on removing possible UI design choices for social media companies -- i have a very small violin on hand.
(Actually, sometimes the "paged" interface in "infinite scrolling" systems is available, only hidden. There for the benefit of people like us, those who would find it and exploit it.)
"Resourceful"?
It’s like listening to the lawyers at a cigarette manufacturer, car manufacturers fight seat belts or gun manufacturers in kindergartens. The change is coming because real people are pissed.
And it doesn't just affect them. I think most of us would rather live in a society where 50% of the population isn't brain-rotted.
When does a feature that simply makes your product easier to use cross into a territory that it's illegal?
What about media previews, in a platform like reddit if you can preview or expand media directly from the main list is that an “addictive feature” or just convenient design?
also interested in the larger economy, if you create a plugin that restores or adds infinite scroll to a website could you be liable for providing illegal UX?
EDIT: to clarify I'm not really griping on infinite scroll in particular, more the difficulty in regulating postitive UI/UX. Dark patterns are relatively easy to identify. If the unsubscribe button is hidden behind 3 screens and is in 3 point font that's pretty clearly a dark pattern. This seeks to regulate the opposite basically "your platform is, too easy, too good at serving your content"
This is much harder to categorize and has fuzzier boundaries. For example imagine if it applied to remembering your login for more than 24 hours. Certainly people would use your service less if they had to continuously authenticate. Are long-lived sessions good UX or encouraging "addictive" behavior?
It is the algorithm they attach to infinite scroll which is problematic. It is not a UI design problem.
Uh... Have you actually ever read section 230? There is no "exemption" that algorithms get. Like literally none. The section is probably one of the simplest forms of legalese in the entire US code. Please read it before making claims about it.
When I’m trying to do something constructive, like search or browse, infinite scroll is IMHO disastrously bad. You can’t keep your place in the list, or jump ahead/back.
if i refresh the page it should be almost the same. maybe a couple new things at the very top, but i should still be able to find the thing i was just looking at.
by comparison, facebook auto-reloads while you're halfway down a page, and wont show you any of the same things. its an incredibly poor experience
At the very least we should be able to scroll backwards after a page refresh to see previous posts.
Same as if you are scrolling and have reached result 20 And want to load more.
There's potentially a difference if the server's sending repeat posts and you're doing client-side filtering of what to show next. But do any sites work that way?
(And of course these issues only exist when your list of results changes order. It the list merely grows then you can paginate with start=xxx)
We want visitors to imagine that we just plopped a binder of sorted results down in front of them for their page-by-page perusal, but the suggests permanence and invariants we don't want to provide (because it's harder.) For example, the assurance that page 2 will always have the same items on it unless they "search again", and the last item on page 2 will not not duplicate itself on the top of page 3 as they page forward.
By way of contrast, imagine a system where a result-set was not just a UI metaphor, but real domain concept. Do a search, and you get a Result which is a limited-size listing generated at time X for user Y and will be cached for Z.
The typical infinite scroll that I've seen implemented does not work the way you describe though, it's just pagination without controls. The reason it works is because it's pushing content you never asked for anyway and it just keeps pushing. Without any sense of pages you'll never know the difference.
Users know that they are scrolling endlessly, they just don’t care. Adding a “more” button every now and then isn’t going to change that.
[A B C] D E F G H …
A D C [B F E] G H …
If the order changes, all bets are off regardless of pagination or infinite scroll.
Reddit page links include both the number of the first item on the page (only cosmetic) and the last item on the previous page (which actually determines what is displayed).
In thems of pagination, yes, which is why I prefer to use https://hckrnews.com/.
Well, that's obviously false. There are two styles of pagination:
https://yourblog.zox/archives?page=4
https://yourblog.zox/archives?before=2019-06-03&count=10
The problem is infinite content.
Instead, a scroll should give you a break before heading into the next video. I'm willing to bet this would help severely with addiction. People are then forced to reconsider whether they actually want to play the next video. "Done" should not always lead to "here's the next stimulus". That's what's addictive. The brain isn't made to break out of that loop easily.
