this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2025
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Blame tablet culture. Everything is now optimally desgined for user friendliness. Kids can just download an app from the appstore and point at what they want it to do. People don't even know anymore how the filesystem on their computer works. If the dow load pup-up in chrome disappears, they think the download has dissapeared and they need to download it again.
TBF, Android and iOS do not make it clear where files are going when you save them like desktop OSes do. It's almost as if they are intentionally trying to hide their file structure, especially Apple, which is beyond frustrating.
They are intentionally trying to hide it.
The default file browsers don't access the entire file structure, what exists and what you can see and edit, without root.
You can, or at least could, sideload a FOSS filebrowser, much more straightforward UI, doesnt shit itself if you arent logged into it.
What they instead do is make it really, really easy to upload all your personal files to their cloud, which is either going to cost you time, money, or your privacy.
Its why Microsoft genuinely doesnt understand why everyone hates OneDrive, why they genuinely don't see a problem with Windows becoming an AI prompt/API with ads.
Because its basically the same as the mobile UI paradigm.
FTFY. Microsoft doesn't deserve the Hanlon's Razor benefit of doubt.
I mean, I feel you, but I also used to work for Microsoft.
Their management is largely literally delusional.
The groupthink / corpo culture is so strong that its basically like talking to an ET alien, on many topics.
So yes, clearly they do not care, but also, they're very much deluded into thinking that everything they do is just obviously the way you would do something.
Its very culty, to be frank, its one part of why I don't work there any more, the other main one being their blatent reproduction of India's caste system within MSFT itself.
Multiple times I saw H1B visa junior employees getting viciously verbally absued by more senior employees from India, from a higher caste or social status, shit that I would have gotten instantly fired if I did.
I went to HR and they told me that actually I was being culturally insensitive because that's just normal in their culture.
Absolute fucking horseshit.
And this was all a decade-ish ago. I am certain it is much worse now, just look at everyone who got fired for objecting to Microsoft aiding and abetting and facilitating Israel's genocide.
... I'm gonna need a fucking cigarette, god damnit.
I know where mine usually go, but sometimes they go somewhere else. Why did it do that? Where did it go? Sometimes I run a search and still can't find it. Wtf? So, I have re-downloaded when I was in a pinch.
It's been known since probably the seventies that normies have trouble with hierarchical file systems. UI researchers kept testing the assumptions about file systems, and the results in the majority of populace have always been abysmal. Which is why people have the desktop piled with every file they ever created or downloaded, and why UI designers are trying to move away from shoving file systems into users' faces.
I thought the younger folk would be faster on computers than me but I had to show a junior new hire IT tech what a zip file was and how to open it. Something that I assumed would be second nature to them, they hadn’t seen. Growing up with analog and moving to digital as society progressed, I assumed the next generation would smoke me in tech but it’s been surprising that because tech has “Just worked” for many of them they haven’t had to learn how it works. A blessing and a curse I suppose.
Honestly sometimes having learned the analog counterpart is really useful. It's a different field but the first time I mixed live audio was on an old analog mixer. It wasn't really all that difficult to use once explained. Shortly after we replaced it with a digital mixer (behringer x32), and I'm so glad that I had the opportunity to use the old analog one because so many concepts would appear, at least to me, difficult to grasp if you're starting out on the digital one.
The next gen grew up on tablets and iphones and walled gardens that make everything a mystery to them. Corporate infantilisation
File compression is for poor people.
Feels like the opposite to me. Modern mobile style interfaces feel extremely hostile, designed to minimise the amount of information the user can extract from the application (and maximise the amount that can be extracted from the user and sold to the highest bidder) and our control over it.
Classic desktop interfaces (and no, the stupid office ribbons are not included in that), even when poorly designed, are many orders of magnitude easier to use and navigate, and provide a lot more tools and information.
I agree, but we have two have different meanings of user friendly here.
You: The thing makes it easy to do what I want, to understand what it can do.
Them: The thing makes it easy to do what the designer wants, makes it easy to understand what the designer wants me to do with it.
Also I've noticed a total lack of curiosity or willingness to learn how to use these products. It takes a little brain power sometimes.
And a lot of Lemmy could be accused of having the same attitude towards sports, fashion or pop culture. People aren't obligated to be interested in tech, for most people it's a tool, not a hobby.
Honestly I don't blame them, I fall into the not giving a shit about sports or fashion camp too. My inner boomer comes out when I'm forced to use microsoft products so I'm definitely a hypocrite but at least I'll put a little effort into trying to get a surface level of understanding.
The things you've mentioned are hobbies, not tools you need to use
Because I used stereotypical non-nerdy things. Most people also couldn't repair their car, fix their pipes or install a stove.
