7 ms·

As a comp-sci graduate, as someone who grew into computing through the late 80s and 90s, the files-based paradigm makes a lot of sense to me. But is it really t

As a comp-sci graduate, as someone who grew into computing through the late 80s and 90s, the files-based paradigm makes a lot of sense to me. But is it really the ideal model/UX for most people? Files are hard to manage. Most people don’t do library work, or habitually create relationship hierarchies. (I do it all the time; I love a taxonomy, but it’s work, and the general pattern for memory is association, not hierarchy). I worry the “apps” paradigm focuses users on brands and encourages lock-in, walled gardens, and so on. I think we need a third way.

azernik 5y ago
Something that is evolving for certain common types of files (images, for example) is an application-mediated storage, but where apps "share ownership" (or rather, declare awareness) of files rather than owning them exclusively. So e.g. my camera roll, Google Photos, and Facebook comments can all give me a window onto my photos. Those "windows" are currently inconsistent and kind of painful, but I see the germ of an approach there.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > Those "windows" are currently inconsistent and kind of painful, but I see the germ of an approach there. There is an approach here, but I can't see it as anything other than a hostile takeover. The "shared ownership" of application-mediated storage is not under user control. Depending on the implementation, it's either controlled by the platform and otherwise sandboxed (i.e. you can't get at the data from outside of a participating app), or - more commonly - it's controlled by mutual business agreements between app vendors. In that latter case, you still can't get at the data directly, and the app you're using can suddenly stop being able to access the data, because the vendor that provides access revoked API access to the vendor of your app. For a random example, see e.g. Spotify revoking API access to SongShift for no good reason, and then restoring it later, possibly due to GDPR pressure by a fellow HNer[0]. Regular files are bits on your storage. They stay forever independent. Application-mediated storage is just a window into business partnerships. -- [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24764371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24764371
  - squiggleblaz 5y ago
    I don't think your criticism is accurate. The shared Photos folder on my phone is a bit different than the database of photos Google Photos has access too. But don't get me wrong. I want to criticise the shared ownership model. I just think the model the PP intended to mention was different than the one you criticised. The Photos folder is just a folder. Applications that have requested and been granted permission can access it using a user interface of their choice. This is the "shared ownership" location. The Google Photos database is stored on Googles servers. Third party applications do not necessarily have access to it. It is thoroughly owned by Google. The "shared ownership" model somewhat blurs the lines between the two of them. I think this is a considerable part of why this approach is poor: it is considerably more confusing than the old filesystem approach. With the filesystem, you know exactly where the file lives. Most people know how to copy files and send files and can understand putting something onto a shared drive. The shared ownership notion blurs the lines with exclusive app ownership, and the idea that there are files which I can manipulate becomes obscure. It is hard even for experts to distinguish between local files and remote database entries. The distinction between copying a file and using remote tools to share access to the same file (or a copy of the file) becomes frustrating. The way forward needs to be about respecting and empowering the user. The user wants to feel in control of their data - that is why we have the GDPR and other comparable laws. The user doesn't want to subordinate usability to data trust; they want companies to fulfil both, and since there is a hole in the market, they have turned to regulation to help plug it. Unfortunately, companies have not responded in ways that give us grounds to trust them. A new model based on user-controlled resources and programs that can access resources (given to the program by the user) without gratuitously logging in should be the way forward. This doesn't mean a reversion to the old approach. It had its problems. But the future should look more like the past.
read_if_gay_ 5y ago
My boomer dad used to hate folders. His home directory was completely trashed with files. Impossible to find anything, and his aversion to folders became a self reinforcing problem. But with the lockdowns he was spending more time behind the screen and actually started to structure the mess. Now he’s even happily using a NAS to archive stuff. I guess the principle of having apps manage files is even easier to grok than folders. However if my dad can do it on his own then it’s not like people just can’t learn folders. It’s really only a matter of how do you motivate them.
j1elo 5y ago
I'm 100% with this idea. Managing the file system in a decent way is extra effort and a skill in itself. One that is just adjacent to the concept of using a computer for work. In fact I'd dare to say having the filesystem as first and foremost UI, is bad UX. We just grew with it, so now it feels like the most natural way to work because we've spent decades getting used to it. This became apparent to me when trying to teach computers to some people who were like a "blank slate" so they brought a fresh perspective to everything. The concept of applications seemed about right for them. But opening the dreaded File Explorer and swim through drive letters, virtual and real folders, having to be well organized, having to worry about backups of specific folders, etc... was (and still is) a daunting task for them. And one that is just tangential to the work they wanted to do in the first place.
- ragnese 5y ago