This discussion makes me both laugh and feel sad, because we all know this is bad for us and gives us zero ROI for our time... and yet there's a whole thread developing here to justify the pattern.
I don't think I have a point on that, just that observation.
There is no allowable constitutional authority for actions like this. CA is literally overstepping the 1A limits of the Constitution here.
It's also telling that only corporations seem to be the ones demanding the right to infinite scroll; what's the scenario where an individual can only express themselves and their ideas through implementing infinite scroll on a social media?
We draw lines in the sand all the time for the sake of public safety, I'd like to hear a specific case of harm here.
The First Amendment is clear: there shall be no law abridging freedom of speech. Courts have bent around that in the past, in earlier eras, but they were wrong to do so. Their mistakes have mostly been corrected although there’s still a few left.
The document that governs this country spells it out: it can’t be done. Public safety be damned. There’s no public safety exemption in the Constitution. If you want it done, pass an amendment. There’s a process for it.
I personally dislike infinite scroll, but I dislike the camel’s nose in the tent even more. No speech laws.
Seriously, this diffusion of individual liberties into corporations has no presence in the constitution, and courts have fabricated this wholesale. There is no idea, no concept, no notion that infinite scroll provides. We regulate the size, location, and brightness of billboards; is this also a matter of speech?
Oh is the presentation of text and images not “speech” because it’s “addictive”? I didn’t realize that.
Your strategy with billboards is more clever than I’ve usually seen from you lot; I’ll give you credit for that. A billboard is actually a physical structure. The message on the billboard is the speech. If I stopped here you’d have a “gotcha”; the software must be like the billboard! But no, because first of all, code is speech, and secondly, the layout of items on the screen and how they interact is also just speech. It’s just graphic and UX design! There is no physical structure here. You’re attempting to regulate the presentation of information—design.
But courts are willing to find that certain speech that is apolitical can be limited (the previous "fire in a crowded theatre" example). Basically the courts have recognized 1A established freedom of speech to protect political dissent and political ideas. Porn, for example, has limitations that would never apply to political ideas.
Limitations on porn still exist in a few areas, but they are gradually being rolled back—obscenity laws were once widespread and highly restrictive. Most still standing carveouts are pretzel twists that probably need to be corrected with a clarifying amendment; they are on very shaky ground.
The court has recognized speech protections outside of politics many times, including protections for authors and creators who were not explicitly aiming for political statements. For example, Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association established that video games are protected expressive speech, even if they are violent trash that aren’t attempting any political point whatsoever.
Re, source code: you can print out an implementation of your infinite feed and put it on GitHub. Go nuts. That's your freedom of speech. Likewise, I can write DDoS control software and clients. However I can't run said software as a service because that specific act is illegal. Same thing applies to the application feeds we're discussing; hosting content and offering software as a service has different semantics.
If you think that UX is a matter of free speech then I have an illuminated freeway sign running at 3000 nits to sell you.
We can have nice things. We can push corporations to act in pro-social manners. We can put individuals at a better footing with respect to large corporations while ensuring the liberty of individuals and small businesses. This libertarian idea that we cannot constrain obviously harmful behavior from massive corporations without immediately turning into an authoritarian both flies in the face of historical precedent and basic reason.
A law doesn’t just get a constitutional bypass because it’s addressing known harms or “anti-social” behavior or whatever. This is not the UK.
Illuminated signs exist in the real, physical world. They can beam bright light into your home, involuntarily. Design and presentation exists in the realm of a printed page, or on the display of your device. Can we regulate how a book lays out its type?
The First Amendment is quite possibly the most uniquely American thing about our Constitution, and its most defining feature. It’s worth defending.
> A law doesn’t just get a constitutional bypass because it’s addressing known harms or “anti-social” behavior or whatever. This is not the UK.
First, the harm arguments are regularly made in front of the supreme court. And sometimes, when it suits them, justices make their own harm or sociality arguments. No, USA is worst. It gets to be constitutional if it advances conservative right wing agenda and unconstitutional otherwise.
