Missing the forest for the trees

Since there's still lingering discussion regarding making Gemini more accessible, I thought I'd chime in yet again, even though my responses seem to be falling on deaf ears. I think a lot of the discourse has been snarky jokes and people talking past each other, although it's not nearly as bad as the mailing list (which I finally unsubscribed to recently).

I think that the claims of gatekeeping or condescending jokes about needing to be a computer expert to use Gemini are misplaced. Being a small community based on a niche interest, there is naturally an interest to protect the culture and prevent Gemini from turning into Hacker News or another Reddit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Indeed, the reason why I like Gemini is because it has not (yet) been infected by the disease that permeates mainstream media and social media sites like Reddit, Lobste.rs, Hacker News, Medium and so on and so forth. Misleading or clickbait headlines, advertorials, blogspam, inflammatory discussions and manufactured consent is why I can only take the web in small doses.

There's certainly nothing wrong with making Gemini more accessible, making software easier to use is always a good thing. However, there's kind of a practical limit here. When discussing developer's attempt to reduce complexity in software, what they're really doing is pushing the complexity elsewhere. This results in *lower quality* and harder to maintain user interfaces because the complexity can never be completely eliminated. The examples I've used in the past are overly complicated build scripts, dumbed down interfaces and so on.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-abstractions/

I find that there's little point in sharing dissenting opinions because users with clout or whoever is making the most popular browser is going to do what they want to *anyway*. The cool thing about Gemini is that we all can share our opinions, whether listened to or not, and it won't get buried like it would on Reddit for example. What I don't find cool though is feeling like I'm not being listened to because of condescending or dismissive attitudes. Simply reducing the argument to gatekeeping or implying that we only want tech wizards in Gemini is intellectually dishonest.

I implore people listen to all sides of the argument and think about the problem more carefully before going full speed into this.