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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
This is a really well written post. That’s all I came here to say. /srs
The obligatory add-on to a comment that says “that’s all I came here to say”: this phenomenon can be seen in a great variety of communities and I believe that it speaks for not the characteristics of the FOSS community, but rather some detrimental socially constructed human tendency to feel superior by oppression.
thank you! ^w^
that’s a good point. i’m talking about the foss community because it’s what i’m part of and i see it coming most from it right now, but tbh i’ve had car people give me some shit for not knowing some car knowledge i’m assuming are pretty basic to them lol
I feel you. Interestingly, Linux communities, especially the Arch one, but also programming communities over at StackOverflow, can be pretty exclusionist and elitist, while, for instance, electrical engineering, electronics and other hardware oriented communities feel more inclusive and welcoming. Are there conclusions to be drawn here? Software vs hardware? 😆