this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
-53 points (19.5% liked)

Technology

59374 readers
7416 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
-53
It’s time to retire the term “user” (archive.today)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
26 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

because we shouldn't be humanizing AI while depersonalizing the actual people who use stuff, according to MIT Technology Review.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Recently, I met with a founder who cringed when his colleague used the word “humans” instead of “users.” He wasn’t sure why.

Yeah because it sounds super weird. Who says "humans" instead of "people".

  • "my app has 2000 users" - yes
  • "2000 people use my app" - yes
  • "2000 humans use my app" - you're definitely an alien

Either way what a stupid article. The AI angle pretty much makes me dismiss it outright because I refuse to let AI dictate anything I do except for adding AI crawlers to my website's robots.txt. And then you've got the corporate focus which is also really strange since that's not the only place where there's "users". Open-source software also has users (and developers, so if you want to replace "users" with "people", does that mean developers are not people?) and I would be insulted if someone implied I "depersonalize" the people who use my software by calling them users. It's just a descriptive word and this article and everyone quoted here seems like they're trying to pull a bad connotation to the word out of thin air.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

It posits that üser" makes designers think of users one-dimentionally and ignore the many things they could think of. Now, there hasn't been any studies on this yet, so it's unsubstantiated (especially since UX has worked for decades now), but I nonetheless found the angle iintriguing.