User-land

    From Consumerium development wiki R&D Wiki
    Revision as of 04:54, 22 February 2004 by 142.177.104.110 (talk)

    User-land has different rules than geek-net. First, user-land is a real place where people have real problems. If they get hurt or lied about, it causes actual discomfort. If they are cheated or lied to, they don't come back with 20 new IP numbers to cheat and lie back, they mostly just go away and say bad things about you. If they are threatened, they go to the police about it, rather than start rumours with what they know are echo chamber lies. A user-land community is a real place with gardens and streets where people live and love. It is not a bunch of text hacked up from community point of view, which real users would recognize as being mostly just irrelevant.

    But most importantly, user-land consists of real human users, not geeks. To a real human user, the most important thing about his computer is that it be easy to use and use the same words to mean the same things, like Mac or Windows or his phone, not 3000 different words in 30 colours like a typical web site. The price of the computer matters, too, and its operating system being so reliable they never have to know what the word "crash" means. Hardware and the exact words used on the screen matter much more than whether free software is under it, which the smartest child of the user might learn how to read and change in 20 years, if and only if they can get a job as a cheap outsourced coder with that skill. Meanwhile, the user must work at a real job to get the money to pay for the computer, the education, and keeping the electricity on and that child fed.

    Trying to use geek-net to figure out the problems of user-land has an obvious systemic bias. The only way to make up for this is to do serious research on the needs of real people, and give more credibility and status (e.g. via a revert currency system) to those who do this research, than those who spout their own opinions. It may also be necessary to create a power structure that puts developing-world users with language barriers reporting their community point of view with more power. When someone is reporting only their own view, presumably, this is not quite so important. Also, a developed-world user is inherently more priveleged and to reduce the systemic bias they should be disadvantaged relative to those from poorer places. To equalize access based on language, sticking to simple glossary and Simple English vocabulary and phrases may really help.

    When the actual views of real developing nations users is not available, NGO and political party positions might be necessary to fill the gaps until more firsthand field reports are available from real user-land.