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   Lauren Weinstein (lauren@mastodon.laurenweinstein.org)'s status on Saturday, 25-Nov-2023 03:33:04 JST Lauren Weinstein

   Big Tech routinely vastly overestimates the level of understanding that most of their users have of technology -- including websites, devices, security, reliability, and all the rest. Help forums are generally useless or worse. Help documents are typically written at levels beyond the understanding of most users. This is why so many users are being left behind, and why so many of them suffer catastrophic account lockouts and data losses, that Big Tech generally considers to be unimportant.

   • Embed this notice
     wrosecrans (wrosecrans@mstdn.social)'s status on Saturday, 25-Nov-2023 03:33:00 JST wrosecrans

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker

     @dalias @lauren All modern documentation has only two modes,

     "To implement a custom CFD solver, remember that Frob frobbles frobbables using the Omega Mu bistatic convention adopted by Klorzen [87]"

     And

     "The computer had a whoopsie, so try again later or ask someone for help."

     There is no middle ground, and all the technical writers got fired 30 years ago so it's all written by devs who know too much or interns who know nothing."

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Saturday, 25-Nov-2023 03:33:01 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     @lauren I don't doubt the first part is true, but I find documents & error messages these days the opposite. They all amount to "something went wrong and it's unknowable to your puny mortal brain, so too bad you're fucked" rather than giving you any starting point to understand what's wrong and fix it.

     Matthew Lyon repeated this.