Lot’s of software is just shit/hard to use
That is the reason for degrading proficiency. Not, that the tools are bad but the attitude, they have to be easy to use.
That almost everything “just works” is nice as a consumer but it won’t make you troubleshoot and you will not gain technical expertise by using such devices.
In my experience, it’s often users who just want everything spoon fed to them like infants that think it’s hard.
From the tasks described, it seems to me they were not measuring ‘Computer Skills’ as reasoning, patience, tenacity - people could have similar issues with similar tasks involving a pile of papers.
I’ve been reading the book “A Small Matter of Programming” which discusses a bit end users relationships with computers.
I think people who are into computers get surprised to know most people just don’t care about how computers work and they shouldn’t have to. They want software that is easy to use and allows them to complete their task. Ex: a spreadsheet is an incredibly powerful software that hides anything about how computers work but still allow users to create multiple different “apps” by effectively programming.
Most of the “decaying” tech skills people say are actually stuff people don’t need to know nowadays. Everything is an abstraction anyway, and most people using even desktop computers aren’t aware of how the graphics software is rendering the screen, for example.
The problem is the software isn’t making it simpler to operate just by abstraction, much of it is by subtraction.
It’s not turning two buttons with individual functions into one, it’s removing a button all together, even for the people that knew how to use it.
The problem with the abstraction is, the more you rely on technology to replace certain skills, the more dependant on it you get, and the tech industry is getting less dependable and increasingly predatory when it comes to the users that are now dependent on them. That dependence also leads to more market entrenchment.
For example, if you don’t know how to manage files, you are trapped forever with iCloud or OneDrive until they create easy ways to transfer everything seamlessly between clouds (and they won’t). That’s bad for users and for the industry overall.
I built my entire cloud storage strategy around Google drive because it had very simple integration with my previous seed box provider. Like, I could run Plex from the cloud through them directly off of my Google drive and then mirror that to local storage.
Super slick and easily usable setup. In a push to completely de-google my life the past 2 years I had to figure out an effective migration strategy off of that stack.
It was a total pain in the ass. Not to mention moving the rest of the people on my family plan off of Google as well. The majority of them are fairly tech savvy and even with that in mind we struggled.
I am now 100% self-hosted and learned a shit ton about docker along the way but, I couldn’t imagine trying to do the same thing with a group of entry level users.
But the thing with users is that their learning depends on their motivation. Just like we all, they don’t care about something until it becomes an inconvenience and then there’s a reason to learn.
So as long as there are resources to learn when you need it, I don’t think that’s a problem.
But it is unreasonable to expect the average users to care about what the file structure should be when current computers can search through anything in 1 second and they think it’s good enough.
I guess Idiocracy was a documentary after all.
I’ve watched it (EDIT: recently) and frankly it seemed like a future where people stupid, but like me are the majority.
IRL people both stupid and the opposite of me are the majority. That sucks more.
I am by no means top at anything I do with a computer, but I do find it said that I tend to know more than almost anyone I interact with in real life when it comes to using computers.
For the most part the way I became proficient with a computer has come down to reading comprehension. I would like to see studies showing the overlap of computer proficiency, and reading comprehension.
In my experience, it’s not just a lack of reading comprehension, but often some combination of an utter lack of curiosity, laziness and defeatism. Many other things, like video games, have escaped the realm of being reserved only for nerds and gone mainstream, yet computers remain something people just constantly assume are hopelessly complicated.
I know for a fact my mother-in-law can read just fine, as she spends most of her day reading novels and will gladly spend the rest of it telling me about them if I happen to be there. Yet when it comes to her cell phone, if there’s any issue at all, she just shuts down. She would just rather not be able to access her online banking in the Citi bank app for weeks or months at a time, until one of us goes and updates it for her, rather than reading the banner that says “The version of this app is too old, please click here to update and continue using it.” and clicking the damn button. If anyone points this out to her, though, she just gets worked up in a huff and tells us “I’m too old to understand these things, you can figure it out because you’re still young.” She will eventually figure these things out and do them for herself if nobody does it for her for a while, but her default for any problem with her phone is to throw her hands up and declare it a lost cause first. I’ve seen a lot of people have the same sort of reactions, both young and old. No “Hey, let’s just see what it says,” just straight to deciding it’s impossible, so they don’t even bother to check what’s going on.
I know too many people like that and I hate them
“I’m no expert so I will dismiss this dialog without reading it” - “it gives me error but because I’m not expert I’m not going to read it” - “it says something but you need to come here to read it - no, I’m unable to read it because I’m not expert”
It’s the retarded UIs, I think. I function the same way when having to use Windows, Android, typical applications and sites. It’s an undertaking to use any of them to some end.