  > The concept of applications seemed about right for them. But opening the dreaded File Explorer and swim through drive letters, virtual and real folders, having to be well organized, having to worry about backups of specific folders, etc... was (and still is) a daunting task for them. Dude, I grew up with computers in the mid-90s and that's all a daunting task for me, too. In fact, it may be WORSE for me than for a "blank slate". I had switched to Linux on my personal machines for a number of years and then tried to help someone with a computer issue they were having with their Windows computer- I had NO IDEA where their "Pictures" folder was, or why I kept seeing the same file in multiple places as I clicked around the file explorer. I also feel like I was confused about something to do with "Desktop", but I don't quite recall what it was. It was honestly pretty disorienting- I thought I was in a weird carnival house of mirrors. I don't honestly know --right now-- if you can save a file to one of these virtual "Pictures" places or not. Or, if you do, where it would actually go.
  - j1elo 5y ago
    To be honest, I don't know either because I avoided them since the first time they got introduced. Those folders is precisely Microsoft acknowledging there is something wrong about the files-first approach, but as usual, in trying to make it more approachable, they ended up with an even more confusing solution, virtual folders that try to abstract the actual filesystem hierarchy with some virtual collection folders based on file types.
qwerty456127 5y ago
I've also been using computers since the age of DOS and felt like I loved taxonomies but once I grew up I found out I hate them. A non-system/code file should better only have meaningful (and also easy to view, edit and query) extended attributes (long and short titles only targeting humans, optional description, creation and last update timestamps independent of when you have technically put it into to the file system or changed some metadata about it, content author field, tags letting you "put" it into several categories at once, type-specific properties like the type itself (so we wouldn't have to use stupid "extensions"), picture size, music bitrate etc). Creating strict single-place (symlinks don't help much in this context) short-named taxonomies for real-life non-programmer files is a huge pain and they often feel unnatural. Coming up with file names targeting both humans and traditional file system (e.g. where you can't use colons and have to keep names rather short because of full path length limits) while also optimizing them to leverage searching isn't a pleasure either. I am sad WinFS never arrived and I am in a constant search of a good cross-platform tagging file manager.
- maliker 5y ago
  I've been using hash tags in file names (e.g. "eat more veggies #todo.txt"). To group by tags, I use the smart folders functionality on windows/macos/googleDrive to save a search for items with the tag in the name. Definitely not as smooth as an OS-level tagging feature, but it works in a pinch. Should be easy to port to other systems with some scripts in the future when/if this functionality becomes mainstream.
dsego 5y ago
There is the problem of one document not necessarily being one file. Sometimes you have sidecar files or some meta data that is stored somewhere else in a database of sorts. So it can be messy, especially dealing with antiquated formats like dcim (easy file name conflicts), gopro leaves extra thumbnail files scattered around, wtf is even DS_STORE, etc etc. I also think that file managers are not powerful enough for searching and managing all kinds of data, the fact that we need photo management software proves it.
- photojosh 5y ago
  It's not perfect, but the macOS way of creating "bundles"; where a directory looks like a single file if it has a particular extension is 99% of the way there. The average user double-clicks and it opens in the relevant app. The power user can right-click and choose 'view contents', which opens it like any other directory. This can also be done via compressed files with an application-specific extension. We use it at work for Python zipapps, and of course everyone probably knows .docx and .xlsx > file managers are not powerful enough for searching and managing all kinds of data, the fact that we need photo management software proves it. I don't want to be responsible for manually managing all my photos, copying them off cards or downloading from online services or whatever. I also want to view the photos in various ways: I'm regularly browsing them via the map view, or person tagged in an image, and so on. Hence the photo management software that handles all that for me. But the photo management could certainly be better integrated into the OS, ie open your Photos folder and rather than seeing raw image files, it would load the photo management.
alxlaz 5y ago
Honestly, I think a third way would be good, but sticking with a way would be even better. A huge, huge chunk of my last year was spent teaching dozens of teachers (long story) who were used to, and very productive with, the '90s way of using files were everything, how all these new cloud things work. The whole thing was extraordinarily confusing. Lots of things that they depended on didn't quite fit with the "let's do away with files" approach, and the fact that they couldn't do it more than compensated for any productivity gains due to easy collaborative editing and the like. We're all computer nerds here and love to learn new things about computers but most people aren't. People have treated the sick, built the largest buildings in the world, gone to space and developed new vaccines using this clunky, inefficient, Stone Age file-based interface. I'd say it's not too shabby. Unless a hypothetical third way enables measurable, verifiable improvements (and I mean measurable, not "we asked 10 interns to rate how easy it is to perform these actions", that's an anecdote, not a usability study), that third way would be a net loss for virtually everyone except us. FWIW: I think the constant UX churn in our industry is just the symptom of an identity crisis. It's what happens when a company (or, as is often the case, an entire industry) is increasingly unable to produce meaningful fundamental improvements, so it's churning visible, but practically inconsequential changes in an effort to justify the money it burns through. In our bubble we all go ooh and aah over the latest UX improvements of whatever piece of software we run into again, but truth is most people just go aww fsck, how the hell do you do X now, over and over again?
