> Sometimes I can't help but cynically think that perverse "engagement" incentives are at least somewhat connected to ballooning bandwidth consumption. Compani

> Sometimes I can't help but cynically think that perverse "engagement" incentives are at least somewhat connected to ballooning bandwidth consumption. Companies building these user experiences are often incentivized to have fast experiences that could avoid bandwidth consumption. For example, some sites started serving GIFs as videos because the images were used as discussion replies. The video files were smaller for users. I won't claim this is universal. IMO the woes of modern sites and social media are much more connected to everyone now being connected on a mobile device. They are reachable and you can manipulate our vices. A cross-cutting concern is that this has created significant demand for developers and product managers. People are throwing together products more quickly than they will admit and then moving on. The next set of people are only allowed to pile on. Lots of experienced people know the issues and how to fix them, but across the whole industry they have little sway. Overall, it's a much more complicated human-centric issue than the one you've described.