[idle_zealot]

Am I missing something or is the thesis of this piece, or at least its main action item, a demand that everyone all of a sudden "grow up" and accept personal cost and inconvenience, and that will somehow save the open web? It acknowledges systemic problems, and then totally ignores them in favor of prescribing a pie-in-the-sky solution. It's like saying we could solve homelessness if only enough people would give to charity and take someone in off the street. Technically true, and I'd love to meet the alien species to whom it is relevant, because they sound swell.

I find it particularly disappointing as a conclusion because its a strange curveball on what otherwise seemed to be the obvious conclusion it was building to: if we want the open web to survive then it has to be convenient to use. We need to grow up from our RTFM tendencies and build technology that people can intuit how to use without a manual. Approximately nobody wants to spend their time reading a manual to learn to operate a chat application or publish a blog. We even have an opportunity afforded to us by enshitification and declining software quality. The bar is lowering on being the easiest option!

[pdonis]

The problem is that building technology that people can intuit how to use without a manual takes more time and effort than a person can afford to spend on a hobby project. It has to be a business. Which means it's not just a matter of doing the tech right; it's a matter of finding a business model that supports the open web. And that means displacing the current business models that don't, but which have a lock on the market.

[smitty1e]

> We need to grow up from our RTFM tendencies and build technology that people can intuit how to use without a manual.

Concur to a point here. But these technologies don't drive the bell curve of the population.

This conversation could be repackaged as: "Why doesn't the distribution drift toward the technologically savvy tail?"

Sorry. People don't scale. As popularity grows, all drifts toward the mean.

You can have smartphones, but you will inevitably ooze toward a small number of providers making commodities out of the users.

Sites like HN will be the outlier.

Technological gravity, boss.