This is a great comment. I keep seeing examples like Obsidian in which "normies" which are supposed to be completely dumb and useless creatures, manage to learn how to use software that isn't just clicking a single button many times, and yet the UX specialists keep telling us that we must dumb down everything to the lowest denominator possible and become apes. That is not true at all.
I don't think tech needs to choose between being friendly towards average users and tinkerers. You can strike a happy medium. @fiatjaf's post makes me think of the recent Fast Company article on Obsidian: https://www.fastcompany.com/90960653/why-people-are-obsessed-with-obsidian-the-indie-darling-of-notetaking-apps
The crux of the piece is basically that the note-taking app Obsidian has grown to 1 million users despite not being very user-friendly because it requires knowledge of Markdown. I don't think Markdown is the major barrier here. Most of the things a user might want to do with text notes (bullet points, bold and italics, headers) can be easily toggled with UI buttons in Obsidian. I think most digital natives have at least a passing familiarity with markup languages or can easily adapt.
Obsidian is actually good example of how software can be both user- and programmer-friendly. Nostr still has a lot of hurdles in the way of mass adoption, but being able to peek under the hood isn't one of them.
View quoted note →
View quoted note →
