The slow death of the power user.

"This isn’t an accident. This is the result of two decades of deliberate, calculated effort by the largest technology companies on earth to turn users into consumers, instruments into appliances, and technical literacy into a niche hobby for weirdos. They succeeded beyond their wildest expectations"

https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/the-slow-death-of-the-power-user/

#technology #tech #sustainability

The Slow Death of the Power User β€” fireborn

@koen_hufkens I saw a neat hiring trick once: an ISP had hidden the instructions on finding the job application in DNS TXT records. Without modest DNS and a few other networking skills you didn't get to even apply.

I might have to resort to that if the "power user" situation is as bad as the article suggests. I guess I just don't hang out with the wrong people... πŸ€”

@TallSimon @koen_hufkens I saw something similar done for a web developer position. It looked like the application page (linked from one of the big job boards. Probably Monster; this was well before Indeed or ZipRecruiter) was broken, just a blank white page. In the end, I had to use curl to get the application. It basically filtered out people who lacked even the bare minimum curiosity required to check the source to figure out why/how this mission critical page was seemingly broken.
@gordoooo_z @TallSimon @koen_hufkens
I once saw a website where the first thing printed to the DevTools console was a message congratulating you for your curiosity, with a link to a job application page.

@TallSimon @koen_hufkens The old alt.hackers newsgroup was a little like this. You needed a moderator's assent to join and post, but there were no moderators: Everyone in there had figured out how to bypass moderation.

https://www.samiam.org/alt.hackers.1995/

Sam Trenholme's webpage

@TallSimon @koen_hufkens I did that at a previous job. Put a job ad into the website html and console log

Can't remember if someone applied through it, though