

Confused Facebook user debacle not what it seems. - someplacecold
http://uucsc.tumblr.com/post/394864367/your-users-are-very-stupid-maybe

======
citatus
When lawyers go drinking together they laugh at stories of criminals who don't
even understand the basics of evidence law.

When doctors have coffee breaks they share stories about how modern people
don't even understand the difference between a virus and a bacteria and demand
antibiotics for the common cold.

Latin professors share hilarious pictures of people who have tattooed
themselves with incoherently mistranslated latin tags.

Every profession thinks that the general population is full of dunces who
don't understand the basics of the highly important body of knowledge that
they are experts in...

~~~
char
This is likely true. However, using the Internet isn't a profession. It is a
globally-scaled phenomenon that is essentially 'the future'. Anyone can learn
how to use it and become an 'expert' for basically no cost and little time.
People get made fun of not necessarily for being dunces, but for not choosing
to embrace and learn about a technology that is already a huge part of their
lives.

~~~
dzohrob
Using the human body isn't a profession either. But it's likely that you and I
are significantly more ignorant than a doctor regarding its inner workings
despite using our bodies every day.

~~~
char
Of course. But my point wasn't that 'things that aren't professions are easy
to learn about', it was that 'using the Internet IS easy to learn, and
requires few resources.' The fact that using the human body isn't a profession
is completely irrelevant; doctors spend years studying how our bodies work,
while all I do is some occasional research to learn more about it. Of course
they know more than me, because they spent lots of time and money on it.

------
youngian
I liked this. There's a touch of empathy there for "stupid" users. But it's
not denying the serious problem that these people represent, especially when
they're in government, writing policy to control an entity that they aren't
even close to understanding.

------
encoderer
I think the author of this blog has a view of "society" that is a little
myopic.

The premise that the "structure of today's society" is based on facebook and
the web is, I think, something several hundred million people in this country
would disagree with.

The internet itself is not yet one of the few pieces of technology that is
intractably ingrained in our societal DNA. On that list? I don't know. Cars.
Telephones. Television. And _facebook_ certainly isn't.

~~~
someplacecold
On the contrary, even if you don't use the web on a consistent basis, you
actually do still depend on it. When people coordinate shipping groceries,
they use the internet. When people plan any aspect of any product you use,
they use the internet. When newscasters and radio announcers ready their words
and check their facts, they benefit greatly from the internet.

One of the greatest benefits of the internet is that information breathability
has increased drastically. A generation ago, if you wanted to know why the
economy was falling apart around your ears, you might look at a newspaper, but
if you didn't understand, there wasn't a lot you could do. These days, you
have a million web sites and powerful tools for organizing information.
Ignorant people these days versus ignorant people those days are drastically
different.

And the debate is not about whether Facebook is intractable social DNA. The
debate is whether it is a tremendously bad thing that users can't tell whether
they're on Facebook or not. They can't, and therefore their ability to access
information is greatly diminished.

I don't honestly see how you could think anything different.

~~~
endlessvoid94
He's not arguing the web isn't important.

He's saying that for a TON of people, they don't need to use it personally,
and see no reason to put in the (sometimes) massive amount of effort to learn
how to use the web. Their lives go on just fine without their direct
involvement.

Also, it is useless to cry "How terrible that so many people don't understand!
What a failure!" -- The only failure here is the failure to make software just
as intuitive as older technology. For someone who never uses the web, Google
is the only option because of it's incredible simplicity. It takes a non-web
savvy person quite a while to parse something like Facebook or Amazon.

I'm amazed at the narrow view that so many people (seem to) have.

~~~
someplacecold
He said that the internet is not something that society absolutely cannot
function without. He is wrong. Society very much depends on the internet. The
fact that not everyone has a Faceboook profile is inconsequential to this, and
I would point out that the one does not follow the other.

Further, saying that the failure lies in the fact that we need to "make
software just as intuitive as older technology", is just hilarious. Since when
is "older technology" intuitive? Simple, sure, but intuitive? It's not like
the natural state of an old-fashioned phone call is fraught with complexity,
and that phone companies have won a major victory by wrapping them in a simple
user interface. You just call, then you're done. If that's intuitive, I assure
you, it's accidental. And have you ever sent a letter before? What's intuitive
about addressing an envelope, or styling your letter accordingly? What's
intuitive about stamping it and sending off? We've been doing it forever, but
that doesn't make it natural.

