Every Friday, Instagram's CEO Adam Mosseri engages in conversations with a diverse array of individuals.

Mosseri hosts a "Ask Me Anything" session on Instagram every week. During these sessions, anyone can pose questions to him, provided they pertain to Instagram, its parent company Meta, and his own work.

I started watching the videos of these sessions a few years ago, and I have enjoyed them immensely. He answers technical questions such as "Why can't we add links in posts?" and "My Explore page is strange, how can I fix it?" with enthusiasm and sincerity.

As my interest in these sessions grew, I began to find noteworthy things in Mosseri's seemingly impromptu remarks.

On the most recent Friday, someone congratulated Mosseri on the success of the social networking app Threads. Launched by Meta in the summer of 2023 as a competitor to X (formerly Twitter), the person wrote: "Zuckerberg said the number of active people on Threads today is more than at launch, that's great, congratulations to you!"Wearing a pink sweatshirt, Mosseri responded, "I want to explain what this means. We mainly focus on daily active users and monthly active users (users), and now our monthly active users exceed 130 million."

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Mosseri simply equated users with people, a subtle change that is almost imperceptible, but I noticed it. Mosseri did not respond to the request for comment.

For a long time, people have been called "users." This is a practical shorthand favored by executives, founders, operators, engineers, and investors.

Generally speaking, it is correct to use this term to describe people who use software: the definition of a user goes beyond customers or consumers.

Sometimes users are not even people. For example, it is well known that corporate bots manage and operate accounts on Instagram and other social media platforms.But the term "user" is also not specific enough; it can almost refer to everyone and is almost applicable to any grand idea or long-term vision.

While we use computers, platforms, and companies, we are also used by them. Although "user" seems to describe a transactional relationship, many technological relationships that view a person as a user are actually very intimate. In that case, does the word "user" still make sense?

"Humans are a bit like machines."

The initial use of "user" can be traced back to the era of large computers in the 1950s. Due to the large size and high cost of commercial computers, they usually required a dedicated room and special equipment.Therefore, their operations are also carried out by trained employees (i.e., users). These employees work for companies that own or lease commercial computers.

In the 1960s, as computers became popular in universities, "users" began to include students or anyone who interacted with computer systems.

It was not until the mid-1970s that personal computers truly entered households. However, as the number of people owning computers increased, the term "computer owner" never really caught on.

Compared to other 20th-century inventions, such as cars, which were owned by ordinary people from the start (so a car owner is called a "car owner"), a computer owner was just a "user," not a "computer master," even though computers permeated every aspect of people's lives.

As computers became popular in the 1990s, the terminology matrix related to users also upgraded: user accounts, user IDs, user profiles, multi-user, and so on.Cognitive scientist Don Norman joined Apple in the early 1990s with the title of "User Experience Architect," and he is a central figure in the widespread adoption of the term.

He was the first person to write "User Experience (UX)" in his job title, and it is widely believed that he made the concept of "User Experience Design" mainstream, which aims to build systems in a way that is intuitive to people.

Norman's book "The Design of Everyday Things," published in 1998, is still the "Bible" of the user experience field, discussing "usability" together with aesthetics.

Now 88 years old, Norman explained to me that the widespread adoption of the term "user" is partly due to the early computer technicians mistakenly believing that humans are a bit like machines.

"Users are just another component," he said. "We didn't treat them as people, but as part of the system." Therefore, early user experience design did not seek to make human-computer interaction "user-friendly."The purpose of doing this is to encourage people to complete tasks quickly and efficiently. People and their computers are just two parts of the larger system that technology companies are building, operating according to their own rules and having their own plans.

After this, the universality of the term "user" has been cleverly integrated into the era of the tech industry that is willing to do anything for growth.

When the concept of "user" is so malleable, it is easy to act quickly, break old things, and then take over the world with software.

The term "user" is vague, and therefore it creates a sense of distance and forms a cunning hacker marketing culture. In this culture, companies grow for the sake of growth, without pursuing actual utility.

The term "user" embodies some implicit rules and patterns, and these functions cleverly encourage specific actions because it reinforces the growth of data in language, rather than pursuing human-centered design.User experience designers strive to construct software that aligns with the intuition of all unknown users, and what we end up with are bright red notifications (to create a sense of urgency), e-commerce shopping carts with countdown timers (to encourage quick purchases), and "Agree" buttons that are more conspicuous than the "Disagree" ones (prompting people to accept terms without reading them).

Of course, users are also individuals who struggle with "addiction." Being addicted to certain software, at least to some extent, means living in a state of powerlessness.

Today, the term "power user," which was initially awarded to those who mastered skills such as keyboard shortcuts and web design, is no longer measured by technical ability. The current criteria are the amount of time they spend using devices or the size of their audience.

