Howard RheingoldOne of my favorite Engelbart sayings might relate to the "Mastodon is too confusing to learn" claim. Paraphrasing, he said that if ease of use was the ultimate aim for a tool, the bicycle would never have evolved beyond the tricycle. #technology
Michael Downey 🧢@hrheingold I have been thinking a lot about Doug these past couple weeks and what he would have thought about this "new" trend.
Jana@hrheingold Yes, but lots of people still learn to ride a bicycle with training wheels or scooter bikes. The analogy is lacking a bit.
Denial 🐔 Shown@luxzia @hrheingold this is true. If i understand the metaphor, it's that we have collectively stilted our capacity by halting our development at training wheels.
In the last year i really got to dig into Engelbart, and found out, yes he invented the mouse and the GUI and the... Name the thing to make computing easier in 1960s. He also invented or shepherded advanced modes of interaction (like chorded keyboards) that are only used in small pockets today. Everything he built was towards unlocking human potential, and there is a lot of potential left to tap. He believed in us.
We can do better.
Viveka@luxzia @DenialShown @hrheingold
I was brought up in the usability school of HCI, where ease of use and ease of learning are supreme. But this is not the only worthwhile value. These days I also work hard on *expressiveness*. How powerful can a great tool be in the right hands? A violin is infamously hard to learn. New violinists produce terrible screeching; but a fine violin in the right hands can express tremendous depth of feeling.
I was brought up in the usability school of HCI, where ease of use and ease of learning are supreme. But this is not the only worthwhile value. These days I also work hard on *expressiveness*. How powerful can a great tool be in the right hands? A violin is infamously hard to learn. New violinists produce terrible screeching; but a fine violin in the right hands can express tremendous depth of feeling.
@Viveka @DenialShown @hrheingold There's a few points here: 1) every violinist starts with stuff like "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" - very few become brilliant violinists, but everyone has to start with the basics. 2) This is the most depressing thing with the loss of Twitter's usefulness - anyone could really be there and it was easy to use. Harassment towards folks got better over time. Language is a way that everyone can express themselves well. Why are we gatewaying this on a platform?
@luxzia @DenialShown @hrheingold
I’m not advocating we deliberately make this place hard to use. It should be as complex as necessary, but no more than that.
The two most common complaints I hear are:
1. Decentralised/federated is different, therefore confusing
2. CWs are weird and confusing
Those are crucial, ineradicable parts of what makes the platform powerful. They’re worth learning. But I support any effort to make them less confusing ^_^
Fun fract:
Most people don't know that Dr. John got his Ph.D. working on expressiveness for Engelbart.
"I been in the right place
But it must have been the wrong time"
waxbanks@luxzia @hrheingold funnily enough (forgive me if you already know this), training wheels are going out of fashion in favour of 'balance bikes' (frames w/out pedals)--turns out training wheels impede rather than enable the hard parts, balancing/steering, instead emphasizing the exact wrong thing (the pedals).
this seems relevant to howard's quote, i think?
Marcia Conner@hrheingold
I'm one of the lucky souls who saw you on stage at Doug's big anniversary bash at Stanford. I was working on community (at PeopleSoft) so had read all you'd written by then & Doug's 1950s paper & thought it doesn't get much better than this. Simpler, though, let's hope so. Just not simpler than makes sense. Thanks for introducing a new crowd to the bicycle metaphor.
@harold
I'm one of the lucky souls who saw you on stage at Doug's big anniversary bash at Stanford. I was working on community (at PeopleSoft) so had read all you'd written by then & Doug's 1950s paper & thought it doesn't get much better than this. Simpler, though, let's hope so. Just not simpler than makes sense. Thanks for introducing a new crowd to the bicycle metaphor.
@harold
@marciamarcia @harold Hi Marcia! The bicycle metaphor occurred to me as I saw people complain about the complexity of getting on board Mastodon
@hrheingold
This is where Facebook did do something useful, perhaps, convince people their mothers could join in the online conversation. There aren't enough baby pictures for my aging mom to have any interest here so that's ok, and Twitter was never the rage for people looking for ease. Over time there might be some parts of the Fediverse designed for an easy entry in.
@harold
This is where Facebook did do something useful, perhaps, convince people their mothers could join in the online conversation. There aren't enough baby pictures for my aging mom to have any interest here so that's ok, and Twitter was never the rage for people looking for ease. Over time there might be some parts of the Fediverse designed for an easy entry in.
@harold
Benjamin Kwiecień 🇵🇸@hrheingold people's unwillingness to learn something new is an extremely powerful force. Rationally, it makes sense to take the time to learn something that you will end up using for years, possibly decades into the future.
Stewart Russell@hrheingold and yet it's much easier to fall off a tricycle than a bicycle at speed. They're very difficult to ride
teledyn 𓂀Bucky Fuller said if you make it such that even a fool could use it, only fools will use it.