What you want to say is that we should be making software a simple and
familiar as older technology. But at what cost? I love my smart phone, and as
far as I'm concerned, it's about as close to being as simple as it can get,
while still implementing all these features I like. I'm not switching to a
Jitterbug any time soon. Sure, it's intuitive, but it's also simple. My phone
is intuitive and functional. That's a win for me.

The fact is, at the end of the day, progress is made by breaking the norm. I
don't want to go back to the simplicity of old phones; I don't want to look
everything up at a library; I don't want to do everything the "old" way. But
with these leaps in progress, a lot of people have been left behind.

Yes, that's a problem. Yes, that's a failure.

~~~
encoderer
This is, honestly, absurd. Society depends on the internet? Sure, some people
depend on the internet. And some companies. And some verticals.

But "depends" sounds to me like... without it, society will crumble or go
through some dramatic metamorphosis. I find that... questionable to say the
least. I don't remember much about the 1980s, I was 8, but I'm faily certain
it wasn't the dark ages as it seems you're suggesting. Eliminate the internet
off tomorrow, and society will carry on.

Eliminate motor vehicles? Electricity? Complete chaos.

The idea that it's some big problem because people can't differentiate between
Facebook and some blog?

This is more myopic thinking. You're acting like if you're not on the internet
you must either be amish or impoverished. Please.

~~~
someplacecold
HA! You just don't get it. ALL the processes for which the internet provides a
mission-critical service are going to freeze. What happens when MasterCard
suddenly can't access the balance of its creditees anymore? What happens when
you need your social security check? What happens when you need money from a
bank? Who's tracking stocks? How are you going to get all your important
emails, or your contacts, or your off-site financial records from company x?
All these processes are not trivially related to the internet; they depend on
it in a way that cannot just be "fixed". Make not mistake, our financial
system is completely and 100% dependent on internet, and if you take it away,
there will be a complete disaster. Sure, some of it will eventually get where
it needs to go, but some of it won't. And some of that information you need
NOW.

I'll say it again: without the internet, these processes FREEZE. And that's
just the effects that don't involve the lack of ability to communicate. Here
are some more:

Google is worth $154 billion. That's one company alone. There are lots of
companies, lots of small business that are purely internet companies. I'd say,
what, a couple trillion dollars worth just in the valley alone? What happens
when the internet disappears? They are all suddenly useless. Maybe it doesn't
sound like a big deal, but there is a LOT of money tied up in those companies.
Not only would investors lose basically all money (and thus, losing their
ability to leverage more bets, etc., depending on how deep they were in), the
companies that were banking on those companies to buy things would lose money.
And many, many more companies would lose time and energy due to vastly
decreased productivity related to not being able to get those products in as
fast a manner as the internet allows.

Then there's the fact that there is a lot of valuable information stored on
the internet. What happens when MasterCard suddenly can't access the balance
of its creditees anymore? Who's going to absorb that debt? You? What happens
when you need your social security check? What happens when you need money
from a bank?

It's no secret that e-commerce is big business in the US. Even a lot of
businesses that are relatively small do e-commerce a lot of times, so you also
have to count the fact that all their investments are sunk, too. Then there's
the cost of the lost business that brought them, which they may have been
banking on. Then there's the fact that, again, they can't get goods as fast as
they used to because the efficient means of communication are gone.

Then there are the international implications, which means you can take all of
what's said up there, and cross-apply the affects to them, as well as how
those effects will affect us.

Oh, and I still haven't discussed the fact that you benefit more than you even
know from information accessibility. For the last 10+ years, you've been
slowly teaching yourself that you don't need to memorize everything because
you have the internet. What happens when you need all those facts, but now
they're gone? What happens when reporters don't have access to those facts?
What happens when vital government organizations don't have access to those
facts? And it's not just you: our entire society is built around this
accessibility of information. Without it, we are blind.

