>For me the biggest issue is the lack of understanding of files and folders. Google Doc is used by I'd say most people under 25 today. It sucks, it teaches people to rely on search, and not even Google is good at finding stuff on that level.
It pains me to say this, but honestly? I think it's an elegant solution to a problem that doesn't want answers.
The world at large has never, and I mean never, understood files and folders. Most people, both in the 20th and 21st centuries, create and leave all their files straight on the desktop. Teaching people about file structures never works because they don't care, far as they're concerned they have more important stuff they need to be dedicating their brain cells to.
So the wiser(?) computer nerds giving up on trying to teach file structures and bending the knee to what the world at large wants, a singular place to store data and a quick way to find them, is an elegant solution.
> The world at large has never, and I mean never, understood files and folders.
This doesn’t mean not to use an analogy to organize information. Most people don’t understand Dewey decimal, but that doesn’t mean libraries of the future should abandon it.
Files and folders are at least teachable and correspond to many successful life patterns (eg, kids put their toys in their cubby and their friends put their toys in their cubby. This makes it easier to find the next day at school).
I would like to see more work done on graphs of folders instead of just hierarchies. When google docs first started you could have lots of labels and organize the same file into multiple “folders.” But I think they did away with this when they switched to drive and had to represent as a folder structure.
I think an easy way would be to have lots of bins and link them together with lots of edges that could be hierarchies or topics or subjects. If I have to project it onto a file system then use lots of symlinks to put the same file in multiple places.
I tend to avoid too much Desktop pollution except to maybe keep something I'm referring to a lot. However... While I used to maintain a pretty granular file folder hierarchy, these days I mostly just dump things into an &Archive folder or one of a few other fairly generic folders and, yes, rely on search/knowing the approximate date.
And I don't really have trouble with finding my own stuff. It's finding docs that have been shared with me in part because things I really need are mixed in with a zillion agenda docs and presentations from some meeting I didn't really care about.
It pains me to say this, but honestly? I think it's an elegant solution to a problem that doesn't want answers.
The world at large has never, and I mean never, understood files and folders. Most people, both in the 20th and 21st centuries, create and leave all their files straight on the desktop. Teaching people about file structures never works because they don't care, far as they're concerned they have more important stuff they need to be dedicating their brain cells to.
So the wiser(?) computer nerds giving up on trying to teach file structures and bending the knee to what the world at large wants, a singular place to store data and a quick way to find them, is an elegant solution.