> The First Amendment is quite possibly the most uniquely American thing about our Constitution, and its most defining feature.
You dont defend it by redefining its meaning to unrecognizable to encompass things non-speech of corporations. All the while making it so that in practice, poorer people have no defense anyway.
We’re talking apples and oranges because a website is more like a book than an illuminated sign. You have to decide to view it, and it doesn’t shine through your window at night, disturbing the peaceful enjoyment of your home.
Does society benefit from mass ownership and unlimited access to fully automatic rifles and grenade launchers? If it does, what country allows it?
Are the above constraints explicitly decided as constitutional though years of legal decisions at all levels of the courts? Yes? Then we can observe that we can reasonably constrain constitutional rights through law and legal opinions. The line may be hard to draw and may shift, see the AR ban, but it is accepted that constitutional guaranteed rights have bounds that can be articulated and clarified through the legal and political system.
We put upper bounds on the rights and freedoms of individuals and corporations because we all must live within proximity to each other. These bounds may be authoritarian at times, and of course that's bad. But we collectively can limit freedoms because the alternative is actively and disproportionally harmful to society.
When it comes to the rights and the freedoms of the largest and wealthiest corporations, we already live in an era where these entities are shaping major aspects of our lives. Infinite scroll is one small mechanism by which they're hacking our biology; this is more than just pixels on a screen but a component in a system that was A/B tested to maximize behavior modification.
Help me understand - do you believe that it is possible to regulate these entities in any form? Or do we need to say that the folks that yeeted tea into a harbor were fine with infinite corporate power and regulatory capture?
I must also mention that courts are not Congress and states are not Congress. The first amendment does not say "there shall be no law" - that is your poor paraphrasing - it says "Congress shall make no law"
If you’re just going to pick and choose what rights you apply, then it’s not much of a governing document, is it? Is this just “Parliament is Sovereign” with extra fluff? Might makes right?
It’s almost like we need a robust system of checks and balances, governed some kind of rigid framework to ensure that everyone plays by the rules. Or we could just continue to ignore that and see what happens.
• It is content neutral.
• The government can probably show a significant government interest in reducing the harms infinite scroll often leads to.
• It is narrowly tailored. It achieves the goal without burdening more speech than is substantially necessary to achieve the goal. Arguably it doesn't burden any speech since every word you can have on an infinite scroll page you can have on a paginated site.
• There are alternate channels. The speakers still can get their message across. In this case they can get it across to the exact same audience in the exact same place. They just have to stick in page breaks.
While the court has once or twice extended protections to people using private property as a public forum, to my knowledge they have never done so with time/place/manner restrictions.
Hint: the physical world is very different from the virtual world, and has different limitations.
Hint #2: if I crank up the amp to 1000db and shout into it, it’s obviously not a question of speech anymore. This is obviously an extreme example (the energetic release just destroyed the planet), so dial it back to where it’s reasonable and concerns are balanced. Are you still facing actual physical discomfort? Did you dial it back enough?
Hint #3: is my nighttime writing keeping you awake in your home?
To be honest I suspect much of the support for this bill here is inorganic, and I do feel extreme contempt for the people pushing it.
In the end I’m not really trying to convince these posters—they have obviously made up their mind—but rather to entertain and educate the nonaligned audience.
Why not link to those instead of a youtube video?
Should/do we allow foreign propaganda radio stations? If we accept that the government can (and very much does) impose itself on content platforms for "national security", what exactly is the difference between deliberately insidious information warfare, and collateral damage from market incentives?
I agree that its better to find solutions that involve protections instead of restrictions though. I think it means forced decoupling of indices/curation from advertising. This would make advertising funded addiction feeds compete with paid feed applications.
How do you define this? Is it foreign owned? Noncitizens are not guaranteed the same rights, especially citizens of hostile foreign powers.
> If we accept that the government can (and very much does) impose itself on content platforms for "national security"
Why should we accept this?
