16 May

Not even totally clear here whether people can be subdivided into developers and users. Seems reductive. But I'm just thinking on paper here.

(Does the common person have the responsibility (to whom? To society?) to accumulate enough experience to navigate the Internet the way that a developer does? Like as if the Internet is itself a separate society unto itself, and much like many people know how to e.g. get a good deal on a house, cross the street even when the light is red, find the best butchers in town, anyway, much like that, are people responsible for developing a passing fluency in Internet society???)

But assuming that it's not the responsibility of the common person to develop supra, do developers have a responsibility to build an Internet society that will be kind/forgiving/navigable to those who don't have supra?

I guess the question really is: who comes first in this industry?

I was listening to the How I Built This about Stripe, and one of the great features of early Stripe (and which probably continues today) is its developer-friendliness. It used to only take seven lines of code (or something) to integrate with your online store. Nowadays it only takes a couple of clicks in the Woocommerce backend. But I suppose if you had your own hand-coded store, which if you're serious about this you probably will. But so at any rate the developers were a priority. And the API or whatever you want to call it was simple and clean and easy to interface with.

But much of the Internet is not that. Simple or clean or easy to interface with. Much of the Internet is about pulling off a series of pseudo-psychological gymnastics to get people to do what you want them to do. Is it the responsibility of developers to build an Internet that is as easy for regular old users to interface with as the Stripe API was/is for developers?

Or should we assume that much like in society, every like third person is some sort of grifter? In society, someone will have anything that's not bolted down, basically. Any liquid capital is basically free game, and if you don't have your wits about you it will shortly belong to someone a little wittier.

Is the Internet a place like that?