Default to "People"Karina Nguyen, a researcher and engineer at the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, recently wrote on X: "I hope more product designers will also consider language models as their primary users. What kind of information do my language models need to address the core pain points of human users?"

In the old world, "users" usually fit the companies that create products, rather than the companies that solve pain points for people who use the products. The more users, the higher the value.

This label can remove the complexity of people, turning them into data that needs to be studied, behavior that needs to be A/B tested, and capital that needs to be earned. This word often ignores any deeper relationship that may exist between a person and a platform or product.

As early as 2008, Norman found this shortcoming and began to advocate for the use of "person" or "human" instead of "user" when designing for people. However, in the following years, we have seen the number of bots on the internet surge, which has made the problem more complicated.

"Psychologists call people 'subjects', which dehumanizes them, and we call them 'users', which is essentially the same."Both of these terms are pejorative. "He wrote at the time, "If our (products) are designed for people, why not call them that?"

In 2011, Janet Murray, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and an early digital media theorist, opposed the term "user" because it is too narrow and functional.

In her book "Inventing the Medium," she suggested using "interactor" as an alternative term, as it better captures people's creativity and sense of participation in the digital space.

In 2012, Jack Dorsey, then CEO of Square, urged the tech industry to abandon the term "user."

He said that Square would start using "customers," a term that is more "honest and direct," describing the relationship between his products and the people he serves.He wrote that while the original intention of technology is to put people first, in the eyes of companies building platforms and devices, referring to them as "users" diminishes their authenticity. He said, reconsider your users, and "how you refer to those who like the things you create."

The public is mostly indifferent to Dorsey's views. Hacker News has debated this term for several days, with some people believing that "user" appears overly simplified just because it is too common.

Others explained that the problem is not with the term itself, but with the larger industry attitude of placing the status of the end user below technology. Clearly, Dorsey's post did not prompt many people to stop using the term "user."

Around 2014, Facebook followed Norman's advice in the book and abandoned the "user" centered wording, changing the default to "people." But habits and internal language are hard to change, and the "user" in Instagram CEO Mosseri's speech is the best example.

Over the years, some other technology companies have also adopted their own ways to replace "user." A financial technology company calls people "members," and a screen time application chose the term "gems."Recently, I encountered a founder who felt uncomfortable when his colleagues used the term "humans" instead of "users," but he didn't know why. I think this is because the term "humans" seems to be an overcorrection.

But this is what we have learned from the mainframe era: systems never have just two parts (people and machines), because all people, all "users," are affected by the design of new technologies.

Carissa Carter, the academic director of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University, compares this framework to the experience of using Uber.

She said: "If you hail a ride using your phone, the people involved are the passenger, the driver, the employees of the software company that controls the process, and even the person who wrote the code that decides which car to dispatch.

In the multi-stakeholder system we are in, every decision about users includes people who have direct contact with whatever you build."With the sudden emergence of artificial intelligence, the point of contact between humans and computers (i.e., the user interface) has undergone profound changes. For instance, the popularity of chatbots has driven the trend of generative artificial intelligence.

This is a paradigm we are accustomed to. For over a decade, Siri has existed on our iPhones, earnestly ready to offer all kinds of help, but Siri and other voice assistants of its time could only do so much. Now, a more genuine partnership is brewing.

The tools that were once called artificial intelligence bots (AI bots) are now endowed with high-sounding titles such as "copilot," "assistant," and "collaborator" to convey a sense of partnership rather than automation. Large language models quickly abandoned terms like "bot."

Anthropomorphism, which tends to attribute human-like qualities to machines, has long been used to create a sense of connection between people and technology. We (people) are still users, but if artificial intelligence is now a "partner" with a wealth of information, resources, and knowledge, what are we?

Well, at least for now, it is unlikely that we will discard the term "user," but we can default to using more precise terms, such as "patient" in the healthcare field, "student" in educational technology, and "reader" in media companies.This will help us to understand these relationships more accurately. For example, in games, users are commonly referred to as "players," a term that affirms their engagement in the technology and even the enjoyment they derive from it.

On airplanes, customers are typically referred to as "passengers" or "travelers," and when they are in the air, it inspires a spirit of enthusiasm and friendliness.

If companies are more specific about the people their products are designed for, and the current artificial intelligence, rather than casually abstracting everything into the concept of "users," perhaps our relationship with this technology would be simpler, and we would also be more likely to accept the fact that we will inevitably coexist.

In my conversation with Don Norman, I often got caught up in my own words. I switched back and forth between "users," "people," and "humans," always deliberately controlling my vocabulary and unsure of their semantics.

Norman assured me that my condition is normal, and this is the process of thinking about how we design things. "We change the world, and the world changes us in return," he said, "so we should be cautious about changing the world."