Users are a pyramid. At the top of the pyramid are highly technical users who spend all day not minding spending all day dealing with hostile and spiteful interfaces to get trivial tasks done - there are very few of these people in the world. As you progressively work your way down the pyramid users become progressively less inclined to tolerate this nonsense and the number of people in that segment grows.

At the very bottom, the largest population of possible users, are people who's toleration of any sort of confusion of nonsense from their computer device things is at zero.

As a company, you have to decide how far down this pyramid you want to target your products. The lower down the pyramid, the more work you have to put into your product on the usability side, you may even decide to ignore higher tiers on the pyramid because you can only put so much effort into a product, and the upper bits of the pyramid represent an astonishingly small fraction of the market space.

AOL did one thing really well, they decided early on to target the absolute bottom tier of the pyramid that they could recognize. This is pre-Internet days where practically everything you ever wanted to do with a computer was user-hostile. They didn't give two shits about users who knew all of the Hayes command set by heart, because those users were 1% of the entire possible market and supporting them was as much effort as supporting the 99% they were trying to get money out of.

The Internet didn't even immediately kill AOL, as in their own controlled user interface. It really was easier to start "your AOL" wait a minute for the funny sounds to stop and type in "gardening" to get more than enough information about that subject. You could even guess at keywords, "cars" or "cooking" probably took you someplace as well.

The Internet started at the absolute top-most part of the pyramid and we've spent decades trying to get it to work where all the money is, the bottom bits. It hasn't helped that there were all sorts of unexplainable (to the common user) hanger ons and hatefulness that users have had to deal with along the way. But every time we improve the experience a little, high fives everywhere and the bottom lines jumps another million dollars.

Anybody remember the old ways to setup an email client? Remember all the little bits and pieces of information you needed, POP3 or IMAP mail server, SMTP server, authentication, encryption methods, different user/pass for sending and receiving, opening firewalls, setting spam filters, etc?

Then it got better. The last time I set up Thunderbird I supplied it with approximately two pieces of information, my email address and my password.

Do you remember how an AOL user set up their mail? They didn't.

Why is this important? Because that other stuff is hateful to the user. It's also pointless. It never should have gotten to the point where I needed all that stuff just to get my email. But that's what happens when you design software for the top of the pyramid. You can make it as obtuse, undocumented/poorly documented and hostile as you want, and there will still be a small population at the top of that pyramid who won't mind dealing with it.

I was pondering the other day the vast reduction in websites (and other internet services) that I typically visit and use in a day from 10-20 years ago. Pretty much I use, HN, Reddit, Facebook, gmail and youtube for fun and my corporate equivalents for work. I felt sad for a moment because the internet used to seem so much more chaotic and vibrant.

I'm pretty sure that 10-20 years ago I'd have spent time on USENET, telnetted into something, fought with my mail client, hit as many ftp servers as web sites, probably at least 1 gopher site and more. I'd have probably searched for any search term on multiple search engines to make sure I wasn't missing any results and more. 20 years ago I would have even supplemented my time on the Internet with time on local BBS's, each with different interfaces and services.

But today what's the point? I didn't like calling into all those BBSs, or going to all those sites. One site with all those services is much less user-friction to deal with. I didn't like mucking around in some command-line ftp client, why shouldn't I just have a link on a webpage someplace to download something? Why should I telnet into some message board to talk about the Amiga when some meta-message board service lets me just go to /r/amiga? What's the point of gopher when the web works so much better? Why USENET when I can find better, less spammy conversation on HN or reddit?

And guess what? It's even better than that! I can shop on-line, I don't have to drive anywhere, deal with parking, deal with people, deal with the heat. From my toilet, on my phone, I can buy just about anything I'd ever want to buy and have it delivered to my front door within 48 hours.

It's not just that the world today is more convenient, in some notional tradeoff of power vs. convenience, it really is actually better. We're not quite at AOL levels of simplicity. I still have to waste time explaining to my mom why she needs to type "https://www." when all she wants to do is type the name of her bank and have it go there.

More importantly, there's absolutely nothing preventing anybody from doing any of the old things. Want to run a gopher site? Set up a gopher server and do it! Want to run your own private message board behind an obscure domain name? do it! You can still target that top of the pyramid user if you want to, but understand that if you want to make money from it...well...good luck.