Comment by Vilian

What's worse is how much the modern world and software quality has trained them to just be so helpless.

My mom has been using Windows computers since before I was born. She would spend all sorts of time working on the computer, creating tests for her classes, researching my sister's illness on the pre-2000s internet (with great success even!), had no problem adopting software over the years as things upgraded and changed, had no problems pivoting to using a Macbook at work, had extremely few problems adapting to remote learning, to the point of asking me for advice using OBS to improve her ability to run a virtual classroom (for things like different "scenes" and control over her output video). She broadly understands the concept of "files" and directories and how to move them and transfer them and manage them well.

But at some point, she forgot how the "Start" menu worked! You put her at a Windows desktop and she doesn't know how to start the program she needs to use! Do you know how much goddamned money Microsoft spent ingraining the start button in people's heads in the 90s?

But it's just gone. Because modern web based stuff follows no patterns. It makes no sense. Shit just happens sometimes, with no feedback, with no warning, and sometimes breaks while only leaving a damn error message in the javascript console, and the behavior changes from one day to the next. The only way people who aren't experts can hope to navigate this hellhole is to learn EXACT workflows and never change them and never think of changing them and never attempt to do anything novel in case it breaks everything without warning and don't pay heed to any dialogs because they don't contain useful info anyway.

Like, what did we expect to happen when we punished people for trying to build mental models of this stuff? You cannot build simple mental models of webapps. Companies don't want you to, because then you might not be as bamboozled and you might be less susceptible to advertising.

[On a thread about how people don't read]

Yes, and some of the details really need to be emphasized, because I'm sure that a good chunk of people assume this means "people don't read more than they need to / people have a lack of inquisitiveness and general competence matching their lack of interest in reading for personal fulfillment" or whatever.

No, no, this is literal and (almost) not exaggerated. They _don't read_. Anything. _Ever_.

The almost-not-exaggeration is in the "ever", if anything, because some of these people can eventually be compelled, with much sighing and gnashing of teeth, to actually read something.

But as a matter of course, they don't read. And that's not just "don't read what they don't need to." It's more like, you know how your eyes happen across some text and you just read it inadvertently? And your daily life is full of moments where these glances at random words give you little reminders or flashes of insight or just fuel for the train of thought? Haha, that's a good one. I didn't even do that on purpose. Anyway, they don't do any of that shit, they literally have to start reading on purpose and the rest of the time, as far as I can tell, they are actually not processing any of it at all. They navigate the computer/phone by rote or by visual cue based on color/position of UI elements. When they can't figure out where to go using that method and you suggest that they actually, like, read the shit on the fucking web page they're trying to navigate, they ...

... start at the top left corner ...

... and crawl the page elements linearly ...

... and when they arrive at the correct one ...

... there's a pretty good chance that they won't actually recognize it as such, because for some reason they simply can't contextualize any of the shit they're reading!

These are people who have jobs and social lives, are not wards of the state, and can carry on a coherent, reasonable, and engaging conversation with you.

(No shade thrown to visual thinkers though -- there may be some overlap, but I don't run into these people as often as I run into visual thinkers, so I think I'm talking about something else)