Well, they give the rationale there too – that most webpages out there are, well, useless.

I think that the heuristic is mis-firing in this case. But…okay, let’s consider context.

I think that the first substantial forum system I used was probably Usenet. I used that at a period of time where there was considerably less stuff around on the Internet, and I had a fair amount of free time. Usenet was one of several canonical systems that “intro to the Internet” material would familiarize you with. You had, oh, let’s see. Gopher and Veronica. FTP and Archie. Finger. Telnet. VAX/VMS’s Phone, an interative chat program that could span VMS hosts (probably was some kind of Unix implementation too, dunno). IRC. Usenet. The Web (which was damned rudimentary at that point in time). I’d had prior familiarity with BBSes, so I knew that forums were a thing from that. There are maybe a few proprietary protocols in there too – I used Hotline, which was a Mac over-the-Internet forum-and-file-hosting system.

But there just weren’t all that many systems around back then. Usenet was one of the big ones, and it was very normal for people to learn how to use it, because it was one of a limited set of options.

So the reason I initially looked at and became accustomed to a forum system was because it was one of a very limited number of available systems back in the day.

Okay, what about today? When I go see a new forum system, I immediately say to myself “Ah hah! This is a forum system!” I immediately know what it is, roughly how it probably works, what one might do with it, its limitations and strengths and how to use it. Even though I have maybe never used that forum website before a second in my life, I have a ton of experience that provides me with a lot of context.

Let’s say that you don’t have a history of forum use. Never before in your life have you used an electronic forum. Someone says “you should check out this Reddit thing”. You look at it. To you, this thing doesn’t immediately “say” anything. You’ve got no context. It says “it’s the front page of the Internet”. What…does it do? What would one use it for? There’s no executive summary that you see. You don’t have a history of reading useful information on forums, so it’s not immediately obvious that this might have useful information.

Now, I’m not saying that you can’t still assess the thing as useful and figure it out. Lots of people have. But I’m saying that having it fail that initial test becomes a whole lot more-reasonable when you consider that missing context of what an electronic forum is coupled with the extremely short period of time that people give to a webpage and why. You’d figure that there would be some significant number of people who would glance at it, say “whatever”, and move on.

Facebook was really successful in growing its userbase (though I’ve never had an account and don’t want to). Why? Because, I think, it is immediately clear to someone why they’d use it. It’s because they have family and friends on the thing, and staying in touch with them is something that they want to do. The application is immediately clear. With Reddit or similar, it’s a bunch of pseudononymous users. People don’t use Reddit to keep in touch with family and friends, but to discuss interests. But if you’ve never had the experience of using a system that does that, it’s not immediately obvious what the problems are that the system solves for you.

I was talking with some French guy on here, few months back. He was talking about how American food is bad. He offered as an example how he went to an American section of a grocery store in France and got a box of Pop-tarts after hearing about how good they were. He and his girlfriend got a box and tried them. They were horrible, he said. He said that he threw them in the garbage, said “they should be banned”. I asked him whether he’d toasted them before eating them.

Now, is the guy stupid? No. I’m sure that he functions just fine in life. If you look at a box of Pop-tarts, it doesn’t tell you anywhere on the thing to toast them. The only clue that you might have that you should do so is in the bottom left corner, the thing says “toaster pastries”, but God only knows what that means, if you even read it. Maybe it means that they toasted them at the factory. We don’t have that problem, because we have cultural context going in – we had our parents toast them for us as a kid, and so the idea that someone wouldn’t know to toast one is very strange to us. The company doesn’t bother to put instructions on the box, because it’s so widespread in American culture that someone know how to prepare one. My point is just that a lot of times, there’s context required to understand something and if someone has that context available to them, it can be really easy to forget that someone else might not and for the same thing to not make sense to them.