I will readily admit in collective number of clicks and screentime, 37 year old men with advanced degrees in computer science are a super small minority.

But who is the majority then? Who spends the most time on say Reddit and YouTube? Children! Yes, people who we know are dramatically cognitively different than adults.

Why does YouTube keep recommending videos I've watched? That's what a child wants! Why does reddits redesign look like Nickelodeon?

There isn't one user and one interface that's right for everyone when we're talking about 5 year olds, 50 year olds, and 95 year olds.

We can make them adaptable to the screen, we should also do work to make them adaptable, at fundamental interaction levels, to the person using the screen.

And not in a clever way, but in a dumb one.

For instance, here's how you could ask YouTube: "We have a few interfaces. Please tell us what you like to watch:

* Cartoons and video games

* Lectures and tutorials

* Other "

And that's it. No more "learning", that's all you need to set the interface and algorithms.

Let's take Wikipedia, it could be broken up into children, public, and scholar. Some articles I'm sure are correct but are way too wonky and academic for me to understand and that's ok. There's nothing to fix, I'm sure it's a great tool for professionals. However, there should be a general public version.

"Simple English" does a pretty good job. Obviously it's a mix of children/public but for science/mathematical topics where I'm looking just to verify my basic understanding of something, swapping over to Simple English usually gives me what I was looking for if the main article is immediately going down into technical rabbit holes.

This proposal quickly falls apart because your categories are ill-defined based on your preconceptions. I watch a ton of lectures about video games on Youtube (e.g. speed run breakdowns or game lore theories). Do I choose the "Cartoons and video games" bucket or the "Lectures and tutorials" bucket?

"We've found adults and teens like different parts of youtube and use it differently. We want to make it the best for you. You can switch at any time, but tell us what best describes you:

* I'm an adult

* I'm not an adult.

"

youtube has this "for kids" app which came out after I first started pointing this difference in earnest around 2013, (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...) but it's not right and they clearly still cater their main interface to the habits of children who watch the same video hundreds of times - the insane repetition is a part of learning nuance and subtly in the context of content they don't have to actually pay attention to. It's all about learning the meta, super important. They know what happens, it's the silence in between they're excited about - that's the nature of play.

This app instead silos the kids into a playskool interface, great for people under 7 or so, but like our playground reform, we've made it completely unappealing for the 8-22 or so demographic (when I was a kid and there were ziplines into a bank of tires, you bet there were 20 year olds lining up to have a good time on those, we all have a need for play; freedom to err wrapped in relative safety).

Instead, it's data-driven UX for adults and data-driven UX for children - it's about separating the data, not a PTA-acceptable UX for overprotective parents.

The easiest thing to do is just allow them on youtube no filter.

The middle ground is the play app. Weird stuff sometimes get through but usually it's more someone dressed as a pretend princess. The good thing it's never really a murder scene or something equally as horrible (which could popup on youtube.com).

What would you do as a parent?

I would avoid youtube unless you setup the video until 7 or 11. After that it depends on the child.

It kinda has this for specific subjects:

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Introductory_articles

It already exists.

Yes, and Mozilla has become much worse about this. Turning off "Pocket Integration", or "Shared Bookmarks", or "Mozilla Telemetry", or "Auto update" becomes harder in each release.

Native macOS apps get to be a bit clever for this, in that there are two kind of button-highlight-state per dialog (the "default action" button, which is filled with the OS accent color; and, separately, the button the tab-selection starts off highlighting, which has an outline ring around it.) This means that there are two keys you can mash, for different results: mashing Enter results in pressing the default action (i.e. colored) button–which Apple HIG suggests be the "Confirm" option for dangerous cases; while mashing Space results in selecting the initially-selected (i.e. outlined) button—which Apple HIG suggests be the "Cancel" option for dangerous cases. I believe that, in cases where the action isn't irrevocable, Apple HIG suggests that the default-action and initially-selected attributes be placed on the same button, so that either mash sequence will activate the button.

I really wish that kind of thinking was put into other systems.

What is different in Win32, however, is that if any button is focused, it is also made the default for as long as focus is on it (or, alternatively - Enter always activates the focused button). Thus, there's no visual state for "focused, not default", because there's no such thing.

The distinction still matters, though, because if you tab away from a button to some other widget that's not a button, the "default" button marker returns back to where it originally was - focus only overrides it temporarily.

This can be conveniently explored in the standard Win32 print dialog (opened e.g. from Notepad), since it has plenty of buttons and other things on it. Just tab through the whole thing once.

There were computer keyboards which had a distinction between the button to enter the field and the button to, for example, do the desired action behind the whole dialog. Just like today it is common to expect that Esc is going to cancel the dialog (or the entry form) there was a key that one knew would do the "proceed" (GO) independently of the position in which field your cursor is at the moment (or was). In these operating systems Enter always did just the non-surprising "end of the entering of the current input field, skip to the next" and the "GO" signaled the end of that process and the wish to use everything that has been entered up to any point. It's particularly convenient when entering a lot of numerical data on the numeric keypad, where Enter also just moves to the next field.

I think that concept was right, and better than what we have today. Entering what are basically "forms" in any order (filling the dialogs) and proceed from any point is a basic task and could have remained less surprising.

IOW following metrics optimising for local maxima instead of looking at the big picture in a non-zero sum game. Each task is made easier by itself but in doing so creates a model in conflict with everything else, making everyone miserable. Nash would be sad.