People will ALWAYS fuck up. The world we craft for ourselves must take the “human factor” into account, otherwise we amplify the consequences of what are predictable outcomes.
So what does it say about us diverting from purely server-side scripted message boards with pure HTML and tables, and not a line of JS? Yes, let’s get back there please. And no phone numbers.
The majority of industries that actually have immediate and potentially fatal consequences do exactly this, and have been for more than a generation now.
Boeing - we know where you’re goeing.
Damn near everything you interact with on a regular basis has been designed at some point in time with human psychology in mind. Built on the shoulders of decades of research and study results, that have matured to the point of becoming “standard practices”.
There’s one industry which kinda started like this, with proper HIG and standard key combinations and proven usability with screenreaders or by people with color blindness, autism, ADHD, whatever.
Then came in people talking with the tone similar to, sorry, yours in the “People will ALWAYS fuck up” part came saying that people want nice, dynamic, usable websites with lots of cool new features, people are social, they want girls with real photos, names and phone numbers on their forums which BTW should be called social nets.
By the way, we already had that with Flash and Java applets, some things of what I remember were still cooler than modern websites of the “web application” paradigm are now. And we had personal webpages with real names and contacts and photos. And there were tools allowing to make them easily.
These people just hated the existing culture with its individualism and depth, the web applications should be able to own you and not be just another kind of embedded content, the personal webpages should be all the same, and of course normies wouldn’t want to come as guests into the nerdspace - no, they had those new social nets as their space, looking down on those nerds and freaks of my kind.
Now - well, try using today’s web as a person impaired in any way.
And those normies can’t really use it too, and too feel impaired, they just won’t admit it.