I feel the ratio is the important thing - at least if your goal is to let the broader society benefit from your work and not just an ivory tower of people with similar background.

In that regard, the "nerds" utterly failed. We're looking back at the "old" internet with some kind of sentimental sadness, but we've evidently failed to convince the general public that a noncommercial, decentralised internet is the way to go.

The UX on the old Internet was terrible, and I remember a solid generation of veteran users telling newbies to RTFM instead of either putting the hard work in to educate or improve the UX of the toolchain so education was less necessary (work that is hard because it is less about understanding the code and more about understanding how users think and why they don't think like the developer of the protocol or application).

Average users who don't have the time to understand IPs, sockets, or authentication schemas have been served by companies willing to shoulder the burden of relieving them of those special-knowledge requirements.

And terrible UX was a feature to some extent. The people who got through it put in some effort to do so, so it filtered out a lot of low effort people. (Think about all the garbage on reddit, facebook, twitter).

Average users aren't necessarily the people I want to interact with on a daily basis. It's like an advanced version of a captcha.

Maybe I'll make a technology and discussions site that is purposefully difficult to connect to. Maybe I won't use a standard protocol and you'll have to use netcat & gpg to read / upload posts or something absurd like that.

Yes, except this exact sentiment, I believe, is part of why we now have the internet we have.

The "old internet" was inaccessible unless you were an expert, true. The experts could have seen this as a chance to make everyone into an expert and teach the values that were important to them in the process. If all the talk about the internet as a democratising force and a tool for freedom of expression is taken seriously, this would have been the way forward.

Instead, experts chose to be elitist and decided to use the information asymmetry to offset themselves from "the masses" and exploit it for monetary gain. The result is that we now have a wealth of powerful, free but arcane and hard to use tools for devs and a locked-down, commercialised and psychologically manipulative web for the rest. What kind of future is that?

I partially disagree because i did that educational thing, though a long time ago. All in all it was mostly a waste of time.

I have an aversion of being called elitist. It's more like resignation, cynicism. Like thinking 'Eat all the shit that you want. Just don't shit on me'

I can understand that not everyone wants or has the time to keep explaining the same things to everyone (though I think there are solutions for that). Also, developers might have other priorities than polishing UX, especially if the software is a volunteer or hobby project. I wouldn't call those things "elitist".

However, what I absolutely believe is elitist is to intentionally design a confusing UX or value it as a "feature" because it will prevent certain groups of people from using the software. That was what the GP advocated for.

In my experience the problem isn't elitism. The problem is large swathes of the human population are lazy luddites.

I see it with cars too. I have friends that love owning fast luxury coupes, and yet don't know how to change their own oil, and can't drive a stick shift. Some of those are guys who build their own PCs, but when it comes to anything mechanical? Nope. Don't even want to learn, and that surprises me.

You can lead horses to water but you can't make them drink, I guess.

Time is finite, and people choose what they are interested in learning. One is not a "Luddite" for not understanding how one's car works if one has a mechanic for that.

So too with software and networks. The internet would never have gotten so big and useful if we demanded every user understand all its subsystems.

It filtered out people with different interests. You do find way more diverse topics out there now in good quality. There are still plenty of forums and sources for technically interested people now - more then before. What also exists are forums and places for everybody else - majority of Internet.

Yeah, and if people want niche ecosystems, they can have niche ecosystems.

They just shouldn't be surprised when organizations that build something that tries to appeal to a mass audience become much, much, to appeal to a mass audience become much, much more relevant to the masses than the niches will ever be.

That is why average users using dumbed down and teletubbyfied interfaces of 'trusted' sites have bean fashion victims by countless leaks, breaches, closed down sites, and so on.

I remember when MS-DOS came with large printed handbooks. They were good. Maybe casual users should have read about 20% of that, for learning how to organize and separate programs and data, and doing backups accordingly.

Almost none did. And then cried because of some mishap.

Shrug.

shrug isn't the way to bring people in.

Also, what leaks and breaches are you referring to? I've never heard anyone make the claim that the big sites are sources of more leaks and breaches than smaller sites. If anything, smaller sites have fewer resources to protect against attacks; if they are less often breached, it's likely because they're smaller, less interesting targets.

Nobody cares about smaller sites that much, larger sites more so. Because everything counts in large amounts, therefore larger sites are a more valuable target.

In general, exceptions happen and apply as alwasys.

This comment should be at the top of the thread.