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0 pointspyre16y ago0 comments

> Have them bookmark your site. Many of them will not understand bookmarks. Teach them to understand.

Isn't that really advocating that each and every website on the internet should teach their users basic computer skills?

I mean if these people had bought a magazine from the news stand, and it said "Popular Mechanics" instead of "Playboy" on it, do you think that they would just say to themselves, "I guess that Playboy changed their name, logo, and stopped showing pictures of naked women. Interesting. I'll have to tell me friends about this?"

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patio1116y ago· 1 in thread

A hypothetical engineer might be emotionally invested in "Everyone should know enough about computers to do basic things, and they should have learned that years ago, so if they can't do them it is their fault." That hypothetical engineer might bristle at being told "You should help them succeed, even if it means teaching them the basics."

A hypothetical business owner, told that there was an issue that was preventing his customers from paying him money, would probably say "Fix it."

Some days we have to pick whether we want to be engineers or business owners. For my part, I spent time yesterday teaching a PhD how to open PDFs.

pyreOP16y ago

> "Everyone should know enough about computers to do basic things, and they should have learned that years ago, so if they can't do them it is their fault."

I think that it's more along the lines of assuming that everyone on the road took a driver's test to be there. You don't think that people should have learned to drive years ago. People just feel that you should be able to assume a certain level of competency among your users as part and parcel of owning/using a computer. But as we see in the real world, you can never assume that people have a certain level of knowledge/logic ability. (i.e. Needing to put the "do not use top of ladder as a step" warning on ladders because there are enough people that don't realize that's dangerous)

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