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An edit of xkcd 2501, “Average Familiarity”:
[Ponytail and Cueball are talking. Ponytail has her hand raised, palm up, towards Cueball.]
Ponytail: Open-source alternatives are second nature to us foss nerds, so it’s easy to forget that the average person probably only knows Linux and one or two degoogled Android ROMs.
Cueball: And Firefox, of course.
Ponytail: Of course.
[Caption below the panel]
Even when they’re trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person’s familiarity with their field.
partly inspired by the replies to this post but i see this kind of thing all the time (shoutout to the person who once genuinely asked “who still uses google these days?”)
made with this neat tool
I remember being on Reddit some time ago, and in the comments somebody mentioned Linux. The next comment was “What’s Linux?”
I try to keep that post in mind whenever I think anything is common knowledge.
I’m of two minds on this.
In some respects people are learning new things everyday and your take is correct.
On the other hand it’s so incredibly easy to highlight some text and click search that it it shows a profound lack of curiosity and a lot of laziness.
On the third hand if people didn’t constantly ask this, those search results would not exist, especially for more obscure queries.
Reddit became the #1 source for search engines for a reason
Not to mention that this approach is so much faster and more effective than asking a question in the comments and waiting for an answer, if anybody answers it at all!
While I agree on some level that it might be easier and quicker to find out by simply putting it into a search engine I don’t want to deny the human aspect here. At the end of the day social media (and even reddit/lemmy …) is not “knowledge transfer” its about the interaction between humans. So if someone is faced with something new, especially in a thread where it seems to be a given that people know what it is, it makes sense to use that space to ask what it is everyone is discussing. And while a search might yield a generic result (maybe even a better worded explanation) a good faithed commenter might, in the given exampl, enot just explain what Linux is, but also why is relevant to the bigger discussion and also the commenter that orignally asked would have a way to ask further questions that might lead to a deeper understanding of the topic eve it if isn’t as efficient.
Tl;dr: Don’t just RTFM or LMGTFY someone. Take a minute to explain and welcome people into the lucky 10000