The Slow Death of the Power User • Hacker News Board

Re: The Slow Death of the Power User

#61

Post by sixtyj » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 9:18 PM UTC

> 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. Congratulations to everyone involved. You’ve built a generation that can’t extract a zip file without a dedicated app and calls it innovation.

As a power user, I feel weirdo when trying explain something what I take for granted. :)

Total commander/norton/midnight commander, bash, cron, portable apps, zip a file, automation of email processing, having a non-gmail address, markdown, “don’t touch mouse” editing, pdf manipulation, block editing in Sublime text (don’t mention vi/vim, Emacs :)

Re: The Slow Death of the Power User

#62

Post by its_ethan » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 9:21 PM UTC

imiric wrote: post #18

> All of this was sold as a feature. “It just works.” Safety. Privacy. User experience. What it actually was, was control — Apple’s control over what you could do with hardware you supposedly bought. Can't both of these be true? Apple, Microsoft, and the evil tech companies us nerds love to vilify actually brought computing to the masses. In the early 1980s only tech geeks and corporations used computers—the Apple Ma…

> It's all relative. Except "AI". That is more of a disabler than an enabler

Feels like there's some irony here given the rest of your comment. "It's always been this way and probably always will be... except for this time it's different."

I'm not trying to say you're wrong, just a funny thing I noticed that reminded me of an Arrested Development scene.

Re: The Slow Death of the Power User

#63

Post by slumberlust » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 9:25 PM UTC

frizlab wrote: post #53

xyzzy123 wrote: post #17

Most people, when they turn the tap on, they don't know where the water comes from. Try asking someone "What is the physical principle that makes the water come out of the tap? How do they make it come out?" you might be surprised how many people don't know and most importantly don't care . The water comes out. The water has always come out, every time, so it's not really a thing worth investigating. Like the sunrise…

> What is the physical principle that makes the water come out of the tap? How do they make it come out? Curious coincidence, I was literally thinking yesterday: “but why does the water come out of the tap?” I self-answered “must be the pressure somehow” but did not dig much more…

The water gnomes carry it there.

Re: The Slow Death of the Power User

#64

Post by SuperHeavy256 » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 9:40 PM UTC

xyzzy123 wrote: post #17

Most people, when they turn the tap on, they don't know where the water comes from. Try asking someone "What is the physical principle that makes the water come out of the tap? How do they make it come out?" you might be surprised how many people don't know and most importantly don't care . The water comes out. The water has always come out, every time, so it's not really a thing worth investigating. Like the sunrise…

This is a good and important counter-point to the given article. If we as 'tech people' expect the layman to have a higher standard of tech knowledge, then what is to stop people from other fields from telling us to do the same? Truthfully, an average person won't develop expert knowledge of every field.

Re: The Slow Death of the Power User

#65

Post by dw_arthur » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 9:41 PM UTC

igloopan wrote: post #12

[flagged]

Low information density is a big AI tell. Also sheer length is another AI tell. The LLM pukes out a bunch of text and the "author" either doesn't have the skills or energy to edit it.

Re: The Slow Death of the Power User

#66

Post by quesera » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 9:43 PM UTC

kittikitti wrote: post #47

Thank you for sharing this article. I found it very insightful while eloquently proposing root causes. In particular, I found this bit to be wonderful: "The smartphone didn’t just shift computing to a smaller screen. It replaced a computing paradigm — one built on ownership, modification, and composability — with a consumption paradigm built on managed access, curated experience, and dependency."

AI loves AI.

Re: The Slow Death of the Power User

#67

Post by mixmastamyk » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 9:46 PM UTC

I'm in agreement and receptive to this piece in its broad strokes. Although, as some have pointed out some of the examples are a bit too obscure, like ssh.

However, I think the bigger problem with it is what I used to call a "Slashdot Attitude." If you don't remember or are too young, it was the "users are idiots/lusers" and "people should suffer like I did" i.e. non-constructive perspectives that were often expressed there. (Getting that vibe, although may be my own perception.)

I'd argue that the main problem isn't the ease of use, but rather the elimination of freedoms and privacy that prevents learning. A friend and I wrote our thoughts and hopeful solution here: https://trustworthy.technology/

Re: The Slow Death of the Power User

#68

Post by thefz » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 9:46 PM UTC

I agree with the author in almost everything and in the end it was all a manufactured shift to benefit the seller of the platform/software/hardware.

Re: The Slow Death of the Power User

#69

Post by thefz » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 9:48 PM UTC

maest wrote: post #32

poisonborz wrote: post #4

I agree with the article fully, but: > These are the same people who would lose their minds if their city government told them they could only buy food from vendors the city had approved, licensed, and taxed But it is exactly like this in the developed world, and not many would buy food from a trunk of a roadside car.

An important difference is that governments are elected, but private companies (in some cases monopolies) are not

Another important difference is that at least in theory the end goal of a government is the well being of its citizens, while for private companies it is profit.

Re: The Slow Death of the Power User

#70

Post by mwcampbell » Wed, Feb 25, 2026, 9:50 PM UTC

ctoth wrote: post #8

"Don't Make Me Think" wasn't descriptive. It was prescriptive that became descriptive. An entire professional class, PMs and UX designers, adopted as axiomatic that cognitive effort is friction, friction is bad, therefore understanding is a design failure. Then they spent 25 years engineering understanding out of every single interaction, and now point to the resulting learned helplessness as validation. "See? Users…

We had Joel Spolsky saying that users don't read back in 2000, around the same time that Steve Krug published _Don't Make Me Think_: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/26/designing-for-peop...

So was the learned helplessness already ingrained by 2000? How far back does it go?