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Maybe that's the regular path of any technology. At first most of the community is small and technical so you don't need (and don't have the means anyway) to id
by ardemue 12y ago
Maybe that's the regular path of any technology. At first most of the community is small and technical so you don't need (and don't have the means anyway) to idiotproof. Then it grows and eventually there are more casual users than technical ones. Since the technology is more stable you have more ressources that you can dedicate to figuring out how your casual users use the technology. And since they have no interest in understanding how it works, you idiotproof.
The beauty of it is that it regulates the number of potential technical users. At first, your technology needs a lot of technical users, and since it's not idiotproofed yet, and users are exposed to low level details, you attract a lot of them. But then, low level details are progressively hidden, and only the users that have a strong interest will become technical. Essentially filtering out the users that don't have a strong enough interest to dive deeper than what they're exposed to.
Maybe the internet doesn't need as much technical users as before. So yes, there will be less kids getting interested in its technical side, but that's okay because it doesn't need them.