So, ReadWriteWeb has a lovely blog post about Facebook logins. And something very very strange happens. The comments start filling up with people who think that ReadWriteWeb *IS* Facebook, and who cannot figure out how to log in.
Apparently there are a number of people out there who (seriously) use a search engine to "find" Facebook every time they want to log in, and when they typed in "Facebook login" or something similar, they were taken to ReadWriteWeb because of the article. And assumed that Facebook had just changed again.
I honestly don't know what to say.
I always thought all those phishing scams were too obvious for anyone to fall for. I thought most people who use the internet had to be at least literate. After all, the web is made of words.
I was wrong.
The stupidity of people is ceaseless. I cannot imagine how the people who are writing comments on that blog article are even capable of functioning in the real world. It takes only one or two brain cells to realize that is an article *about* Facebook, not Facebook itself, even without the big bold warning paragraph that the article added after the first 50 or so comments. And yet these people still scroll down and add a comment that says, "All I want to do is log in, this sucks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1" or "I just want to log in to Facebook - what with the red color and all? LOLLLOLOL!!!!!111". What is wrong with these people? The regular commenters start chiming in, and find it to be hilarious. I find it to be one of the singularly most depressing things I have ever read in my entire life.
Then again, there's this: "This thread of responses is the single most awesome, tragicomic example of internet stupid I've ever been lucky to witness. It's like having Carrot Top pull my spleen out through my nostril." and this: "This thread reminds me of the time my grandfather typed his phone number into the microwave's keypad, then wondered why his kitchen was on fire. (Seriously, that happened.)"
Though this may be the winningest comment of all: "For the sake of humanity I hope that every idiot posting 'help' after page 3 is a troll. Please, oh please. Please. Don't be real."
Amen.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Oh. My.
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6 comments:
It is sad, and scary even. But not surprising. I am constantly in awe of the people who somehow manage to go online and actually do things after I see some of their comments or the way they speak or figure things out.
It is truly frightening.
I've been doing a lot of research on spyware lately for a project, and for the first time I understand how it could possibly work. Same with the old Nigerian Prince scams. People really *are* that stupid. Wow.
They are stupid. Even if you typed in 'facebook login' at google, bing, or other, the first link given is Facebook.com
Def scary! Of course, my mom can't figure out how to write an 'original' email. She always forwards other messages and adds her own on top! Though she does know she's sending me this..ie jokes, photos, etc...
There's a great MetaFilter thread about this, and I love this comment: "These people GOT IN SOMEONE ELSE'S CAR (because it was in the same parking lot), the key didn't work, so after cranking it for awhile they left a note saying they wished Ford hadn't changed it on them, even though the dashboard clearly said Toyota."
It reminds me of when AOL first opened a portal to the internet. Suddenly, users who'd only (barely) understood how AOL's internal chatrooms and such worked were pouring onto Usenet, assuming any regular poster was a paid AOL admin and constantly asking inane questions. Wow, that was a long sentence.
Phishing scams work because there are idiots out there who fall for them. But the fact that people can't remember facebook.com and type that into their URL bar (or, even better, bookmark it) and Google it every time instead, is beyond anything I could come up with. Which proves how computer illiterate so many people are. They probably don't know how to bookmark or even what a URL bar is. At the library where I work, I once answered the phone and someone asked me what our earl was. That took me a few moments to figure out.
I'm not sure it's stupidity, at least not in most cases. It's a mentality that computers are magic, that they're too hard to learn more than how to do the basics, that people are uneducated in the ways of computers and the internet, and possibly that they don't have the common sense of the average house fly. But stupid? I work with the public. This is just the tip of the iceberg. ;)
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