I was reading this article on Vox— a bit of a panic about short-form video. I don’t have the same fears about it, because I think I’m missing the dopamine brain rush where I feel like I have to keep endlessly scrolling or I’m going to miss something the enters the zeitgeist later.
The larger issue here goes unmentioned: how poorly the user experience of the internet is becoming.
Closing modal windows and dealing with pop-ups are a bigger issue for me—especially when I’m just trying to work on sites that are so broken because they’re chasing mobile ad clicks. That’s a much bigger deal than short-form video.
I’m not even going to take the excuse that these sites are desperate. There are other models outside of the advertising model that clearly work.
Take The Verge, for example.
It’s a high-quality product, and I’m paying subscriptions to them. Alexa is also subscribed to a couple of publications. Clearly, there’s a demand for quality journalism. But if you get addicted to ad clicks and data sales as your main source of revenue, it’s going to be a really hard time over the next couple of years.
How I’m Managing This
The way I’m dealing with it—and I think I need to post a new article on the tech I’m using—is by centralizing a lot of my communications so I’m not in every single app.
I’m using Beeper for that. They were just acquired by Automattic, and they recently had a relaunch party at the old Tumblr office in New York. It’s amazing. This is the kind of tech we should be building across the internet right now: tools that provide real utility, not ones designed to hijack attention as the core product.
The Junk Food Problem
That’s Instagram’s biggest issue right now.
TikTok, for example, is a place where people can actually search and get highly useful reviews and information—beyond just being entertained. I don’t actually know who Instagram is for anymore.
Instead of scrolling it a ton during the day, I’m just trying to use the messaging feature. Beeper allows me to do that. And the same probably goes for LinkedIn. LinkedIn has the same problem, but wrapped in an air of professionalism. The content is still pretty much junk.
The Bigger Question
I don’t disagree with fears about how people are being manipulated through UX But I think the larger issue is:
How do we go from a bunch of different places we don’t want to be—and empower ourselves to be in the places we do? If you aren’t going to create user experiences that respect the user, do they even need to be there?