blivet
I don’t think it’s fair to expect someone looking to join a new knitting community to learn about client/server relationships and federated social platforms.
This is my opinion as well. I really don’t think that the average end user should be expected to know or care about how federated servers work, any more than I need to know that when I visit a website it uses a load balancer to route my request to one of many servers. Users should be able to create an account and click on links to find and create content without having to understand anything about the technical end.
Yeah, I agree with the writer’s overall point, that some level of moderation is always going to be required, but there is an elitist tone in the article that I don’t care for. As someone who first gained home access to the internet at the beginning of the “Eternal September” people like the author are always moaning about, I think it’s deeply offensive to write off anyone who wasn’t privileged enough back then to have internet access through a university or employer as a “fool”.
I know what you mean. There’s nothing wrong with being young, of course, but I really cut back on my interaction on Reddit when I realized a while back just how many people there are teenagers or in their early twenties.
Even if they’re not actually trolling, there’s an awful lot of attitude motivated by ignorance. It got really frustrating being downvoted for simply explaining some actual verifiable fact about the early development of JavaScript.
I wish the micropayments model people were proposing twenty years ago had taken off. I don’t have any interest in subscribing to The New York Times, for example, because I just don’t read it very much, but I wouldn’t object to paying a few cents every time I happened to read one of their articles.