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Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

daringfireball.net

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Re: Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

#161

Post by jrockway »

patio11 wrote: post #36
natemartin wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course if your app is aimed at educated people, such as a tool for engineers, you get a nicely self-selected group and can avoid these problems. But you'll never get to facebook-level with a niche audience like that. It certainly avoids some of the problems with dealing with stupidity though.

Educated people... can avoid these problems. I have a user population with 50% masters degrees which disagrees with you. Violently.

"Educated" is the past tense. Some people just stop learning after a while, even though there were capable of it in the past.

People that have education and continue to get it are the people that can "avoid these problems"... but we don't really have a good word for "educated and able to learn", so the OP just said "educated".

Re: Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

#162

Post by awkward »

cgranade wrote: post #49
ubernostrum wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seeing as this phenomenon -- even to the point of people literally typing URLs into Google and then clicking the first result -- is old, well-known and well-documented, I'm gonna guess you need to broaden your usability reading. Here, for example, is an article from 2007 pointing out that the top search term on Google was... "Yahoo": http://www.dailydomainer.com/200742-yahoo-top-search-term-on... Here's Jeremy Zawodn…

Maybe users that type in actual addresses are in the minority, but then I consider this to be a basic literacy issue, just as I consider it a failure of basic science literacy when people say that lasers work by focusing sound waves ( http://scienceblogs.com/principles/2010/01/public_knowledge_... ). The Internet has had a transformative effect on society, and to not even know the first thing about it represents a fa…

It's not a failure of literacy, it's a failure of URLs as a system. Which company has which URL is determined by a long set of events having to do with competing businesses, events and plain luck that even people here wouldn't care to unravel for most of the sites they visit. The best example I can think of now is when pitchfork (the music review site) was at pitchforkmedia.com, and pitchfork.com was owned by a company that sold hay.

Search, on the other hand, has failures, but those failures are rapidly fixed.

Re: Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

#164

Post by GHFigs »

Groxx wrote: post #160
GHFigs wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I contend that branding people as intentionally ignorant is an excuse for your own laziness. You're always going to be able to dismiss part of the problem as "too hard" to bother addressing, that way. I used to feel that way myself. It's convenient, but it's also not true. The truth is that people are learning constantly whether they want to or not. It's what humans do . We take input from the world and turn it into…

I used to think this way, until I stepped back and abstracted it a bit. Look at it from further away, and it's behavior based on fear that's become harmful. It's identical to people afraid of flying, driving, swimming, going out in public, etc. But those are seen as disorders , and how does society handle them? By pointing out they're harmful, and offering help. How does society handle computer fear? By saying it's o…

People don't know that it is fear. They think it's normal for computers to be difficult, confusing, fragile, and have internalized the belief that they are stupid and lazy and incapable of understanding without years of dedicated effort. And they think that because people who "know computers" keep telling them so, either directly or by designing interfaces that support that notion.

It isn't wholly irrational fear, either. Computers are uniquely fragile and prone to disrupting expectations. People looking for Facebook who wound up on ReadWriteWeb got there by doing something that had worked the day before. Ideally, they would have an understanding of what was going on and what assumptions had been violated. In practice, they had no intrinsic reason to until that moment.

(In fact works even better now: Google has added a link to the Facebook login within the suggestion box for the search "facebook login".)

It's identical to people afraid of flying, driving, swimming, going out in public, etc.

These are all things in which much effort is made to eliminate painful experiences and prevent feared things from happening. You can never get 100%--there are practical limits to what you can do or need to reach a level where people will use them. I don't believe that we have reached the limit of what can be done from the creation side to make computers less painful to use on the consumer side.

