Hold on a minute, I'm trying to decide for fuck's sake!

Here's the problem with the Internet. People expect instant gratification and when they don't get it, they get angry. I think someone made a thread about this once. The psychological problem, not the cakes.

I mean, you can jazz it up and make it look less like it was made by a 25 year old bachelor, but it still shouldn't have actual frosting. Whipped cream only.

This is the guy who makes a new thread, knowing he's just written the absolutely perfect post. A post that should be heralded across the Internet for its beauty, comedy and insight. It is such a good post that the guy is checking every five seconds to see if there is a new response. If he gets a response he quickly dashes out his own reply that will appear half a second later.

If there are no responses to his perfect post then he will wait an eternity of five minutes before replying to his own thread with, "What, nobody has a comment? Helloooo???"

You may also find this guy submitting stories to news portals like Digg and Reddit, losing an entire workday hitting refesh (or F5) over and over, waiting for somebody, anybody, to digg up his submission.

In Real Life it's Called...

Low Frustration Tolerance.

LFT is defined as a person seeking immediate gratification or the avoidance of immediate pain. At first this sounds like the behavior of any whiny seven-year-old who wants a toy and will scream and pump his fat little arms until he gets what he wants. But unlike a kid, a quick smack to the back of the head won't shut this guy up.

Someone with LFT is so obsessed with their current project that everything else in their life stops. It's actually a form of procrastination, the obsession with that (often utterly inconsequential) object allows them to neglect their work, or girlfriend, or their dog that shits in the corner of the bedroom because it hasn't been walked in the last 10 hours.

So Why Does it Happen on the Internet?

There never has been an engine for instant gratification like the Internet. Our parents thought television killed our attention spans, but hell, with TV you still had to wait for the shows to come on, and they played at their own pace. On the Internet, the videos start when you fucking tell them to. If they don't, off to another site. It's like a faucet: you turn the knob and you expect an immediate flow of lolcats.

It trains all of us to be impatient. And it's easy for the impatient to start looking at fellow posters or Diggers as just more pieces of content, morsels that need to be delivered the instant we want them. And why wouldn't we? This is a place where we can get a girl to strip for us on a webcam for like three bucks.

Sorry, Kam.
Those rice crispy treats look fun and festive.