Well like, I would argue that you should know how to fix your car if you use one, yes. And I also would say that, if you own a home, you should know a thing or two about plumbing or appliances
..and know who to call for electrical because that can kill you
I'm not arguing that it's not helpful, but I don't think it's a "should" or even a reasonable expectation. Nobody has the time to learn how to do everything that's going to be potentially helpful at some point in their lives. We all set different priorities, and that's fine.
Your original comment was about people attitudes towards stuff like sports, implying a hypocrisy. I was just pointing out how it's a different category in my opinion. Whether it's a reasonable expectation or not is a different discussion (though I would still argue that, yes, it is reasonable. Knowing how things in the world works is immensely helpful and helps build stronger societies. For example in appreciating other's work more and being a more rounded out person, among other things)
People never knew how filesystems work. It's been tested time and again, people aside from nerds have trouble with hierarchical filesystems. They had trouble in the eighties, they had trouble in the nineties, had trouble in the two-thousandths and obviously still have trouble today. Saving every single file on the desktop didn't start with tablets.
Nerds just have no idea how the majority of the population fare with computers, and don't know that UI designers in fact test their UIs and continually check their assumptions. But nerds are cocksure in blaming UI designers and ‘tablet culture’, which culture made computing accessible to everyone from toddlers to decrepit geriatrics.
Literacy and numeracy scores in the US in general peaked in 2012.
If you graduated high school / college around then, statistically, everyone +/-5 or greater your age is generally less literate, less mathematically literate, less knowledgeable than you, ceteris paribus.
Do you have any data on that? Maybe it's my personal bias but it seems to me, having graduated high school in 2002, that people ten years younger than me tend to be less literate. That's charitable language. They certainly struggle much more with tech.
https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=38
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https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp
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They unfortunately rework the metrics by which they measure this stuff, and have many different ways of trying to measure roughly the same thing... but hey, thats true of NBER and the BLS and FRED over this same time period too, way before Elon/Trump basically fired everyone.
So yeah, its hard to pinpoint exactly, without... doing my own meta analysis of all their data, but basically around ~2012 were the peak of totally averaged literacy and numeracy scores.
Before that, it was climbing, then peaked, and has since been falling, quite rapidly the closer you get to present day.
Your anecdotal observed deviation is indeed biased, you probably do not spend your time around a purely statistically average set of people, how/why exactly that is the case would require me to get some PID from you to attempt to explain though, lol.
Most likely explanation would probably be regional / location variance.
US education systems vary wildly in quality by Zipcode, the average net worth of families in the zipcode you grew up in is still the most statistically significant way to accurately predict overall life outcomes.
Very interesting. Especially the first link showing how different life circumstances appear to influence performance. I'm fairly certain this is also tied to income inequality.
The practice of funding schools based on local property taxes is incredibly harmful.
Yes, thats like, the whole main problem with American society.
It is statistically true that working hard, staying out of jail, and getting an education is absolutely not a guarantee that you will achieve what the Boomers call 'middle class lifestyle', or better.
It might help you at least tread water, in terms of generational advancement, maybe?
But if you don't have a stable home, family situation, food situation... shouldn't be surprising that you tend not to do well in school.
A huge part of that problem is indeed tying together local property taxes and school systems.
People have been saying this and proving it with numbers since at least the 90s.
But, we never changed it in a way that would fix anything, instead, the Republicans have spent my entire lifespan on this planet deliberately destroying public education, because they want to give taxpayer money to privately run religious schools (Christian, of course), and then make everyone pay for basic, K-12 education, via some kind of voucher/marketplace of schools system.
They know dumb people are easier to lie to, and most of our own Founders knew that a functional democracy is impossible without a foundation of an educated and well informed populace.
So, of course, blow all that up, revert to Theocracy, thats the plan, its basically mostly Reagan's fault for setting all this in motion.
Agreed on almost everything. My only difference is I'd say it started with the Nixon administration and was made far worse by the Reagan admin.
Well, I am just a silly youngin', what would I know =P
Less snarkily, could you tell me what Nixon did in relation to the US education system?
I'm fairly decent with my US History, but I could be forgetting something, or have not heard of it before.
I guess I got a bit off topic. I meant more like a general decline of the US kinda way. In a brief search I found out he vetoed the Comprehensive Childcare Development Act. It would have established a nationalized childcare system, with facilities owned by the federal government. Could have been interesting.
Yeah maybe, but try popping out of an app for five seconds to copy something and then come back to paste it, and tell me how user friendly and optimised that is.
Back in my day we had to walk up hill both ways.