amelius 5y ago
We're living in the age of search engines. So ... just dump files in one big folder, and use a search tool to find them?
- listenallyall 5y ago
  It's called Search Everything, and it's probably the best and most useful Windows utility ever written. I easily use it a dozen times a day, there's likely been days with over 100 searches.
- GuB-42 5y ago
  That's more or less my approach. It doesn't have to be "dump everything in one big folder", traditional file systems are still useful as a way to uniquely identify a file (literally a URL), but more and more, I use search to interact with data. And that's the way we are going. For example, the Start menu in new Windows versions is best used with search. You can still do it the "old way" but for me, it is clear that it is now secondary.
- Minor49er 5y ago
  We're so far into the age of search engines that you're even ending statements as queries
howaboutnope 5y ago
> the general pattern for memory is association, not hierarchy But we organize our real lives in hierarchies, too. We have our clothes in their own wardrobe maybe, socks in one drawer, underpants in another.. not the green shirts and socks with the green books and the vegetables, and the forks and knives in one box with our screwdrivers, pliers and pencils. It's never perfect, of course, some people are messier than others, but the general idea everybody knows and sees the merit of. We navigate and create hierarchical taxonomies so much, every waking hour, that we barely acknowledge them as such. The digital version of that is not fundamentally different from that. IMO the question shouldn't be "where did I put this, so I can have it?", but "if I had this, where would I put it?". If you know your own or an agreed upon structure for something, it's faster and less taxing, both mentally and time-wise. Also, I don't just look for things I remember, I also remember things by browsing the shelves so to speak, and that becomes more fruitful and enjoyable with some order :)
- dmwallin 5y ago
  There's a difference between the way our minds work and the way reality works. In reality a physical object can only exist in one place which naturally leads to hierarchal organization being the dominant paradigm. On the other hand our minds operate associatively. When we started to build out computer systems we based the UX on metaphors of real-life tool equivalents. I would posture though that as we become more of a computing-literate society and as computing moves closer to becoming an extension of our minds as opposed to an extension of reality, the dominant paradigm will shift towards associate models of organization.
  - rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
    You've eloquently expressed something I've been feeling for a long time, but couldn't put into words myself. Bookmarks and file systems are frustrating ways to organize digital thingies.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      So what would be a less frustrating way -- tagging everything with as many (or as few?) keywords as possible, and then ad-hoc searches as looking through "virtual folders"[1,2] with the tag as the "folder name"? And more systematic ones as (SQL-style?) queries of tags with "AND" and "OR" logical operators? Or something else? ___ [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27916648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27916648 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27916467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27916467
ho_schi 5y ago
File-systems work very well for people who understand how a computer works. And I'm afraid your right about the "apps paradigm", it looks easy within the app but the extended usage is difficult. Looking at Signal (the messenger app) on iOS we see the problems, they struggle creating save backup. The are not allowed to store the backup on the file-system only inside the app, which counteracts the idea of a backup. The other option is a cloud backup, most likely and third-party servers, which counteracts the idea of security and avability. Okay, but through some weird menus you could copy maybe something the a crippled third party app, let us say Files (not a file-browser!) from Apple. PS: I still wonder how many people could have grasp how file-systems work, if Microsoft Windows didn't provided that weird desktop metapher. Which was placed within the the "own files", which incluced the "Desktop", all accompanied by the drive letters. And UNIX? This is a tree!
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  iOS backs up application data normally. The Signal developers blocked it. And they said it's likely they'll remove file export and import from the Android app once it has history transfer like the iOS app. Storing an encrypted database in iCloud isn't a problem. And you can back up iOS to a computer instead.
ragnese 5y ago
I agree completely. We need a way to facilitate interoperability without requiring normal humans to know/care about bytes on a disk in some hierarchy (directory tree) where, frankly, your hierarchy WILL eventually be wrong. Remember back in the old days, organizing your music files into a directory hierarchy- often organized by band? Then, inevitably, two bands you listen to release a song where they collaborated. Now your system is fucked- where do you put that song? It's why "tagging" things became a thing (emails, magical "Pictures" directory in your OS's file manager, etc). There has to be some kind of extension to the idea of "tags"...
spideymans 5y ago
From what I’ve observed working with users, a pretty huge chunk of them (if not an outright majority) really struggle with file management. Some might not be motivated enough to organize files, and others just fundamentally do not understand how the abstract concept of hierarchical file systems work (programmers are great at dealing with these abstractions; end users generally are not)