So yes, the internet is integral to our way of living, and in fact, the way of
living of the world as a whole. If you cannot see that, you need to exit the
tech sector immediately.

~~~
encoderer
Are you kidding?

You have no notion of the resiliency of our economy or our history as a
civilization if you think that "pulling the plug" on the internet would be
some crippling event.

Yes, business would be affected. But our civilization would collapse? I mean,
you think people would just start hording guns and food because the INTERNET
stopped working?

If Mastercard couldn't use the internet, you know what it would do? It would
use banks of dedicated lines and dial-up modems to process cards, the same way
it still does to this very day in most businesses.

I get that you live and breath this stuff, so do I. But you should seriously
consider subjecting yourself to a liberal arts education. You need
perspective. Our civilization has survived amazing adversity. Pandemics. World
Wars. Revolutions. You think the internet would break us? Seriously?

------
hubb
holy smokes that's hard to read. i waited a few seconds for the styling to
finish... but it never did.

~~~
seldo
Seriously! White on grey?

~~~
theycallmemorty
Did they fix it? It looks like black text on a grey background for me.

------
fragmede
The problem here is Google's inline news feature. It looks like they've
actually special cased searching for 'facebook login' as the news results for
that search are no longer the top hit. I think this is the wrong fix.

The real problem here is how news articles on a topic are automatically the
top result on Google, which you can be sure the SEO/phishing crowd is
frantically trying to take advantage of.

Unfortunately, for Google, they're trying to expand and be more than a search
engine company under that name. So the powers-that-be want to keep news
results where they are without changing the formatting, when really that's the
better solution. Stick all the news results into a light-blue div with rounded
corners so that it's more visually distinct from 'normal' search results.
Saying "News results for" doesn't change the fact that it's Google, and it's
the top hit, so in many users's minds "it's gotta be (close enough to) right".

------
ssp
The address bar in the browser is totally broken from a usability standpoint.

If you change it, it doesn't reflect the page you are looking at. This means
for example that you can get into a screwed up situation where:

    
    
      - you are looking at page a
    
      - page b is being loaded
    
      - page c is displayed in the address bar
    

Which is not only highly confusing in itself, it also _looks identical_ to
page c being loaded.

There is just no conceivable mental model that non-nerds can build that can
predict the behavior of the address bar. When that's the case, people fall
back on scripts, in this case "go to google.com; type in what you are looking
for; hit return;"

In fact, I've sometimes wondered if you could make a competitor to the web
that would be much easier to use.

~~~
cchooper
That's only the start of it. How many people who use the web know what http
means, or why it appears in their address bar? And how many people _at all_
know what :// is for?

~~~
Splines
:// isn't for anything (the "//" anyway):
[http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/the-webs-
inventor-r...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/12/the-webs-inventor-
regrets-one-small-thing/)

------
daemin
My take on this is that these are the reasons why things like the iPad will
succeed, namely locked down single purpose devices that do one thing at a time
well. Essentially Internet based appliances.

They will succeed primarily as some people (evidenced by this article) only
use the Internet to do a few specific things and don't know of, or don't want
to know of the specifics (address bar, search bar, certificates, etc) of using
the internet in general. Therefore they will have their device with the icons
of the things they use on the home screen, and not really venture into using a
browser at all, just use the specific applications. Thus no more worrying
about how to access Facebook or navigating a browser properly, they'll just
click (tap) the Facebook icon and they are there.

------
astrec
Our biggest site serves a nation of ~21 million, does ~3.5 million UBs
(standard UB caveats apply) and derives 28.94% of it's traffic from Google
organic.

I have to scroll down to keyword number 34 to find a phrase that is not some
permutation of our domain name (which is also our hero brand name). The actual
domain name accounts for 7.12% of these referrals, keywords 1-33 around 73%.

Out of interest, direct traffic is 38.66%

As amusing as the RRW debacle was, this is the way a significant segment of
the population use the web.

------
dasil003
Contrary to the title, what this article describes is obvious. The people
yelling out "OMG WTF LOL" are just teenagers attempting to define their own
identity by declaring the cluelessness of the older generation... nothing
novel there.

Plus, the actual number of comments is unimpressive, given Facebook's size and
demographics, a couple hundred confused comments does not seem especially
significant considering the prominence and placement of the hit under Google.

~~~
someplacecold
Obvious, huh?

[http://uxmag.com/short-news/these-are-your-users-read-and-
be...](http://uxmag.com/short-news/these-are-your-users-read-and-be-horrified)

------
ErrantX
660 comments.

Based on the fact that a large majority google "facebook login" to access the
site, at least that I have seen, I'd say actually this suggests users are
reasonably smart on average :-)

would be interesting to see the analytics for that post to get real figures.

