Every time I do tech support for my family I get very angry about people who whine about lacking "tech literacy".
90% of the stuff I have to teach them is how to navigate manipulative software and dark patterns. This has nothing to do with tech, but with capitalism. Tech is not complicated, it is just made maximally confusing on purpose to remove agency.
Better tech ed won't fix this.
@piegames
You know, there was a time when it was a lot of 'Okay, click on the network that you just named, and...yes okay, but click....okay, the moving thing moves the cursor' tier.
A lot of really basic, really simple stuff that was a bit frustrating to deal with. However, that time is not now. People know how to open menus, pull up keyboards on their phones, know what 'the back button' is.
Now it's 'Yes, they deliberately obfuscated this and tricked you because they're awful, do this'.
@0xZogG @Oggie @piegames I live with that every day with people who struggle between click and double click and "What apple do you mean in the upper left corner of the screen?"
But yeah there's also actual design things like suddenly changing all the text entry to be right justified instead of left, which seems innocuous until you realize everyone is trying to click at the end of the text and they can't because it's such a small clickbox area now.
No way, is that actually a thing?
In their defence (or rather, lack of mine), I usually don’t bother to type capital letters at all.
I think of popups like spam calls.
At least where I live, almost every phone call is an attempt to manipulate the recipient into providing data that can be used against them. An unexpected message that is both needed and useful is so rare that people are conditioned by the system to ignore everything they did not have a good reason to anticipate.
We need better regulation of computer technology in addition to better instructional resources on how it works.
@shadowsminder @gsymon @lanzz @piegames Tech-literate people will know which popups they have to read, and which one they can ignore.
You encounter popups that you don't read all the time: EULAs, ads, newsletter signups, etc. But you know which one are interesting/out of place, and which one are not related to your current activity and can ignore.
For tech-illiterate people, even having to use the computer is juts a hurdle they have to go through to achieve their goal, and so are popups.
@shadowsminder @gsymon @lanzz @piegames
Yeah! They don't read the popup because the last 99 popups were pointless wastes of time!
Would you like to subscribe? No
Get our reminders! Don't want them
We have a special offer! Don't care
Do you accept our cookies? No (or for many people, yes, because one of the commonest manipulative patterns is to make yes quicker to click than no)
I _do_ read the popups, but at least 99% of the web site ones are just irritating friction.
Absolutely 100%. There's loads of times I'm writing code and the documentation goes "it works like this really annoying way" without answering why it needs the really annoying implementation instead of doing something sane and standardized.
It would be awesome if programming was standardized like plumbing or electrical work where there was one good way to do it that everyone agreed on. But if that happens a lot of developers are going to be very, very sad.
But let me give some examples off the top of my head. Axios, one of the main packages used for web requests in Javascript, has no retry functionality built in, you can't tell it to auto-retry something if the connection blips out for a second or so, it has to be hacked together custom. For anything remotely important, you obviously want it to try a bunch of times before just giving up. There is a axios-retry package though, it just needs to be loaded in with webpack at build time, so you *have* to use webpack now, there's no non-webpack way to get the module loaded. Super aggrivating. And really there's no reason why stuff *has* to be this way.
@piegames Historically, my experience is that 90% of the tech support for family and friends is just to dare clicking around the user interface.
I haven't really thought about the part of navigating dark patterns. So I guess you're right. It's 90% enshitified capitalism, 9% just daring to click around, and 1% actually knowing stuff.
@piegames I had an example of this hit my parents. I wrote it up as a newsletter post (When Software Turns Evil: On how my elderly parents were utterly bewildered by some seriously nasty, software updates...):
https://buttondown.email/TheNexusFiles/archive/when-software-turns-evil/
@jonnynexus @piegames if you log into outlook using a browser (so viewing hotmail.com emails online).
The top email in the inbox is ALWAYS an ad, inserted by Microsoft.
Yeah I've had variations of this conversation a few times:
"How do I read that article?"
"There's a link at the top of the page."
(Some time later)
"It made me download an app before I could read it."
"You had to download an app, just to read a web page?"
"Yeah, that's where the link took me."
"Oh I see. No the actual link is that small one, the massive buttony one is a distraction designed to make you think you have to install their shitty app, when actually you don't."'
I visited my Dad today. He's in his mid-80s now, still generally healthy, but some things are getting harder, particularly eyesight. When I visit I usually end up fixing something or other on his computer. Today it was website push notifications that he'd probably accidentally allowed and were pretending to be antivirus software producing scary messages. Also Thunderbird had moved a bunch of its UI around and confused him to the point where he'd felt the only thing to do was to reinstall it.
@piegames some decades ago, I felt like tech was made for dummies with no way to accidentally irreversibly destroy important data. Go wild, explore what your device can, you're safe here!
Today, though? Today I am really confused. How can I teach people to use their devices, when I barely understand them myself with my decades of experience? When you need to disable 10 settings and press 20 buttons BEFORE you can do something meaningful, is it really worth it? Just ask a tech person for help.
@piegames
My brother & I spent almost two hours trying to get his iPad to fill in the username and password (stored in the iPad's local keyring) into his bank's app and/or website.
He taught me my first computer language, and I made a lifetime career out of that, and we couldn't get it to work.
Internet advice boiled down to "try turning it off then on again", and "delete your credentials then re-enter them".
@piegames I was thinking about this last month. Early computer adopters are still better at navigating software than the rest of their age group, and I used to assume it was because they were all programmers—they kinda had to be. But I recently met one of the first non-programmers to use computers: she was in the first group of Stanford professors to get them for work, and she's computer-fluent too.
I eventually concluded that early adopters didn't just learn how to use software, they learned how to teach themselves to use it. They come from a world where you RTFM first, not just when you encounter problems!
This is the exact opposite of the behavior encouraged by guided setup processes or modal-window tutorials, which are often comorbid with other hostile design elements. The makers of manipulative software don't want users who can teach themselves, because those users teach themselves to avoid the dark patterns.
@piegames I want to punch my mother-in-laws Chromecast personally "it just works!" until it doesn't and then instead of being able to fix it by just checking settings you have to do a huge song and dance of weird usage patterns to see where and how it broke and how to fix it.
In her case I had to change her WiFi name to something new. I don't know why, I will never know, but in the end that fixed everything.
@piegames Just adding to the chorus of agreement at this point. I have so many friends and family who beat themselves up for “not understanding” tech when it’s the terrible design that’s to blame, not them.
Our culture has trained people to call themselves stupid rather than call out bad (or hostile) design.
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