> The bloat and slowness is generally due to incompetence.

I'm sure this is true.

I'm also reminded of "office automation". Conventional wisdom was that new technologies would reduce the use of paper. However, for decades, paper usage went up, and it took a long time for the reduction to happen.

Curious, no?

Was increased paper usage an instance of Jevons Paradox? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

I have questions.

So then why did paper usage eventually plummet?

Given long enough time frame, is Jevons Paradox a phase? 150 years after Jevons book The Coal Question, coal consumption is finally tanking. Decades after the start of data processing and office automation, paper usage finally tanked.

Is this generalizable?

Clearly software bloat (and by extension web page bloat) are catalyzed by better tools. Like the democratization of word processing (et al) begat more paper usage, IDEs (et al) begat more code production.

If there is a downside slope to Jevons "rebound effect" (efficiency -> lower cost -> higher consumption), what could it look like for software bloat? What are some possible causes?

For coal and paper, it was displacement by even cheaper alternatives.

What's cheaper than large, slow web pages? Or conversely, how do we raise the cost of that bloat?

Making a huge leap of reasoning:

My optimistic self hopes that the key resource is attention (people's time). Social media values each person's eyeballs at $100/yr (or whatever). So all the nominal costs of all those bloated web pages is pretty cheap.

My hope is the displacement of software bloat will be somehow related to maximizing people's cognitive abilities, making better use of attention. So replace web surfing, doom scrolling, and the misc opiates of the masses with whatever's next.

This hope is strongly rooted in Clay Shirky's works Cognitive Surplus and Here Comes Everyone.

Thanks for reading this far. To wrap this up:

I regard software bloat as a phase, not inevitable.

I imagine a futureperfect media ecosystem not dependent on ad supported biz models, the primary driver for web page bloat.

I have no idea if people smarter than me have studied the tail end of Jevon's Paradox. Or even how much predictive power the Paradox has at all.

I have no idea what the displacement may look like. Maybe patronage and subscriptions. Or maybe universal basic income, so amateurs can self produce and publish; versus "platforms" exploiting user generated content and collaborative editing.

A bit of a scrambled thesis, I know. I'm writing to understand, sound out a new idea. Thanks for your patience.