We reached the point (some time ago) where the save icon being a floppy disk makes absolutely no sense to anyone born after a certain time. We could choose a more modern media format and use an icon of that instead, but we would run into the same problem once that media becomes obsolete.
What is a good icon for the function of saving something that can easily be understood by anyone regardless of language or the march of time?
Edit: I know it’s not really an answerable question and is hard but the question is what would you come up with if tasks to design an icon. Given the constraints of the question, what are your best shots at coming up with something that fills the requirements and why do you thing it would work?
Floppy disk. Fight me.
Agreed. It’s the tried and true icon.
It’s like on discord, what’s the symbol to make a call? An old school telephone handset. People know what it means. It’s a universal symbol
Just keep using the disk icon.
Just because the original reference is outdated doesn’t mean it’s useless; the symbolism carries over. Changing it to the sake of future-proofing makes no sense because everybody already understands it now, and that knowledge will carry forward into the future. It has become the standard, even if it makes no sense, it even if it never made sense.
Horsepower is still used to refer to engine strength, even though nobody uses horses. Qwerty is still the keyboard default even though it’s not optional, because typewriters had settled on that standard ages ago. The human skull symbol is commonly used as a shorthand to indicate a substance is poisonous, because it has been for a long time. Even the term “dial” when referring to phone calls is still commonly used, even though nobody but your great-grandmother still even owns a rotary phone.
Tldr; If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
It’s a floppy disk. Which is the universal icon for saving, the same way a red light is a universal symbol for “stop”.
You underestimate the power of arbitrary symbols. Welcome to all of human semiotics.
No I get that but I’m asking that given what we know about symbols and how we process information, what would be a better icon that can indicate save without having to be taught? There is clearly no right answer here but is it even possible to create something that would work? Things like rain or clouds we can do because there we can see examples. Is there anything that indicates saving we could come up with?
Assuming people still know what a folder is, the most obvious would be a folder with an arrow going into it, like:
or
How are there so many people ITT who genuinely don’t even understand what OP is asking and are arguing about something else completely that they thought up in their head like whether we should do away with the floppy icon because it confuses people now or if their youngsters know what a floppy is or if they do or if there’s a better icon to us now that can represent saving.
None of those are anything to do with OP really.
What OP is asking is if in 10000 years the next human civilization after our collapse that has no concept of computers and probably no electricity or industry nor potentially any grasp on our language or alphabet stumbles upon a functioning computer from our civilization, how do we tell them which button is the save button, when all shared symbolic context has been lost?
Consider the same question but for radioactive waste, how do we ward off potential future pre-industrial human civilizations from our nuclear waste sites to stop them dying to radiation poisoning for possibly tens of thousands of years until they develop an understanding of radiation and the equipment to measure it? Well, something like this maybe:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages
Though maybe given this thread, we should instead be considering how to convey very simple abstract questions to the pre-industrial people on lemmy.world instead, especially when it appears they have only a rudimentary, GPT2-esque grasp on language.
k
I was gonna fight you because “or if there’s a better icon to us now that can represent saving.” Is a reasonable interpretation of what OP said.
But then I continued to read more comments and wow people just like… Explaining the floppy disk is wild.