azernik 5y ago

Something that is evolving for certain common types of files (images, for example) is an application-mediated storage, but where apps "share ownership" (or rather, declare awareness) of files rather than owning them exclusively. So e.g. my camera roll, Google Photos, and Facebook comments can all give me a window onto my photos. Those "windows" are currently inconsistent and kind of painful, but I see the germ of an approach there.

TeMPOraL 5y ago
> Those "windows" are currently inconsistent and kind of painful, but I see the germ of an approach there. There is an approach here, but I can't see it as anything other than a hostile takeover. The "shared ownership" of application-mediated storage is not under user control. Depending on the implementation, it's either controlled by the platform and otherwise sandboxed (i.e. you can't get at the data from outside of a participating app), or - more commonly - it's controlled by mutual business agreements between app vendors. In that latter case, you still can't get at the data directly, and the app you're using can suddenly stop being able to access the data, because the vendor that provides access revoked API access to the vendor of your app. For a random example, see e.g. Spotify revoking API access to SongShift for no good reason, and then restoring it later, possibly due to GDPR pressure by a fellow HNer[0]. Regular files are bits on your storage. They stay forever independent. Application-mediated storage is just a window into business partnerships. -- [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24764371 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24764371
- squiggleblaz 5y ago
  I don't think your criticism is accurate. The shared Photos folder on my phone is a bit different than the database of photos Google Photos has access too. But don't get me wrong. I want to criticise the shared ownership model. I just think the model the PP intended to mention was different than the one you criticised. The Photos folder is just a folder. Applications that have requested and been granted permission can access it using a user interface of their choice. This is the "shared ownership" location. The Google Photos database is stored on Googles servers. Third party applications do not necessarily have access to it. It is thoroughly owned by Google. The "shared ownership" model somewhat blurs the lines between the two of them. I think this is a considerable part of why this approach is poor: it is considerably more confusing than the old filesystem approach. With the filesystem, you know exactly where the file lives. Most people know how to copy files and send files and can understand putting something onto a shared drive. The shared ownership notion blurs the lines with exclusive app ownership, and the idea that there are files which I can manipulate becomes obscure. It is hard even for experts to distinguish between local files and remote database entries. The distinction between copying a file and using remote tools to share access to the same file (or a copy of the file) becomes frustrating. The way forward needs to be about respecting and empowering the user. The user wants to feel in control of their data - that is why we have the GDPR and other comparable laws. The user doesn't want to subordinate usability to data trust; they want companies to fulfil both, and since there is a hole in the market, they have turned to regulation to help plug it. Unfortunately, companies have not responded in ways that give us grounds to trust them. A new model based on user-controlled resources and programs that can access resources (given to the program by the user) without gratuitously logging in should be the way forward. This doesn't mean a reversion to the old approach. It had its problems. But the future should look more like the past.

