Nire Bryce
the thing i've seen doing organizing across fields for five years was that most people do not have the time to make huge leaps, for anything, because they don't have the spare time or energy to like, learn things that aren't directly important to them.
does that suck? yes.
but it has implications for open source, and those implications are mostly "if you want to change the demographic spread, you'll need to start thinking about your base skill assumptions"
Nire Bryce
simplifying things will, of course, mean most people using it will not see the nuts and bolts or control surfaces -- but it doesn't matter, because some of them will and start learning that way. There's enough of them that it being 'productized' is still a net gain in terms of computer knowledge as long as you still leave a cutout for the metaphorical car's hood so it can be opened when people want to work on more than the surface
Nire Bryce
if you use computers for decades as not even a power-user but as someone who like, knows their way around the OS and where things get saved by default, etc, or how to use the Task Manager in windows for more than killing unruly processes, you're like, 90th percentile at worst of people in terms of computer knowledge
Nire Bryce
but like.... your goal is enabling people, not getting people to play with their computer.
if it's not, what are we even doing
I'm not annoyed at anyone in particular but this has been like, an overarching vibe in open source since before I was born.
it's doing the infosec thing where we're blaming users instead of that things weren't caught before then
Nire Bryce
a computer is an appliance to most people, when it breaks they just sigh and buy a new one if they can even afford to. getting them out of that mindset? doesn't require something to have sharp corners, it requires it to be easier to use than alternatives
Otherwise, they'll just stay there with the appliance mindset. Which doesn't seem to be peoples' goals.
Nire Bryce
this isn't underestimating people's ability to learn -- I'm coming from the perspective that everyone can learn. The problem is learning takes time and psychological space to stick, and the economics as they currently stand are in opposition to that if you're in most fields other than STEM.
This is different for things that aren't aimed at end users -- I'm not saying everything that can be self hosted or whatever needs to be accessible to someone who doesn't know much.
Nire Bryce
but instead that like, if we want people to learn these things, we need to be having things where you can peel back the layers, not things where there's a learning cliff if you don't have the prerequisites and ten years of FS/OSS intra-community trivia in your head for why things are named that way
Nire Bryce
I'm technically minded, I've got that ten years of trivia, and I still bounce hard off a lot of projects meant for end-users that make a lot of promises, and then waste two days of my time only for me to realize the lofty ideals aren't met yet.
and *that* is a community issue
I get it takes a lot of work to make good things. So instead I suggest simply not saying how easy things are every single time, because I see it a lot on here, in tech, and in OSS
Nire Bryce
I'm not angry about this, I'm just like... the last two years I've been thinking a lot about the people I know who've bounced off Computers In General because the people decide everything is easy, and like.
the only way open source stays alive and not eaten by corporate contributors that pull their projects wherever their bosses need is if we start actually giving a shit about new people who ARENT nearly as technical.
Nire Bryce
otherwise we're still stuck being a priesthood that barely remembers things ten years ago and keep reinventing square wheels.
Nire Bryce
I'm gonna end this with:
imo/e the biggest folly of the left groups I was in was we collectively assumed people could just like, Use Slack and Use Discord, and it heavily selected for only people with some level of computer-use to stick around.
Or that everyone knew how to use spreadsheets, or everyone understood how text-banking worked. Or that everyone would look at texts.
Nire Bryce
idk. I'm going back to bed I guess. But this is a real problem that everyone just shrugs their shoulders on, says that's the way it is, and then goes on to keep assuming how easy it is to learn the tools we've been exposed to the parts of or at least names of, for decades
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