Are people becoming more stupid?

[Hobbs]

I get tens of those per week from my site feedback form page:

- Please contact me urgently
(not including an email, a phone number or mentioning what this is about)

- Please add a link to my site or company
(without as much as a hint for an URL!)

- There's something wrong with your page
(am I supposed to be psychic and know which page and what went wrong?)

Too many people just assume you can read their minds, and don't bother to make a minute effort towards communicating properly.

I know this can be forced via script, but can commonsense be force fed? Is this unique to the Internet? Am I the only one noticing this outbreak of stupidity? Or I'm just getting old, grumpy and too impatient?

[Habtom]

I know this can be forced via script, but can commonsense be force fed?

Commonsense can't be force fed.

But then if you can enforce it through a script, you might not need to do that.

[Lipik]

To many people write and press 'send'.
They don't think first and most of all they don't re-read what they write.
Re-reading what you just wrote saves you a lot of time and emberassement.
(if you find some mistakes in this text, it's becouse English is not my native language, I did re-read it!;)

[Mreif]

I think that people sometimes think quicker then they type...
Not worth getting upset about, just laugh, you cannot do a thing about it anyway. :-)

[jbinbpt]

We make it easy for them to be vague. You have to or you won't hear from them. Forms with questions put users off.

[Hobbs]

>Forms with questions put users off

That's exactly my problem jbinbpt,
Even the smart ones won't fill all fields, and forcing them to via script is your loss if you want the feedback.

On stupidity,
How about the webmasters, web owners and their designers that build beautiful sites with unusable contact details listing a street and local phone number and fax with no mention of the city and country? Even some brick and mortar companies that forget to include a contact us page in the first place!

How about sites that load a 4 meg rotating logo before allowing you to skip intro.

How about heavy flash sites that take ages to load with no internal navigation, once you click into a page, you have to start from the beginning!

I can go on forever, visitor and webmaster stupidity is on epidemic levels, my head hurts.

[jecasc]

The answer ist definetly YES! People are getting more and more stupid. I have noticed this myself.

Two weeks ago I ordered a new computer. Nothing worked because several drivers where needed. So I used a second computer to download them from the internet (it took me hours to search for them) to my USB stick and then installed them. However I could not find the correct network driver.

So angrily I called support and they told me I should insert the driver CD that came with the computer. Or go to their website where all drivers where available for download.

Stupid people. They should have attached a big note on the computer "Driver CD included" and they could have saved me several hours of my precious time...

[weeks]

I don't think people are getting more stupid. Indeed, I think the average smarts of the population is rising.

But, modern technology has given stupid people tools to reach out to others. A strong economy has even given them money. This, together, has created empowered stupid people.

Combine that with the fact that stupid people do not know they are stupid (where wise people are careful and leave room for potential error or changing situations), and you have what looks like MORE stupid people.

What we have is "better" stupid people, not more.

[grandpa]

Some people don't understand concepts.

I have a friend who uses Yahoo mail. Apparently there was a recent change to the page, and the Compose button was replaced with a Write Mail button.. something like that (I don't Yahoo). My friend was lost for a week, unable to write email because the Compose button was gone.

She isn't stupid, but she does suffer from A.D.D., and it takes her a long time to figure out how to do something. She is a member of a very popular forum (not this one) and she can use it without any problems. But put her on another forum and she is totally lost and confused. She doesn't understand the concepts that would enable her to be web savvy on most sites.

For my part, I have nearly given up in frustration. Finally, I showed her how to find tutorials on that popular video site. So if you want her to fill out your forms properly, create a video, make it easy to find, and easy to understand.

[weeks]

Good advice about the video, Grandpa. Thanks. I think a lot of us older web folks can't get used to the idea of video being available.

You don't get wiser as you get older, especially in a technical biz. Experience can be a problem.

[gabby]

Hobbs, there's something wrong with your original post, please fix it...;)

[DamonHD]

Hey, ~15 years ago when running one of the UK's then very few ISPs, I did have at least one customer demand that I 'fix the Internet'...

These days, on my main site with free multimedia I have at least two (yes, count them) links on each catalogue page, one near the image and one in the footer, to the Terms and Conditions, ie many tens of thousands of links to the Ts&Cs all together. I still regularly get emails from apparently-coherent people telling me that they cannot find the Ts&Cs or that they don't exist or whatever.

And the odd annoying (usually US, but not always) visitor who demands that in order that they can use my multimedia I fill in and fax at international rates a long complicated form of theirs. This sort of silliness was one reason that I got rid of my fax machine.

Rgds

Damon