read_if_gay_ 5y ago

My boomer dad used to hate folders. His home directory was completely trashed with files. Impossible to find anything, and his aversion to folders became a self reinforcing problem. But with the lockdowns he was spending more time behind the screen and actually started to structure the mess. Now he’s even happily using a NAS to archive stuff. I guess the principle of having apps manage files is even easier to grok than folders. However if my dad can do it on his own then it’s not like people just can’t learn folders. It’s really only a matter of how do you motivate them.

j1elo 5y ago

I'm 100% with this idea. Managing the file system in a decent way is extra effort and a skill in itself. One that is just adjacent to the concept of using a computer for work. In fact I'd dare to say having the filesystem as first and foremost UI, is bad UX. We just grew with it, so now it feels like the most natural way to work because we've spent decades getting used to it. This became apparent to me when trying to teach computers to some people who were like a "blank slate" so they brought a fresh perspective to everything. The concept of applications seemed about right for them. But opening the dreaded File Explorer and swim through drive letters, virtual and real folders, having to be well organized, having to worry about backups of specific folders, etc... was (and still is) a daunting task for them. And one that is just tangential to the work they wanted to do in the first place.

ragnese 5y ago
> The concept of applications seemed about right for them. But opening the dreaded File Explorer and swim through drive letters, virtual and real folders, having to be well organized, having to worry about backups of specific folders, etc... was (and still is) a daunting task for them. Dude, I grew up with computers in the mid-90s and that's all a daunting task for me, too. In fact, it may be WORSE for me than for a "blank slate". I had switched to Linux on my personal machines for a number of years and then tried to help someone with a computer issue they were having with their Windows computer- I had NO IDEA where their "Pictures" folder was, or why I kept seeing the same file in multiple places as I clicked around the file explorer. I also feel like I was confused about something to do with "Desktop", but I don't quite recall what it was. It was honestly pretty disorienting- I thought I was in a weird carnival house of mirrors. I don't honestly know --right now-- if you can save a file to one of these virtual "Pictures" places or not. Or, if you do, where it would actually go.
- j1elo 5y ago
  To be honest, I don't know either because I avoided them since the first time they got introduced. Those folders is precisely Microsoft acknowledging there is something wrong about the files-first approach, but as usual, in trying to make it more approachable, they ended up with an even more confusing solution, virtual folders that try to abstract the actual filesystem hierarchy with some virtual collection folders based on file types.

