Ask Lemmy

A hammer and chisel with a stone slate… some combination of that

Floppy disk. Fight me.

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.

don't change the floppy :( once nobody speaks of it, it truly dies

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.

I've noticed youngsters where I work sometimes no longer know what "saving a document is", as they only know google doc style sync.

So I'd go with a send button: send to harddrive. Usually represented with an triangle/arrow.

We'll see the problem with this is symbols are inherently contextual to culture

There is no correct icon, the floppy disk is at least popular enough to be used essentially forever

Alternatives would be making an SVG that mocks a HDD, or an open drawer with an arrow pointing in

We should just start manufacturing NVME drives to look like floppy disks.

Probably something like this. Seems self-explanatory to me at least.

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.

Are you going for just updating? If so, I'd leave it alone. Culturally it's ubiquitous and doesn't require changing.

If you're thinking more along the lines of a save version of the whole "how do we ensure future people know nuclear waste resides within" then you're gonna run into the same problems they do, symbols change meaning over time. But if I had to pick something that may be obvious to most people, my vote is a scribe and a pen. Most cultures have writing, most cultures with writing save information by writing it down. There are problems, obviously, but if you gotta pick one, that's my vote until I hear a better suggestion.

And for what it's worth, with the nuclear waste sitch, my vote first the atomic priesthood

Assuming people still know what a folder is, the most obvious would be a folder with an arrow going into it, like:

or

"I have updated the save icon from a floppy disk to a CD-ROM."

What are you doing when you save something? You’re keeping it in its current state, held in stasis, to be retrieved later. Maybe using freezing imagery (like a snowflake) could get that concept across, and it would retain its meaning over time.

Another way to think of saving is storage - putting something in a convenient location for later access. A safe might be a useful image, but it implies security. Other types of storage devices seem too likely to change with time. Maybe a pocket? If there was a way to graphically represent putting something in your pocket that would be a fairly universal and durable image.

Or just the hard drive by itself. Is a platter drive old fashioned these days?

Also a safe would be a decent choice.

How about something like that? Symbolises data to device.

Assuming that I can't rely on real life's ubiquitous floppy disk icon, I think something with a bookshelf is probably my best bet. An arrow pointing to the bookshelf for save, away for load. Bookshelves can be recognisable as pretty small icons and a physical book is extremely broadly understood. It may eventually fail if everyone moves to e-readers, but I think that's a long way off

Anything designed to represent the save action will become obsolete eventually because the nature of saving data changes.

Originally you saved writing by inscribing it on a wax tablet, then paper, then removable disk, then hard disk, then solid state, now the cloud.

I would say the most times less will be pencil on paper as it's the most basic method of recording.

📝

But that's already considered to mean an edit action

Down arrow pointing to a horizontal line.

A piggy bank

You're asking for an abstract indicator of a concept. You might as well be trying to draw 'dignity'.

Everything else will become obsolete with time, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. We have countless icons that have long since been separated from their original meanings. The need for it to be intuitive is when the concept is new, not as it changes.

A pencil writing on paper.

Assuming we're talking about "anyone" including a post-collapse society or an alien race that never invented the floppy, and sufficiently advanced to competently use a computer. The most basic means of recording information is to use an implement to create marks on a surface. You can draw lines in the sand, or indentations on a clay tablet, or scratches on a lead sheet, or lines on a paper, the method usually involves a flat surface and a pointy object leaving visible lines. The symbolic representation of a pencil and paper is sufficiently generic that most people will associate it with committing information to a non-volatile medium.