Dan Fixes Coin-Ops on Nostr: Hey, you know how when you gotta do something that's so jank it'll only run on ...

Hey, you know how when you gotta do something that's so jank it'll only run on windows, you set up a new windows box, what's the first thing you do?

You go into the settings in the file explorer and swear at it and go "Where the hell have they hidden it this time" until you find the option that shows the whole filenames, right? So you don't end up double-clicking on cutekitten.jpg.exe, right? So you can see what the hell's going on in the computer that you bought and that lives in your house? How the hell else are you supposed to use it, right?

Most people don't do that. Hardly anyone does that. You are an outlier for doing that. You are a tiny minority. If someone downloads a zip with file.html and file.css and file.jpg then they only see file, file and file. Most people never change any settings. Most people don't even know that there ARE settings. The joke about the writer who sighs and says "Sometimes I'm sad that I make art.txt not art.jpg," nobody gets that joke, except weirdo computer people like us.

I cannot express strenuously enough how different most peoples' experience of technology is, to how people talk about it on fedi, which is full of the one person in a hundred who fiddle with the settings. But which also seems to have lots of people who are trying earnestly to make Software That Will Change The World.

If you want your software to be liberating, if you want it to be an agent of positive change, then it has to be usable and understandable by a majority of people. Being frustrated at Clueless Users won't change anything, won't help anything, won't do anybody any good. I promise you, these people are just as frustrated at you as you are at them, and you're outnumbered a hundred to one.

Meet people where they are FFS.