Comment by troad

> The fact that this comments section indicates such a yawning chasm of gaps in knowledge (much less, understanding) - in a forum whose users are generally known to be more technically savvy than most - is exactly why IPv6 is still not widely adopted.

No, it isn't. Everyone here has the causality backwards. We don't know it because we've never needed to know it, and we've never needed to know it because it's not really required for anything (i.e. the cost of adopting/learning it > benefit).

This has been a frustrating HN discussion to read, to be honest, because the consensus view strikes me as so off base. It's not that IPv6 has been miscommunicated, or that it hasn't been taught enough to undergrads. It's that it has been designed with virtually no incentives to encourage people to actually adopt it, with the entirely predictable consequence that no one adopted it. Therefore, none of us need to know it, schools don't need to teach it, etc.

Folk are internalising the wrong lesson here. Incentives matter. No amount of mandated IPv6 instruction or well-intentioned blog posts explaining IPv6 are going to change anyone's incentive structure. And then when those things fail, there's a predictable and tiresome tendency to blame the users for not switching.

If you want people to adopt new tech, make it actually do something new. Give people some reason to want to switch. "It mostly does the same thing as the old tech did, but it also takes effort and money to learn it / switch to it" is a terrible pitch, with entirely predictable consequences, and it's far too common in technical circles.