When I was growing up, we had operating systems that exposed a lot of the technical details about their inner workings, and websites that let us use code to customize them, like MySpace and Geocities. UX designers in tech have since optimized away most of the stuff that allowed and encouraged people to learn to use technology and now people get confused by files and browser tabs. And as the knowledge shrinks, more and more things have to be simplified away. I only ever see it as a one way road.
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Hi @Gargron,
this seems a thread about #convivlal #tools without naming it such.
Tools are either #emancipative or #convenient. The smarter they are. the dumber and more dependant you. The less smart the tools, the more skill is trained in you. Choose #agency or #convenience. #Priorities matter. #Longread: https://archive.org/details/illich-conviviality
@gargron Oh, you can't imagine how glad I am right now. I've blamed UI/UX so many times for making stuff worse.
So.
Much.
Worse.
Be it with HTML in emails, be it with "simplification". And I've had discussions so many times. .. oh, and how I've have blamed (and still do) Apple for hiding technical details behind "convenience", for making users dumb.
I know it feels ableist these days, but I am still convinced that technology (like, everything with computers) is too complex and too dangerous to be put in everyone's fingers. Or especially into politicians hands (see #fckplntr or every other surveillance dream or the recent signal "hack" or almost any regulation at the expense of the people instead of big tech or administration (at least in Germany))...
So thanks again fur the UI part.🙏
@Gargron Albert Einstein: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
(For people which don‘t trust citates, here is, what he really said: “It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.” ;)
@Gargron it's too bad mastodon is a twitter clone instead of a myspace clone that would have been rad
70%population of world doesn't need to be a tech savy to use any thing.... People want simple and easy to use stuffs in life... Company that making/creating stuffs needs tech nerds to create those stuffs. because of simplicity & easy to use nature users ready to sacrifice their privacy too. I mean why people need technical knowledge about how a call or message works in background?
@Gargron
NeoCities says you're just old.
@Gargron when i describe something as a directory rather than a folder, i get this blank expression.
Yeah, I feel this so much. It's like we traded all that messy, creative potential for a sleek surface that nobody's allowed to scratch. Makes you wonder what we've actually lost in the name of "user-friendliness.
When you come to the fork in the road, take it.
when I was growing up, you could open the hood of a car and understand what all the parts were
now it is buried beneath an enormous tangle of pipes and hoses and stuff
when my grandfather was a kid, he could fix a manual typewriter
etc etc back to the stone age guy who whined about the new fancy imported spear throwers
@Gargron Are you hinting of a geocities like interface to customize Mastodon? Now that would be awesome.
@Gargron I honestly think both paths can be walked at once.
Customizing your UI teaches you practically nothing about computers, no more than installing a different launcher on Android teaches you about what's going on inside a smartphone.
What i love about #elementaryOS for instance, is that it's very simple to use. The UI is pretty and straight forward. Customizing it is limited to wallpaper, dark/light theme and accent colors.
But when i want to do advanced stuff... 1/2
@Gargron one of the things that bother me most is that UI designers have this idea that if you have a good design any documentation becomes unnecessary. Technical documentation is becoming useless or non-existent.
@Gargron I learned to "code" using the Dbase interface. I still use the things I learned in that process.
@Gargron
Yes, and the less the user knows the easier it is to take advantage of them (not a good thing).
I guess it is part of the transition from computing as a hobby to computing as an appliance.