qwerty456127 5y ago

I've also been using computers since the age of DOS and felt like I loved taxonomies but once I grew up I found out I hate them. A non-system/code file should better only have meaningful (and also easy to view, edit and query) extended attributes (long and short titles only targeting humans, optional description, creation and last update timestamps independent of when you have technically put it into to the file system or changed some metadata about it, content author field, tags letting you "put" it into several categories at once, type-specific properties like the type itself (so we wouldn't have to use stupid "extensions"), picture size, music bitrate etc). Creating strict single-place (symlinks don't help much in this context) short-named taxonomies for real-life non-programmer files is a huge pain and they often feel unnatural. Coming up with file names targeting both humans and traditional file system (e.g. where you can't use colons and have to keep names rather short because of full path length limits) while also optimizing them to leverage searching isn't a pleasure either. I am sad WinFS never arrived and I am in a constant search of a good cross-platform tagging file manager.

maliker 5y ago
I've been using hash tags in file names (e.g. "eat more veggies #todo.txt"). To group by tags, I use the smart folders functionality on windows/macos/googleDrive to save a search for items with the tag in the name. Definitely not as smooth as an OS-level tagging feature, but it works in a pinch. Should be easy to port to other systems with some scripts in the future when/if this functionality becomes mainstream.

dsego 5y ago

There is the problem of one document not necessarily being one file. Sometimes you have sidecar files or some meta data that is stored somewhere else in a database of sorts. So it can be messy, especially dealing with antiquated formats like dcim (easy file name conflicts), gopro leaves extra thumbnail files scattered around, wtf is even DS_STORE, etc etc. I also think that file managers are not powerful enough for searching and managing all kinds of data, the fact that we need photo management software proves it.

photojosh 5y ago
It's not perfect, but the macOS way of creating "bundles"; where a directory looks like a single file if it has a particular extension is 99% of the way there. The average user double-clicks and it opens in the relevant app. The power user can right-click and choose 'view contents', which opens it like any other directory. This can also be done via compressed files with an application-specific extension. We use it at work for Python zipapps, and of course everyone probably knows .docx and .xlsx > file managers are not powerful enough for searching and managing all kinds of data, the fact that we need photo management software proves it. I don't want to be responsible for manually managing all my photos, copying them off cards or downloading from online services or whatever. I also want to view the photos in various ways: I'm regularly browsing them via the map view, or person tagged in an image, and so on. Hence the photo management software that handles all that for me. But the photo management could certainly be better integrated into the OS, ie open your Photos folder and rather than seeing raw image files, it would load the photo management.

alxlaz 5y ago

Honestly, I think a third way would be good, but sticking with a way would be even better. A huge, huge chunk of my last year was spent teaching dozens of teachers (long story) who were used to, and very productive with, the '90s way of using files were everything, how all these new cloud things work. The whole thing was extraordinarily confusing. Lots of things that they depended on didn't quite fit with the "let's do away with files" approach, and the fact that they couldn't do it more than compensated for any productivity gains due to easy collaborative editing and the like. We're all computer nerds here and love to learn new things about computers but most people aren't. People have treated the sick, built the largest buildings in the world, gone to space and developed new vaccines using this clunky, inefficient, Stone Age file-based interface. I'd say it's not too shabby. Unless a hypothetical third way enables measurable, verifiable improvements (and I mean measurable, not "we asked 10 interns to rate how easy it is to perform these actions", that's an anecdote, not a usability study), that third way would be a net loss for virtually everyone except us. FWIW: I think the constant UX churn in our industry is just the symptom of an identity crisis. It's what happens when a company (or, as is often the case, an entire industry) is increasingly unable to produce meaningful fundamental improvements, so it's churning visible, but practically inconsequential changes in an effort to justify the money it burns through. In our bubble we all go ooh and aah over the latest UX improvements of whatever piece of software we run into again, but truth is most people just go aww fsck, how the hell do you do X now, over and over again?

amelius 5y ago

We're living in the age of search engines. So ... just dump files in one big folder, and use a search tool to find them?