------
char
The part of this post that stood out for me was the very bottom, where the
author alludes to old politicians who are mostly ignorant of the Internet and
modern technology. There is something pretty scary about the people 'in
charge' being oblivious to something so significant.

------
tbgvi
I've spent probably way to much time thinking about this as well. I'll never
forget the looks I got on the train when I was laughing hysterically at those
article comments :)

It seemed that a lot of the confused were older judging from their profile
pics. I know when I've shown my grandparents how to navigate the internet it's
a lot easier to just set Google as their home page and tell them to type in
what they want to see.

On the surface it seems to be a usability issue, but there's only so much you
can do to help people who don't even really understand the internet and
computers.

------
synnik
Google itself isn't helping to distinguish URLs vs. Search when they make the
address bar in Chrome do both.

FWIW, If I type "facebook", it sends me straight to facebook.com, "twitter"
takes me to search results.

~~~
endlessvoid94
..That's the point.

They're trying to INTEGRSTE search and address bar. They've succeeded. And
it's far, far more usable than having them separate (for most people, people
like my parents, my grandparents, etc).

------
nerme
Maybe Hacker News should try and organize free 2 hour "Introduction to the
Internet" classes for the elderly?

I'm sure it's mainly a matter of ignorance and not a matter of intelligence.

~~~
mortenjorck
I volunteered for one of these before (it was a series of one-on-one
sessions). I patiently walked an elderly gent through the absolute bone
basics: starting a browser, using the address bar, using Yahoo mail. It was
quite slow at times, but he was a pleasant old guy, and at the end of it, I
think he really was ready to correspond with his grandkids on his own. It was
definitely rewarding, and I'd recommend it to anyone.

~~~
GFischer
I have an 86-years-old grandmother that is valiantly trying to get used to the
Internet.

It takes her a LOT of time to learn the most basic tasks, and I know it's an
effort on her part (my grandfather doesn't even try).

She has now mastered the Google search, and so... she uses nothing else :) .
That's probably what happened to these other old gentlemen (my grandmother
doesn't have a facebook account because she's worried about privacy, but it
could have happened to her).

~~~
wheels
The interesting thing I've noticed with my grandparents and great-aunts/uncles
as test cases is that it's not really universal. Both of my grandfathers are
over 80.

One of them carefully writes down how many times he has to click on something
(he can't ever remember whether to single or double click), doesn't really
understand that he's not on a typewriter and can use the backspace, so all of
his mistakes are still inline, is comfortable with email and not much more.
His little sister, in her 70s, however, has more Facebook friends than I do.

My other grandfather, the older of the two (83), plays backgammon against
random people on Yahoo Games, uses instant messaging, regularly buys stuff
online, reads my blog and even asked me what Twitter was, commenting that, "It
seemed like another kind of blog." When we first set up a company newsletter,
he was the first subscriber. He still works most days and complains that he
can't get DSL at his house and so he prefers to surf at the office.

------
vashthestampede
It is amazing to this that people need to _go_ to google in order to pull up
any site. No, don't type in google.com, type in facebook.com instead. Do you
do a google search when logging in to online banking? Checking your email?

And seriously? How much time can one sepnd on facebook in the first place? I
swear my uncles and aunts and parents play on it for _hours_.

~~~
lftl
Having done some work for a local credit union, I can tell you that yes people
do actually do a google search for their bank to get to their online banking.

One item to consider is that a large portion of these people probably have
google as their homepage, so they don't "go" to google, it's just he most
conspicuous box when they fire up their browser.

~~~
vashthestampede
Yeah, that's true. My inlaws though, they have Yahoo! set as their homepage,
then go to google to get to a web address. I asked them why not just set it to
google, and they said they liked having news and weather on the homepage to
check out first. I tried to show them you can do that with google too, they
just weren't going for it.

~~~
misuba
People hate change a lot more than they hate inefficiency!

------
mrcharles
I thought it was pretty obvious that only the first few pages of comments were
even remotely real. Then the internet lolmachine got a hold of it and went
nuts.

Still, it saddens me that people are still just typing random shit in the
address bar and expecting it to work.

------
xiaoma
Going through the names and clicking to the FB profiles, I found the
female/male ratio much higher than the "old person"/young person ratio.

(for values of "old person" > 35)

