user account?

[pas]

You are falling prey to your own model :)

The important thing to notice is that the median user's mind is neutral about features like lockdown, security, side-loading, and everything else, because they don't think about features. They think about concrete interactions, like "playing candy crush", or "talking to grandma/grandkid", or "buying stocks", or "trying that app that my coworker showed me".

And when they can't do it ... "it didn't work for me" ... they, ironically wisely, don't even speculate why it did not work. The folks you see on forums who recommend "doing factory reset and it'll work" or "clean the cache", etc... are obviously the "Dunning-Kruger poster kids".

Median users are monkey see monkey do, that's why if they see "it works on Ted's iPhone" then their thought is "I guess I'll get an iPhone". And ... it works. The US is iPhone-land.

...

And interestingly this hyper-pragmatic (arguably too narrow-minded) approach to technology is also what leads to the interesting cases when enough teenagers want Fortnite on their iThing. And that's when the generalizer machine of society can pick up this thing and sometimes it spits out useful principles. (Mostly we get just one more bad statute on the books.)

[mike_hearn]

You're making statements about how people think in general, but most of the world isn't iPhone land.

[pas]

Most of it perfectly applies to the Android universe too.

And the US device market is still the trendsetter, which is basically Appleistan.

[mike_hearn]

Apple is only about half the US mobile market, and the rest of the world the trend is clearly Android. So calling the US market the trend setter seems odd because if that were the case then the rest of the world would be trending strongly iOS but this pattern has been stable for years.

[pas]

I mean with regards to the sideload-lockdown, ApplePay-or-nothing, privacy-CSAM-detection trade offs.

Apple is the premium brand, the Goliath in the market, especially considering revenue and profit.

Even if there are many Android phones they are of various brands, and Alphabet/Google is not rocking the boat, F-Droid works relatively okay.

[xen2xen1]

I just want it to work! Stupid thing! Why is it so slow!