A big part of that is the fact programs tend to spew their files haphazardly through Program Files/Program Data/Appdata/Documents/etc. I would be confused too with a physical hierarchical system if I had a robot that would randomly put the fruit in the closet shoeboxes next to a pile of batteries and toothpaste.

That's a sign that we need to fix file hierarchy then, not that users are wrong or stupid.

They just don't care. Whatever they have now is fine for them. How are we going to fix that?

Just go and do it instead of performing bullshit A/B tests and copying whatever lowest-common-denominator solution your competitors invented.

Regular users don't have context for technology, they scoop up whatever companies offer on the market. If everyone gravitates towards the same crappy solutions, most users won't complain, because they can't or don't want to imagine how things could be made better.

The irony. Anybody with basic knowledge of CS (ie a geek user) should grok that there is no such thing as a “well-thought” hierarchy. This is the very reason relational databases exist.

And for desktop and phone purposes, search is popular because it works damn well.

>And for desktop and phone purposes, search is popular because it works damn well.

It works well, until it doesn't. It's especially bad if you don't remember exactly what you're looking for; this is when a decent hierarchy is really useful. And yes, hierarchies have problems, which is why RDBMSs took over from the older hierarchical DBs which were used before that (such as on the Apollo program), but just throwing everything into a single directory and hoping file metadata and search will replace it all is wishful thinking.

> It works well, until it doesn't.

In particular, search tend to be buggy, and if you have no reference hierarchy that you know shows you unfiltered results, you have no basis to trust that the results of your search query are accurate. This is no 1. reason I rarely ever use search on Android or Windows. I don't trust it.

this reminds me of the time that I helped my dad migrate his data to a new imac. with somewhat low expectations, I asked him if he knew where all his important documents were on disk. to my surprise he said confidently "sure I do!". he then opened the "All My Files" link in finder. I guess in a certain sense he wasn't wrong, but I still had to spend hours disentangling the files he actually wanted from thousands of random temp files and downloads. I made him get an external drive to clone the old drive anyway, and every so often I would have to help him find something that we had missed in the first pass.

I remember wondering at the time: do windows and mac not do enough to help users organize their files, or are the cute little My Documents and Pictures folders that obscure the underlying filesystem already too much?