hey everyone. if you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout today, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy! Thanks!
hey everyone. if you want to post links or discuss the Reddit blackout today, please localize it to this thread in order to keep things tidy! Thanks!
Agree and disagree … when we say “people shouldn’t have to learn anything to use a technology,” that shifts any focus on better education to dumber services.
I think it’s not necessarily just dumber or more impatient people who can be soft-locked out by this, though. People who are too short on time to put a lot into hobbies (e.g. single mom working two jobs, and others with very busy irl lives) or learning a new unfamiliar system may also be left out, or older people with a anxieties or self-defeating beliefs about their ability to learn. And remembering here also that we are used to learning new internet systems, but that’s a skill in itself even though it feels easy to us.
Leaving people on platforms that have ad-drive, hate-elevating algorithms also has consequences for all of us when it comes to politics and conspiracy spread.
Technology is a tool, and the tool should be as intuitive to a human newly encountering it as possivle, imo. If people make the same mistakes or have the same confusion with something again and again, it means the system is badly designed for humans, not that the humans are dumb.
I think there is a lot of opportunity to address this through applications. Discord’s “servers” are about as complicated as Lemmy’s/Mastodon’s instances, but there is a lot of opportunity to smooth over the “copy this into the search field of your home instance”. Indeed, on Jerboa, I already just got a subscribe button.
I like to think of it as streamlining, the busy parent working two jobs doesn’t have to much around with all the intricate details, but they are there if needed.