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this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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Technology
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@admin this is a result of the enshittification of technology. You're no longer forced to learn, you're only displayed a button that you need to press. Doesn't matter what will the button do behind, just blindly trust that it does what it says it does.
I have to say that learning how to pick out the actual download button from all the other "download" buttons is one of the most crucial steps in making yourself resistant to online scams.
Really, yeah, people today use computers on more than an hourly basis. But that doesn't automatically make someone more technologically literate. It's no longer a hard requirement to understand how a computer (I'm lumping smartphones, PCs, Macs, etc.) works in order to do useful operations with it.
That is not what enshitification means.
Enshitification refers to a very typical capital-driven developer pattern in which (particularly social media) platforms gradually forsake the things that make them great for their users and business partners in order to increase profits, ruining the platform in the process.
It has nothing to do with technology being easier to use. Being easier to use is better. It's about technology becoming a worse product, the opposite of being easy to use.
We should not be deliberately gatekeep technology to make it hard to use to weed out less knowledgeable users. That is some elitist bullcrap. We should hold all the platforms to a higher standard when they facilitate these scams and we should be serious about investigating and getting rid of the scammers.
Install our software! Just pipe a curl download of some random script into a root shell, it’ll be fine.
lol I got trolled by that once. Luckily they just did rm -rf / instead of hacking me.
@Bitrot scams no longer mean malware anymore. Phishing is also a thing for example. And hiding full URLs from a browser's bar doesn't help with this either
This seems needlessly gatekeepy to me. Are you saying everyone using technology needs to learn exactly how it all works? People aren't allowed to just use the tools provided to them? Like are cameras worse now that you can just point and shoot vs having to go through many steps for the photo to maybe turn out ok?
@chloyster I'm sorry if I sound so. No, I do not mean to get into the technicalities of the stuff. What I meant was the fact that technology needs to be a bit more transparent about what is doing, and to have companies stop trying to hide stuff just for the sake of a better user experience. We just need to educate more people into using technology, rather than trying to make it more accessible by sacrificing some power user features and capabilities.
It's the same like knowing some basic economics to understand things like ponzi schemes or other types of scams (or simply being able to save more money).
I see what you're saying. I do agree that people should have the opportunity to be educated to at least a baseline understanding of some things. If for nothing else but to avoid being scammed.
I mean ideally I would just like these companies to be held responsible for doing shady stuff behind the scenes, I don't think having easy to understand UIs (and as a result, a bit obfuscated from what's actually happening) and such have to be a bad thing. But maybe it's too idealistic to want that and expect companies to actually be held accountable if the obfuscation is hiding bad stuff
That's not enshittification it is a normal progression of tech to make it useful for a wider audience. Otherwise we would be typing a byte at a time with front panel toggle switches like on a PDP-8.