Instant gratification

It's no secret that the small web and "bloated" web have opposing goals. The small web is more concerned with asynchronous delivery and consumption of content, while the "bloated" web is concerned with delivering as much content as possible to be consumed as soon as possible.

This has some interesting implications. Anecdotally, I've noticed that small web content creators push their content out and do not seem to care as much about who reads them or when it is read. While for the big web, there is an incentive to publicize the content as much as possible and amass a large number of viewers. This leads to manipulative and unsustainable practices, like SEO optimization or title and thumbnail clickbait on YouTube. On YouTube, simply having a lot of views and subscribers is not enough, creators have to continue to grow in order to make a living wage. And you can see how this infinite growth is not sustainable and leads to the trash that is pumped out daily. Over the years, this has resulted in consequences like:

• Google search becoming more "ineffective" over the years since Google is more interested in showing you ads than actually giving you relevant search results
• Websites, often retro websites, "disappearing" from the web because they're no longer indexed by Google and therefore difficult or impossible to access
• Proliferation of blog spam: which are articles that either copy/paste from other articles, or add little to no value to whatever news they're delivering since they're more interested in obtaining clicks
• "Dark" design patterns that keep users continuously engaged on the website, often through infinite scrolling or making the site hard to leave

These dark design patterns keep users locked in a "dopamine feedback loop" so they can constantly get dopamine hits. They require more and more dopamine in order to feel the same "high" and so keep going back to the website for more and start the cycle anew. Notifications play a big factor in this. We compulsively check our devices for n ew notifications and websites and apps pump out as many notifications as possible to get us to use them again.

All of this ties back to instant gratification. Slow or asynchronous communication does not feel satisfying for someone who is hooked on these dopamine generating websites. I've always managed to avoid social media, having deleted them years ago, but in a moment of weakness I installed Discord a year ago and have been hooked ever since. It's been very difficult to cull my Discord addiction because leaving would cut off my "instant gratification" stream and the withdrawal symptoms are overwhelmingly painful. This leads to me spending almost all day on Discord chatting with people, in both text and voice, because otherwise I'd be battling extreme loneliness and emptiness. In a synchronous chat platform, when nobody is around, then the loneliness kicks in even though they continue to exist in the real world.

The small web tends to attract people who have slow internet or may not necessarily be connected to the Internet all the time. This leads to practices like downloading pages for later offline consumption, communicating primarily via e-mail or IRC (which is more ephemeral than other instant messaging platforms) or pushing content out more infrequently than big web blogs. This has the natural consequence that you are not connected to someone 24/7 like you are on the big web, but this completely cuts out the instant gratification loop and leaves no incentive for the manipulative practices that leave you yearning for more content. Instead of hungrily going for more, you consume content at your own pace and on your own time.

Switching to this "offline asynchronmous" workflow is not easy, let alone cutting off a social media addiction. But it is something I've been thinking about trying for a while as I've examined my connection between mental health and how I spend time on the Internet. Writing this post is a start at least.