Ask HN: Sources about a particular form of user hostility?
Hi HN,<p>I&#x27;m working on a blog post about something I call &quot;usability nihilism&quot; (named in relation to therapeutic nihilism). This is a type of user hostility in the form of, &quot;users aren&#x27;t smart enough to understand their computers&quot; or &quot;users don&#x27;t want to understand their computers;&quot; an attitude that software should present simplistic views to the user, reserving the true interface only for programmers and administrators, and that users aren&#x27;t capable of or interested in troubleshooting or solving computer problems.<p>I&#x27;ll save the arguments about whether this is good or bad for the blog post (if you feel moved to take a position in this thread, that&#x27;s your right, but I&#x27;m going to decline to respond until I&#x27;ve completed my research - I&#x27;m not the thread police, but I am personally only here to discuss sources), but I&#x27;m looking for prior work about this idea, and so far I&#x27;m not finding it. I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;m the first person to notice this phenomenon. I&#x27;m wondering if anyone can point me to sources on this topic or keywords to search for?<p>So far I&#x27;ve been looking for blog posts &amp; academic articles about user hostility and UX, and I&#x27;m finding interesting stuff, but not quite what I&#x27;m looking for (discussion of hostility seems to be about either disenfranchising users to monetize them or offering deaf ears to their concerns, cousins to usability nihilism but not identical).<p>Thanks,
Max