Now why do these people give up and offload it to us “sufficiently young” - they think these UIs are retarded for them, but work for us. Like “you wanted such things, you help me with them”.
And they can’t accept that such things are aimed at them and not us.
You can critique UI design without using an ableist slur
I don’t find this explanation remotely likely.
One can walled gardens, siloed services, lack of trust, oligopoly, widespread scams, legal pressure at everything good in the industry. It’s not the only factor surely.
Did you accidentally a word? Sorry, I don’t understand
add
Yes. When I use particularly badly designed software, where you know it’s from a lazy, cost cutting money grabbing company, and you know you need 8x more clicks, and where any miss-step, means you have to start again, I have great trouble motivating myself to use it.
I think it’s a mix of all of these things.
Being able to read isn’t quite equivalent to reading comprehension though. So between that, and lack of curiosity, laziness, defeatism, and more; it really does stunt the population when it comes to computer knowledge.
Same shit here. Now I know I have ADHD, back then I didn’t. I just couldn’t concentrate on any complete task. And still one day I started my Gentoo install and completed it simply by reading the handbook and the error messages etc. Ended up using Slackware after that, via reading too.
It’s mind-boggling that people who can concentrate on reading pages and pages of text with their content won’t read what’s put under their nose.
The worst part, is a good chunk of those people don’t retain or comprehend what they read either.
That’s another thing.
It is upsetting, yes, when a normie says “ha, you don’t even know in which year yadda yadda A has happened”, but then they can’t answer what is the meaning of that knowledge for them, how is it connected to other events and which, what is the value they’d extract from it, etc.
But it’s understandable that people with good memory get comfortable with using it instead of thinking. Sometimes thinking much faster is too an ADHD bonus, it’s not like I deserved it somehow before being born.
But getting back to computers - it’s rather that in their lives text is apparently mostly meaningless, and they expect that from the error messages. So they seemingly don’t read instructions or scientific\engineering\hobbyist literature. They don’t make things and find flaws in them. They don’t have that thing in their souls which in Ancient Greece was called “metis”.
You’re right. I get hit with the “you don’t know which year” phrases. But when I ask further probing questions as to why I should know those things, I get hit with the “well I learned this in X year of school.” and they fail to explain the importance. People often equate memorization with being intelligent and real world examples point to this absolutely not being the case.
I oddly find technical documentation of things and informational pieces to be far more interesting.
And might I add, well put!
From the article it does seem that the failure of ability isn’t strictly related to computers per SE, but to an over all inability to think about the word problems given in an abstract and mathematically coherent way. They seemed to ask participants to solve what are essentially database query, reading comprehension, critical thinking, and logic problems in the context of an email suite. Word problems can be hard for anyone that hasn’t studied and practiced how to decipher them. It’s just that using a computer kind of forces one to confront those gaps in what should be a fundamental part of highschool education. Math and science classes aren’t just solving problems by wrote memorization or memorizing the periodic table, they are about problem solving. Lots of people fall through the gaps and don’t get that one special teacher who understood this.
I would agree with you here. From my experience, schooling doesn’t aim to teach critical thinking, or reading comprehension ad much as it should. The way tests and work are handled is more closely inline with memorization. Memorization doesn’t help people break new ground, or help develop the tools to begin troubleshooting, and tackling new ideas and problems.
Memorization typically ally only helps with solving problems we already have answers to.
I’ve done support for sysadmins for almost a decade, and the ones that are the biggest pain in the ass to deal with are the ones who can’t or won’t read the error message and think a little about it. And my kids’ friends all have the same problem: They don’t read what’s on screen and if they do they make no attempt to understand it.
This is why the humanities are important. All those times you have to explain why the curtains are blue is practice for reading other things and determining meaning.
I have found in my years of experience in IT, the best way I can handle an issue/error that a user may face is to work through it with them, verbally tell them what I am doing to fix it while showing them. Another trick from my repertoire is to try to relate to their frustration, or their problem, so they don’t feel talked down to.
You are right, the humanities are important.
And it can be about how things are framed and communicated.
100% agree. Often I feel like I’m mostly a therapist who also knows computers.
That aspect of tech support often burns me out. However, put a complex computer related problem in front of me, and I could find myself at it for as many hours as I can be awake without burnout.
Dude, you’re on Lemmy. That means you’re probably in the top 1% of people with computer skills.
