When lawyers go drinking together they laugh at stories of criminals who don't even understand the basics of evidence law.<p>When doctors have coffee breaks they share stories about how modern people don't even understand the difference between a virus and a bacteria and demand antibiotics for the common cold.<p>Latin professors share hilarious pictures of people who have tattooed themselves with incoherently mistranslated latin tags.<p>Every profession thinks that the general population is full of dunces who don't understand the basics of the highly important body of knowledge that they are experts in...
I liked this. There's a touch of empathy there for "stupid" users. But it's not denying the serious problem that these people represent, especially when they're in government, writing policy to control an entity that they aren't even close to understanding.
I think the author of this blog has a view of "society" that is a little myopic.<p>The premise that the "structure of today's society" is based on facebook and the web is, I think, something several hundred million people in this country would disagree with.<p>The internet itself is not yet one of the few pieces of technology that is intractably ingrained in our societal DNA. On that list? I don't know. Cars. Telephones. Television. And _facebook_ certainly isn't.
The problem here is Google's inline news feature.
It looks like they've actually special cased searching for 'facebook login' as the news results for that search are no longer the top hit. I think this is the wrong fix.<p>The real problem here is how news articles on a topic are automatically the top result on Google, which you can be sure the SEO/phishing crowd is frantically trying to take advantage of.<p>Unfortunately, for Google, they're trying to expand and be more than a search engine company under that name. So the powers-that-be want to keep news results where they are without changing the formatting, when really that's the better solution. Stick all the news results into a light-blue div with rounded corners so that it's more visually distinct from 'normal' search results. Saying "News results for" doesn't change the fact that it's Google, and it's the top hit, so in many users's minds "it's gotta be (close enough to) right".
The address bar in the browser is totally broken from a usability standpoint.<p>If you change it, it doesn't reflect the page you are looking at. This means for example that you can get into a screwed up situation where:<p><pre><code> - you are looking at page a
- page b is being loaded
- page c is displayed in the address bar
</code></pre>
Which is not only highly confusing in itself, it also <i>looks identical</i> to page c being loaded.<p>There is just no conceivable mental model that non-nerds can build that can predict the behavior of the address bar. When that's the case, people fall back on scripts, in this case "go to google.com; type in what you are looking for; hit return;"<p>In fact, I've sometimes wondered if you could make a competitor to the web that would be much easier to use.
My take on this is that these are the reasons why things like the iPad will succeed, namely locked down single purpose devices that do one thing at a time well. Essentially Internet based appliances.<p>They will succeed primarily as some people (evidenced by this article) only use the Internet to do a few specific things and don't know of, or don't want to know of the specifics (address bar, search bar, certificates, etc) of using the internet in general. Therefore they will have their device with the icons of the things they use on the home screen, and not really venture into using a browser at all, just use the specific applications. Thus no more worrying about how to access Facebook or navigating a browser properly, they'll just click (tap) the Facebook icon and they are there.
Our biggest site serves a nation of ~21 million, does ~3.5 million UBs (standard UB caveats apply) and derives 28.94% of it's traffic from Google organic.<p>I have to scroll down to keyword number 34 to find a phrase that is not some permutation of our domain name (which is also our hero brand name). The actual domain name accounts for 7.12% of these referrals, keywords 1-33 around 73%.<p>Out of interest, direct traffic is 38.66%<p>As amusing as the RRW debacle was, this is the way a significant segment of the population use the web.
Contrary to the title, what this article describes is obvious. The people yelling out "OMG WTF LOL" are just teenagers attempting to define their own identity by declaring the cluelessness of the older generation... nothing novel there.<p>Plus, the actual number of comments is unimpressive, given Facebook's size and demographics, a couple hundred confused comments does not seem especially significant considering the prominence and placement of the hit under Google.
660 comments.<p>Based on the fact that a large majority google "facebook login" to access the site, at least that I have seen, I'd say actually this suggests users are reasonably smart on average :-)<p>would be interesting to see the analytics for that post to get real figures.
The part of this post that stood out for me was the very bottom, where the author alludes to old politicians who are mostly ignorant of the Internet and modern technology. There is something pretty scary about the people 'in charge' being oblivious to something so significant.
I've spent probably way to much time thinking about this as well. I'll never forget the looks I got on the train when I was laughing hysterically at those article comments :)<p>It seemed that a lot of the confused were older judging from their profile pics. I know when I've shown my grandparents how to navigate the internet it's a lot easier to just set Google as their home page and tell them to type in what they want to see.<p>On the surface it seems to be a usability issue, but there's only so much you can do to help people who don't even really understand the internet and computers.
Google itself isn't helping to distinguish URLs vs. Search when they make the address bar in Chrome do both.<p>FWIW, If I type "facebook", it sends me straight to facebook.com, "twitter" takes me to search results.
Maybe Hacker News should try and organize free 2 hour "Introduction to the Internet" classes for the elderly?<p>I'm sure it's mainly a matter of ignorance and not a matter of intelligence.
It is amazing to this that people need to <i>go</i> to google in order to pull up any site. No, don't type in google.com, type in facebook.com instead. Do you do a google search when logging in to online banking? Checking your email?<p>And seriously? How much time can one sepnd on facebook in the first place? I swear my uncles and aunts and parents play on it for <i>hours</i>.
I thought it was pretty obvious that only the first few pages of comments were even remotely real. Then the internet lolmachine got a hold of it and went nuts.<p>Still, it saddens me that people are still just typing random shit in the address bar and expecting it to work.
Going through the names and clicking to the FB profiles, I found the female/male ratio much higher than the "old person"/young person ratio.<p>(for values of "old person" > 35)