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knieveltech | 7 years ago

Rolling out "grandma" as a reason to not do N is a tired chestnut that is growing less relevant with every passing day. It's ageist. It also ignores the fact that all of the people you're casually dismissing lived through the creation of the web and remember a time when going to someone's web server to view their particular content was the norm. You also appear to overlook the utility of post-it notes in your claim that coaching and repetition are a required ingredient for success.

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eropple|7 years ago

My dude. Most of those people who grew up during the rise of the internet did not experience it. The time when "going to someone's web server was the norm" was outside their lived experience. Your average sixty-year-old probably got a computer when they were forty (because that would be 1998) and what they did with it was generally minimal, modulo company intranets and the like. Of course there are fantastic technologists of that age and I've been privileged to work with some--but they're neither the mean nor the median. Grandma or Grandpa get less relevant as demographics change. But it's still a pretty huge obstacle to doing anything. That'll get worse, too, given the upward collection of wealth.

But here's the other problem: it's changed on the bottom end, too. If you're between about 25 and 50 right now and are nontechnical, you might have gotten deep enough into the internet at a formative period to not feel weird about having to deal with a decentralized web. (I am one of those people, I stress.) But that window? it's smaller than you think!

knieveltech|7 years ago

O RLY. So you claim your average sixty year old with (in your example) 20 years of experience owning a personal computer, is somehow so technologically illiterate as to be unable to utilize browser bookmarks, desktop links, or write down a URL on a post-it note? Alternately, are we pretending that smartphones aren't utterly pervasive in all demographics, including people's grandparents? I mean, yeah, if you absolutely had to you could probably cruise the local K&R cafeteria for the odd outlier who is totally technologically illiterate, but that group is also unable to utilize social media to any extent either and so aren't particularly germane to the conversation. So no, outside of the minds of a handful of programmers, there is no real obstacle.