I have been considering this for awhile. I’m also assuming this is the largest reason why lemmy’s growth hasn’t been what we all wanted lool
I appreciate the compliment. However, there are plenty of people who are more knowledgeable than I am when it comes to the grand topic of computers and technology.
Yeah, probably a big sample bias in these comments
Yeah the biggest problem for people who can’t use a computer always seems to be that they just won’t ever read what it says on the screen. The solution to problems is often very obvious if you just actually read error messages or tooltips or anything
There’s an XKCD for that, of course.
I’ve discovered over the years that curiosity is maybe the most important aspect of being good with technology.
Technical skills, patience, problem solving, organization, all that is critical, obviously.
But more often than not, it all starts with just wanting to know what’s possible. I’m the kind of person that, after installing something for the first time, be It software or a game or whatever, the very first thing I do is open the settings, and look all the knobs and levers that are available.
I was genuinely stunned to find out that the vast majority of users never look at the settings ever. And maybe that’s why developers seem to be increasingly unwilling to even provide options for those of us that like tweaking settings.
curiosity (…) patience
Eh, I used to use those back in the day, but for the last decade or so I’ve been using mostly concentrated spite and it seems to work just fine (though I can’t wait for the AI bros to invent a computer that can feel pain… now that’ll make computer wrangling fun again!).
Single handedly that is how I have acquired any of the computer knowledge I have. So it is absolutely mind blowing that people just can’t seem to grasp the fact that most of the time what it takes to understand something, is reading. That being said, beyond that, breaking through to new discoveries; it makes me appreciate those with an inquisitive mind that tend to push the envelope beyond what is well understood and well documented.
I started noticing this 10 years ago. To me, this isn’t some new phenomenon. However, it feels even worse now than it did back then.
The number one thing that makes me go JackieChanWTF.jpg is when people don’t even know how to navigate through directories.
I post this a lot but it’s true. Younger people definitely have problems with this.
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z
My aunt is a teacher and I remember when she started talking about how her school was getting Chromebooks I thought that wasn’t going to be good for learning how to use “real” computers. Same with phones and tablets. Everything is too abstracted away from the user so they never have to know what a directory is.
Google is buying the generation Apple is close to and Microsoft more or less failed to catch.
It’s like a vicious cycle:
- People are tech illiterate
- Tech companies design things for the lowest common denominator.
- People don’t need to learn anything new and become even more tech illiterate
AI is going to make it so much worse. You’ll soon be in the top 5% if you have a keyboard app installed on your phone.
You mean the twenty to thirty somethings that have come along. They have one folder with all their stuff in it and sometimes spend quite some time just looking for a file because they are unwilling to organize it or even sort it by file type.
I’m a 20-30 something (26) and, generally, I think it’s younger people who are starting to struggle with this (<21 maybe?). All of my classmates seemed to be OK at handling files. From what I saw in highschool and college it was more to do with computer hygiene than incapability.
I teach math to undergrads, and damn it’s sad. They don’t know how to send a PDF file from their phone to laptop, and upload it to Canvas. One guy ended up emailing it to me. They don’t even know what a folder/directory is.
Why would they need to know what a folder/directory is? It’s a remnant from meat space and was replaced by tagging and is being replaced by LLM search/AI.
Why wouldn’t they be able to upload it directly to canvas?
I really empathize with people that didn’t have to figure out how to rip a CD at 2x speed or take a class on card catalog systems. They skipped a lot of critical problem solving learning opportunities.
The directory remark is unrelated to the Canvas one. I guess they didn’t have the app set up on the phone in that case.
Anyway, have directories been replaced? I’m having a hard time remembering any filesystem without directories. And we don’t need to put AI in every fucking thing.
Gmail was the first to get mainstream support for a directory-less method of organizing.
Music, photo, video apps have no need for directories. Many phone apps have no need in general.
Even your documents folders. It’s easier for me to use search than to drill down through folders.
I actually use tags as directories in GMail. I can’t find shit otherwise. (Tangent: just how shitty is the search in Outlook? I can never find anything unless labeled in advance.)
I agree for the apps. But then they shouldn’t deal with files anyway. They should just access certain directories as permitted by the system, and those should also be exposed to the user.
Hard disagree on the documents (or anything else, really). One ends up emulating folders using tags anyway, and there’s no real way of doing it in a platform-independent way. Also, searching can be very annoying in many cases. For my research, I end up working with the same files for a few weeks straight. It’s much better if they’re in a folder, rather than searching them every time.
You do you, though.