listenallyall 5y ago
It's called Search Everything, and it's probably the best and most useful Windows utility ever written. I easily use it a dozen times a day, there's likely been days with over 100 searches.
GuB-42 5y ago
That's more or less my approach. It doesn't have to be "dump everything in one big folder", traditional file systems are still useful as a way to uniquely identify a file (literally a URL), but more and more, I use search to interact with data. And that's the way we are going. For example, the Start menu in new Windows versions is best used with search. You can still do it the "old way" but for me, it is clear that it is now secondary.
Minor49er 5y ago
We're so far into the age of search engines that you're even ending statements as queries

howaboutnope 5y ago

> the general pattern for memory is association, not hierarchy But we organize our real lives in hierarchies, too. We have our clothes in their own wardrobe maybe, socks in one drawer, underpants in another.. not the green shirts and socks with the green books and the vegetables, and the forks and knives in one box with our screwdrivers, pliers and pencils. It's never perfect, of course, some people are messier than others, but the general idea everybody knows and sees the merit of. We navigate and create hierarchical taxonomies so much, every waking hour, that we barely acknowledge them as such. The digital version of that is not fundamentally different from that. IMO the question shouldn't be "where did I put this, so I can have it?", but "if I had this, where would I put it?". If you know your own or an agreed upon structure for something, it's faster and less taxing, both mentally and time-wise. Also, I don't just look for things I remember, I also remember things by browsing the shelves so to speak, and that becomes more fruitful and enjoyable with some order :)

dmwallin 5y ago
There's a difference between the way our minds work and the way reality works. In reality a physical object can only exist in one place which naturally leads to hierarchal organization being the dominant paradigm. On the other hand our minds operate associatively. When we started to build out computer systems we based the UX on metaphors of real-life tool equivalents. I would posture though that as we become more of a computing-literate society and as computing moves closer to becoming an extension of our minds as opposed to an extension of reality, the dominant paradigm will shift towards associate models of organization.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y ago
  You've eloquently expressed something I've been feeling for a long time, but couldn't put into words myself. Bookmarks and file systems are frustrating ways to organize digital thingies.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    So what would be a less frustrating way -- tagging everything with as many (or as few?) keywords as possible, and then ad-hoc searches as looking through "virtual folders"[1,2] with the tag as the "folder name"? And more systematic ones as (SQL-style?) queries of tags with "AND" and "OR" logical operators? Or something else? ___ [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27916648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27916648 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27916467 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27916467

ho_schi 5y ago

File-systems work very well for people who understand how a computer works. And I'm afraid your right about the "apps paradigm", it looks easy within the app but the extended usage is difficult. Looking at Signal (the messenger app) on iOS we see the problems, they struggle creating save backup. The are not allowed to store the backup on the file-system only inside the app, which counteracts the idea of a backup. The other option is a cloud backup, most likely and third-party servers, which counteracts the idea of security and avability. Okay, but through some weird menus you could copy maybe something the a crippled third party app, let us say Files (not a file-browser!) from Apple. PS: I still wonder how many people could have grasp how file-systems work, if Microsoft Windows didn't provided that weird desktop metapher. Which was placed within the the "own files", which incluced the "Desktop", all accompanied by the drive letters. And UNIX? This is a tree!

pseudalopex 5y ago
iOS backs up application data normally. The Signal developers blocked it. And they said it's likely they'll remove file export and import from the Android app once it has history transfer like the iOS app. Storing an encrypted database in iCloud isn't a problem. And you can back up iOS to a computer instead.

ragnese 5y ago

I agree completely. We need a way to facilitate interoperability without requiring normal humans to know/care about bytes on a disk in some hierarchy (directory tree) where, frankly, your hierarchy WILL eventually be wrong. Remember back in the old days, organizing your music files into a directory hierarchy- often organized by band? Then, inevitably, two bands you listen to release a song where they collaborated. Now your system is fucked- where do you put that song? It's why "tagging" things became a thing (emails, magical "Pictures" directory in your OS's file manager, etc). There has to be some kind of extension to the idea of "tags"...

spideymans 5y ago

From what I’ve observed working with users, a pretty huge chunk of them (if not an outright majority) really struggle with file management. Some might not be motivated enough to organize files, and others just fundamentally do not understand how the abstract concept of hierarchical file systems work (programmers are great at dealing with these abstractions; end users generally are not)