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Your users are very stupid. (Maybe.)

There are relatively few moments in internet history that you can really and genuinely say have a shot at being the funniest ever. One of the moments that might actually be up there began on February 12, 2010 at 8:25 AM. Here’s the timeline, as far as I can piece it together:

8:25 AM - Mike Melanson, a writer who’s been with a site site called ReadWriteWeb since December 2009, posts a blog entry to the site. It’s called “Facebook wants to be your one true login”. By my count, this is his 74th post.

Between 8:25 AM and 9:12 AM - People link, tweet, and (re-)blog about it. The Google bots get ahold of it, and, being a fairly relevant post, “FbWTBYOTL” rises to the upper tier of its search results.

9:12 AM - The first comment appears. It reads, cryptically: “Ok If I have to I will comment,I love facebook so right now just want to log in if thats ok with you..lol Keep up the good work…”

From 9:12 AM to 11:57 AM - More confused users comment:

“when can we log in?”

“just want to get on facebook”

“EXCUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUSE ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHY NOT JUST LEAVE IT ALONE!!!!!!!!!!!1111”

“All I want to do is log in, this sucks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1”

This is interspersed by comments from other users who are confused, and occasionally amused, at this odd turn of events.

11:57 AM - The first comment to put it together: “This is what happens when people use Google to enter sites instead of typing it on their address bar… Damn you all Farmville users…” This is comment number 50.

Ah. So it turns out that there was a (perhaps small) present minority who, rather than using the address bar, use Google to get around on the web. Since Google put this post near the top, at least a certain number of these people had no idea the site they just entered was not Facebook. The results are this mess.

Over time (there were roughly 660 comments at the time of this writing), comments left by confused users blend together with comments left by people imitating them. It becomes impossible to tell if there are really still people who are having this problem. Comments left by users baffled at the stupidity of their compatriots begin to grow in percentage. Eventually this hits the blogosphere, and everyone comes to take a look and write their name on the wall of this truly epic event.

Enter sideline commentary and eventful discourse about the uselessness of people in general. By consensus, the opinion is that the internetdom in general is painfully stupid, and it’s a wonder they can get by at all in life. This sentiment is echoed over and over again.

Take a look at the original post, comments and all, here.

But wait…

It would of course be easy to simply dismiss these crimes of stupidity on people in general. There are, yes, a lot of really stupid people on the internet. But who, precisely, is so stupid that they can’t understand that they’re on a blog, and not Facebook? Or, more astonishingly, who could be fluent in the internet and still make this mistake?

The answer, as it turns out, is not at all what it seems. I encourage you to look at the Facebook profiles of the people who are commenting (see above link), as they are nearly always handily available in the post itself. Scrolling down the page, I’ll tell you what I see.

Old person. Old person. Old person. Young person. Young person. Old person. Old person. Old person. Old person. Old Person.

Over the course of the comments, it’s not uncommon to hear things like this: “I’m just learning”; “I was just getting the hang of this”; “My son showed me how to do this, and now I can’t”;

This continues.

In fact, the truth is maybe more awful than you thought.

I suppose how you answer the question of whether people really are that stupid is up to you. I’ll leave the theatrics someone else, but, personally, I can hardly see how that would be a fair description of the events.

More importantly, this highlights a more interesting and descriptive problem with technology today. Not that people are stupid, but just how detached a sizable chunk of the population is from the new structure of our society. If there are people who have trouble telling which site they are on, how many people are there out there who can’t use the site at all?

These are truly amazing things to consider, being that our society is essentially bound at the hilt to technology-based communication. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, it really is true: what seemed like barrage of really stupid people turned out with more careful inspection to be probably the most stupendous example of the tech divide you will see for, at minimum, a very long time. Not stupid people, but people who don’t know — perhaps can’t be bothered to know — about the address bar. People who use the internet for certain specific functions, and nothing beyond that. People who only want to know how to do what they need to do, and precisely nothing else.

And there are still more people like them, people who are more inept than them, people who are more marginalized than them. There are people who have no idea how to get on the internet at all. It’s almost hard to imagine. And another thing, it’s not that this is a small sub-population of the elderly. Consider that if John McCain were an avid Facebook fan, this is something that he very well could have fallen victim to. Alas, Democrats were deprived of that gem (damn!), but the fact remains that there is a generation who literally runs our nation and simultaneously does not understand technology to the extent that they can’t even recognize when they aren’t on the web page they should be.

In school, I was taught that if you use a calculator, you need to know enough about a problem to be able to tell if the answer you are getting is plausibly correct. Well, now we have a whole generation for whom a good chunk of the world is so alien, and so inaccessible that they literally don’t have the frame of reference just to verify that things are as they should be. Just marginalized can you be?

I guess the only thing left to decide now is whether this is still funny enough to rank.