Google docs doesn’t really use folders, and neither does o365. Especially when in a mobile device. Sure you can use folders but it’s limiting compared to tags.
Directory hierarchies are absolutely not a remnant from meatspace. The world “folder” is, but IRL folders are a totally different beast because they’re not nestable. Tags and searching serve useful purposes but they don’t replace directory trees.
Folders are absolutely nestable.
The problem with virtual folders is you can’t have one document in multiple folders without causing chaos because of how limiting that hierarchy is. This is why tagging is better.
How does tagging deal with file locations and permissions?
Location is irrelevant and a legacy method of thought. Why would a digital file need to be held down to a single location? Sure, you could symlink it but that’s a crutch.
Tags can have permissions.
It’s all metadata.
Yeah I grok it I just have no idea how you are going to solve all the issues this involves. Like memory mapped I/O or air gapped networks where the file is in a physical location etc. it feels like you will just have to reinvent directory structure inside tags.
Dunno know, maybe make your own *nix that works this way and try to get attention to it.
Tell me you’ve never used a filing cabinet…
Honestly I use discord or email for that >.>
Windows/iPhone doesn’t seem to have a great solution as far as I’ve checked.
The recent integration Apple did in their newest update is peak usability.
Sadly it’s locked in the ecosystem.Dude, I love Apple hardware for phones but their locked in ecosystem and to an extent the OS is so fucking annoying.
My dream is the (earlier pre 2020s) openness of Android combined with the cohesion and design of Apple.
Android truly is a magnificent clusterfuck like Windows but I still prefer that over someone like Apple defining where I can go and where not.
For Android what is my main draw is that I can fuck around in the filesystem with apps like mixplorer and sideload apps at my own risk. The first part (this is all from the very limited time I had to fiddle with phones from clients) is impossible and the second has too many string attached as far as I am aware.
Oh and I obviously spend money on some apps I would need to find replacements for and most likely pay again. The other points would need to be a strong contender to make me move entirely.But it’s very tempting.
Best of both worlds is a jailbroken iPhone, but it’s becoming nigh impossible these days. Sure, if you have an older phone it’s still possible with some caveats, but long gone are the days of a new model being jailbroken in a year, never mind a week.
Managing digital information today is a horrible mess of silos and big business driven incompatibilities. It often drives people to use PDFs, as there is nothing appropriate. Blame the software/businesses, not the victims/users.
I mostly agree with you. But it only works because users give in. They deserve some of the blame.
I use Arch btw. You should try Arch. Everyone in this post should stop what they’re doing and try Arch. I never go outside.
It has always been this way. Part of my “age-driven degradation” is that I can see the same patterns repeating themselves often at odds with the age of the people in question. The average competency age always shift younger as any skilled profession does. I however am constantly having to show people that should have a newer skillset than me basic problem solving skills and somehow we can both read the same documentation and they not see the solution.
There was a post here a while back about how younger generations often don’t understand concepts like file system structures because concepts like that (which are still relevant in a lot of contexts) have been largely stripped out of modern user interfaces. If your primary computing device is a cell phone, a task like “make a nested directory structure and move this file to the deepest part of it” is a foreign concept.
I guess my point here is that I agree with yours about this being cyclical in a sense. I feel crippled on a cell phone, but I’m also in my comfort zone on a Linux terminal. Using web apps like MS Teams is often difficult for me because their UIs are not things I’m comfortable with. I don’t tend to like default layouts and also tend to use advanced features which are usually hidden away behind a few menus. Tools built to meet my needs specifically would largely not meet the needs of most users. A Level 1 user would probably have a better experience there than a Level 3 like me. It’s hard (maybe impossible) to do UX design that satisfies everyone.
Are the user levels an actual defined thing and are there more?
The article quotes extensively from the study about this and gives examples regarding what kinds of tasks qualify for those levels.
After actually reading the article I see they’re well-defined. Thanks for pointing me there ^^
They defined it for the study.
Obviously you’d find a level 3+ in many population groups but each would a fraction of the alrady small <10% level 3 population pool.
Hahaha, no way that it could be even worse than what I think. I think almost everyone is an idiot.
No, it definitely is worse than you think, no matter how bad you think it is.
That’s because it’s continually getting worse.
It can’t get worse than assuming everyone can hardly do the most basic shit.
I believe the most computer proficient people were born between 1975 and 1995. Before that and they were too old to figure it out without a lot of effort. After that they grew up with touch screens and it’s all just magic. Right in the middle we were able to grow along with advancements in computing.
