The issue with people not understanding filesystems isn't that people don't understand filesystems; it's that for decades now the leading technology companies have been executing a campaign to strip basic computer literacy from everyone who isn't college educated, allowing the formation of a cult of tech and the mysticization of the process in order to justify monopolies and oligopologies with outsized influence over daily life for everyone on Earth.
I fundamentally believe that computers should help as many people as possible do as much as possible, and the way to achieve that isn't by hiding what computers are doing; it's by making what computers are doing understandable and manipulable by users.
Computers should do what their users tell them to. No more, and no less.
@juliana ... I think this might be at the core of why we are rejecting so hard the "just let people forget about files" narrative seemingly everyone is pushing on this. ("everyone" being like, one or two people, but we hsven't seen many countertakes...)
Yeah, exactly. Show them stuff like the filesystem, no need to hide it. It's not like you need to be able to program to understand it.
There is going too far that way. Like, we heard a take "don't use Git unless you understand its internal data structures", and in our opinion /that/ is ridiculous. But files? Files aren't that.
The only argument we've heard for hiding files is "I like being able to tag stuff", and files and tags can coexist!
@LQ84i @juliana why are files/directories not that? It feels for me that the only difference is that I (and many others) grew up with hierarchical directories structure and therefore perceive it as "natural", as opposed to git which we learned later in life. I still don't understand what is so special about hierarchical directories structure.
Computers should do what their users tell them to do, and users generally do not operate e.g. in terms of NAND gates or memory management or master file tables; why do we expect them to operate in terms of hierarchical directories?
I agree that both tags and files can coexist. I agree that users should be able to manipulate files and directories if they want to. I don't understand why the fact that some (many) of them don't want to is considered regrettable.
@IngaLovinde @juliana Because it feels like the next step from "many don't want to" is "it will no longer be an option at all".
Additionally, it feels less like "evolving interaction paradigms" and more like /removing features/, dumbing it down to MAKE people forget about files.
Nothing says you have to use that hierarchy. We have known people who dumped everything in one gigantic folder. Heck, /we/ do that with our downloads folder. But not having your files siloed into one app is important, and it feels like that siloing is what mobile is going toward.
In another thread you mentioned your email messages aren't files. Well, that /prevents you from opening them/ with anything except your mail client. Whereas, say, our Krita documents? We can easily open them with anything else that understands the format (I do not know of any apps that do, but we actually wrote a script to clean up their internal structure, because with files, you can do that).