Re: Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

#165

Post by madair »

Groxx wrote: post #103
madair wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing good about this at all, this is class warfare and culture warfare all wrapped up together, both very bad and both ripping America, among other places, apart right about....now. You have absolutely no clue about this person and yet you are prejudiced against him, her, it. Is he/she/it 10 years old? You have no clue. You don't know background, you know nothing except that this person just feels that th…

The loss of all social filters is social anarchy. If you're an anarchist, then this likely appeals to you, but I'm not. We certainly have too many social filters, but having none enables malicious people to gain incredible power. Projections based on limited information are innate to not only humans, but learning in general. Sea cucumbers learn. This easily extends to projections of human behavior based on limited in…

(a) this a very likely young person that we're talking about

(b) very likely un- or undereducated compared to you

(c) very likely poorer than you, and that's poorer even if you live in a dorm eating ramen and

(d) it's prejudice that I'm commenting on, not your social filters

(e) all the evidence points to that, as I said clearly confused and frustrated person, thinking that they just signed into Facebook and wondering why it appeared to them to not work right. Are you saying that you're a bastion of clarity and even temper when you reach an impediment like that. Sure you don't spell bullshitttttt like that. So what?

[Edit:] (f) It's people protecting their social values with oppression or prejudice who are quite the malicious danger, aren't they? Exhibit A: Fox News. Not so much computer illiterate youths who use a potty mouth

(That is, unless I'm talking to someone who likes oppression too, unlikely but possible, as in, on the Internet, no one knows if you are a dog. ;-)

But the really sad part is that lots and lots of other people are prejudiced, and they think that's a good thing.

Note that I did not bring into this random correlations to other social injustices, but I ask you to consider all those many many many southern god-fearing americans who love them their prejudices, and think god gave them that right. They are protecting their culture with their social filters too.

Re: Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

#166

Post by madair »

joeyo wrote: post #113
madair wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Karma well spent. The doubled-consonants style is very popular with the 12-16 year old set right now. Congratulations on your prejudice.

Your prejudice is my Bayesian inference. In any rate, judging someone based on how they communicate is morally very different from judging them based on who they are . Communication is action, and if one cannot form opinions based on the actions of others, then indeed, what may we do? Passively observe the world go by?

My prejudice against prejudicial people? It's amazing how many people think that is a good argument. Typically prejudiced people.

It a common enough movie-cliche too. I.e., gambler just lost the car saying, "Don't judge me, don't judge me!"

Re: Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

#167

Post by Groxx »

madair wrote: post #165
Groxx wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The loss of all social filters is social anarchy. If you're an anarchist, then this likely appeals to you, but I'm not. We certainly have too many social filters, but having none enables malicious people to gain incredible power. Projections based on limited information are innate to not only humans, but learning in general. Sea cucumbers learn. This easily extends to projections of human behavior based on limited in…

(a) this a very likely young person that we're talking about (b) very likely un- or undereducated compared to you (c) very likely poorer than you, and that's poorer even if you live in a dorm eating ramen and (d) it's prejudice that I'm commenting on, not your social filters (e) all the evidence points to that, as I said clearly confused and frustrated person , thinking that they just signed into Facebook and wonderi…

You do realize that A, B, and C are way more damaging and insulting prejudices than mine, right? I just prefer not to deal with people that act like that, you think they're dumb and poor.

Re: Daring Fireball: "Facebook login"

#168

Post by madair »

Groxx wrote: post #167
madair wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(a) this a very likely young person that we're talking about (b) very likely un- or undereducated compared to you (c) very likely poorer than you, and that's poorer even if you live in a dorm eating ramen and (d) it's prejudice that I'm commenting on, not your social filters (e) all the evidence points to that, as I said clearly confused and frustrated person , thinking that they just signed into Facebook and wonderi…

You do realize that A, B, and C are way more damaging and insulting prejudices than mine, right? I just prefer not to deal with people that act like that, you think they're dumb and poor.

So, first you say I shouldn't be prejudicial against prejudice, and now you say that pointing out that someone is probably poor or probably uneducated, based on evidence, and while arguing against prejudice for those things, is prejudicial?

I just wish that I was being trolled, so that I could have more hope for humankind.

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