I was teaching a class with mostly students born after 2000. One of them had never used a computer with a keyboard and mouse. Never used folders and files. Kind of blew me away.
I was born in 98, my brother was born in 2000. The level of computer literacy just between the two of us is astounding. While a lot of my aptitude with computers stems from a personal interest, even growing up many of my peers were relatively tech savvy – as far as laypeople go. But people in my brother’s grade in school, people just two years younger than me, i noticed a meaningful difference in how they interact with computers vs how people I spent the formative years of my life around do. It’s insane.
I think for those of us that were born 2000 and later the amount of tech experience we have probably has a strong correlation with who was into PC gaming/modding as kids.
Most certainly.
My higher computer literacy stems solely from personal interest.
The IT education in school was basic office usage and other “normie” tasks. Not even typing classes…Still doing the 4,5 finger blind/hunt writing system.
Hopefully my rough estimate of 1995 was not too exclusive. I’m sure there’s not a hard cutoff, and the same goes for pre-1975. But being right in the middle of that range, it was pretty cool to use the full spectrum of PCs, and all the game consoles, and see the internet bloom and explode and decay.
Oh I bet, and fwiw I think that’s a pretty good estimate of that bell curve – I’m just on the tail end of it, so I got to see an actual decline in tech literacy in the people literally in my immediate orbit. It was an interesting experience, for sure
I would put it up to 1999.
But the returns of 1995-1999 are very small indeed.:(
EDIT: Welp, I guess I just proved someone else’s point.
?
Btw the “>” at the beginning starts a quote.
To prevent that put a\before something like a*or. Like this:\>. Hope I could help you :)That is exactly what happened. I was trying to jokingly express anger at seeing my birth year being correlated with being tech-illiterate, so I typed a ‘>:(’ emoji, not realizing I needed an escape-character to avoid it looking like quote.
Hope you get the same laugh out of it as I did lol
When I read “never used a computer with a keyboard and mouse” my first thought was “wow, they only ever used punched cards” until I realized you meant they only used touch screens.
I saw middle school students preferring to type a report on a fucking touchscreen rather than a pc with keyboard “because in this way is faster”. Then for some reason they share a fucking screenshot of the document instead of just attaching that to the email
I have seen worse. Normie’s around me use their phone to capture photo of the laptop screen and send the low pixel photo with less than half part in it including the actual document.
When I ask for a screenshot I get a Word document with a picture in it about 10% of the time.
I feel like that’s more a boomer thing.
The screenshot thing is PAINFUL and way too common by management in particular
Lol screenshot, pdf, what’s the difference really?
I hate them so much when they do that. “I don’t know how to export pdf” - yet you know how to make screenshots which is a “secret” key combination that’s written NOWHERE on the ui.
How it’s possible that they think that’s ok to send four separate emails (separate emails because they click on the screenshot preview on the bottom of the screen and share that) with a screenshot of each page instead of just the file? How they don’t think “wait, is it possible that there isn’t a better way?”
Yeah this is very much not that they don’t understand there’s a better way. It’s that they don’t care to look up how. It’s pretty common. People just go oh I don’t know computers and you get whatever random crap they could throw together with zero effort lol.
There’s no secret to screenshots. They all have a phone.
You’re joking, right? Please tell me you’re joking.
I am joking
PDF scales when you zoom in on it.
Born in that time frame. Windows XP was just finicky as hell, no matter how much praise it got later. If you wanted your Internet to work you just had to flush the DNS cache or just disable and re-enable the interface occasionally. Hell, same for my mouse - occasionally had to use the keyboard to disable and re-enable the mouse drivers.
Now shit just works. Only reason I’ve had to fiddle around so much in recent years is that I used Gentoo for a couple of years. Though by the time I was bored with it, it worked better than Windows XP ever did.
we had typing class in elementary school circa 1995. that’s how I got to typing 150 wpm. almost useless now because of OCR, but still… sad to see computer skills lost these days.
I see ppl typing with 3 fingers and you have 10 of themI learned to type from instant messaging: ICQ and AIM. I know I did Mavis Beacon too but that was the practice that solidified it.
Yeah they tried to teach me to touch type in middle school, but it was MSN messenger and using an internet-connected computer as a tool for socializing that got me to actually practice typing.
A lot of those typing things start you off with “here’s the home row. Now type several strings of meaningless text. Okay, now we’ll let you type g and h in addition.” and then add one or two letters at a time to slowly build up typing skills. I’m the third fastest touch typist I know and I got that way hitting on coeds.
The last sentence resonates with me. I too wore a robe and wizard hat back in the day.
