I have been on a bit of an ‘extended rant’ lately about the internet…. how it is not useful to me, how SEO sites suck, and so on. And then I came across this post about manufacturing desire on the internet. 

As I read it – it dawned on me that large amounts of the internet were now focussed on establishing this ‘desire engine’ to generate clicks and pageviews and ‘minutes spent on-line’. The ‘dopamine rush’ helps explain the hours and hours of my life wasted on the internet.

I started to think of other ‘engine of desire’ based industries. You may argue that at some level all consumer industries do this. Apple creates huge amounts of desire for its products, exclusive fashion brands can (so I am told) create great desire for their products. However the consumer pricing makes these industries somewhat supply limited. Apple products and exclusive fashion items cost hundreds of dollars, and their ‘exclusivity’ helps add to the desire.

However there are other industries, that are built on tapping into this ‘engine of desire’ for which supply is not limited. Poker machines at $1 a go are a ‘classic’ example. The desire engine as described in essentially creating addictive behaviours and these examples can be extended to other industries based on addiction where supply exceeds demand…. smoking, alcohol, fast foods to name a few

And then it struck me that all of the examples have extensive public policies designed to support consumers in managing and limiting their behaviours. From labelling the fat and sugar content of foods, to public education programs, to ‘supply limits’ on cigarettes and alcohol (taxes and point of sale restrictions).

Yet the internet has an almost infinite supply of sites either deliberately or inadvertently designed to trigger dopamine-rushes and addictive behaviours? Can we really expect people to place effective limits on these tactics through sheer will-power alone?

Dear Sarah Lacy

I, like many readers, have watched from the sidelines as the tech blogging world tries to eat itself. I don’t mind a bit of ‘personal character’ in my tech news – and so whilst these shenanigans are a sideline to my tech news – I don’t mind too much. What I really like though – is when this turmoil leads to innovation – and that, Sarah, brings me to the point of this post.

I want to congratulate you on trying to do something a little bit different with PandoDaily. I really would like to see this succeed. I like the idea that I can get a one paragraph take on current news, and then link to the full thing if I am still interested. But for the love of all that is good and right – can you please speed up your site? I mostly visit PandoDaily on my mobile device. It is part of my daily tech news reading. But it is so SLOW. It takes forever to load. It may possibly be the slowest loading thing in my daily feed (although it may just seem this way because I go to it many times). And unless it gets a lot faster I am sadly going to have to remove Pando from my daily feed.

You will probably never see this post, I really just wrote it to assuage my own ‘guilt’ at the thought of removing Pando. I love seeing innovation. I love seeing new things tried… and I like it even more when they seem as though they could be very useful to me. So I really want to support PandoDaily, I really want it to change the way I get my tech news… but it needs to load super fast on my mobile browser. It.Just.Has.To. 

Regards