this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2026
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[–] DreamlandLividity@lemmy.world 0 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

No one who was not specifically taught this will notice the difference between Mbps and MBps since it's the same fucking letters. Let alone know the difference is division by 8. Not everyone has formal IT education and bits never come out in daily life of most people except for internet speeds. You are expert in this field. You massively overestimate how much average people know if you think they recognize the difference and know how to convert it.

If people cannot understand that, how are they going to understand that different downloads or uploads inside different applications provide them with different (byte-based) values depending on protocol and server performance of whatever service they are using?

Why do you keep insisting they need to? An average person will not care much about the difference between a download taking 6 minutes or 7 minutes. They will care about the difference between 6 minutes and an hour, which is about the difference if they misinterpret bits as bytes.