> what exactly is the difference between deliberately insidious information warfare, and collateral damage from market incentives?
None, both are concepts not found in the Constitution (if you’re talking about domestic speech by citizens) and both are protected by 1A.
I don’t care in the slightest about your fearmongering national security nonsense.
That was a little hyperbolic. The government already can regulate "speech" to some extent in limited, targeted ways, as this is. For example: they can (and increasingly will) require ADA accessibility standards on web and mobile sites and apps-- even private sector-- that deal with the public.
It may be that this isn’t as settled as you think when speech concerns are present. The existence of alternative accessible formats, or sufficient assistive technology in the marketplace, may be just as compliant. It’s likely that these will be favored over mandating changes that affect design or presentation, given the Court’s prior decisions on balancing speech concerns in other areas.
And things like image crafting are not even necessarily intentional or malicious. Somebody who posts a pic of their filet mignon dinner probably isn't posting much in the way of their microwaved leftovers mashed up in a bowl. And adults already get mistaken perceptions of others because of this bias, let alone children.
I'd fully support removing infinite scroll or even just banning it from under 18 year olds
It makes it impossible to click on any links in the footer of the page or even really reading what's in the footer.
I remember when it was initially introduced, everyone I spoke to about it hated it.
I don't mind that the order of search results might be shifted around over time, and I understand that there is some profit motive to inserting tangentially relevant or sponsored hits, but I really wish that there were an easy way of knowing what index each result has.
This grew out of a funny little habit I sometimes have where I like to pick a random number and see what search hit that corresponds to. It becomes too tedious with infinite scroll.
That's a UI bug. Real infinite scroll does not have a footer.
Could be I’m just an old man yelling at clouds though.
But you can see the links! Maybe if your reflexes were just a little faster, if the mouse didn't lag!!!
A lot of implementations also break the back button and "page" or scroll position links (you can link to a singular item but not a spot in the list)
They usually also break psuedo binary search and force linear/sequential search (you can't skip a head to page 10 when you're trying to zero in on a date unless they've added an explicit date filter and you remember the exact date versus the relative position)
Also breaks parallel loading--can't queue up the next few pages of gigantic media in new tabs while finishing the current page
They also tend to break ctrl-f and if they don't they tend to get progressively slower as more crap stays loaded in memory
Neither? Pagination is good UX; infinite scroll is a way to make your usable page unusable instead.
And of course we know that small changes increase engagement/addictiveness.
Html interfaces are easily configurable, technically.
The fact companies at least don't offer easy ways to configure websites to be less addicting, and some even block those, does tell us something.
Reading the bill I see carve-outs for things like "commercial transactions", perhaps allowing Amazon and Temu to use infinite scroll, but not Facebook and TikTok
You know, I hate to give the oppo any decent ideas, but maybe there’s some allowable way to subsidize apps that use “healthy” patterns rather than attempting to “ban” things!
Except it doesn't. You lose context and are now drowning in an endless morass of lazy-loaded blocks and widgets, all hiding under invisible elements. Nothing has a permanent URL, so there is zero accountably if the user was shown something that they need to reference - unless it benefits the platform. And of course, it will eventually all force reload when the page complexity exhausts the available memory, or at least when it becomes too exhausted to reliably serve ads.
[1]: something like a link specifying the contents of my feed at a specific date+time and scroll-position.
…whereas with old-school SSR paging it’s right there in the querystring paging params (page-size, page-index or item-offset, and an optional results anchor for stability).
I’ll concede that a well-designed infinite-scrolling (or “click to load more inline” button) feature could use history.pushState to dynamically update the browser’s address with new query params but I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen anyone do that - which is a shame.
It's addictive. There is no "one more page and I'm done" because the page never ends and you're never done. You get to the bottom, more content loads automatically and people say "this looks interesting, let me scroll some more". That's why it's doom scrolling because all you do is scroll, no need for any other input. The bait is always there right in front of you and I'll bet that the algorithm make sure the first couple of posts that load every time you get to the bottom are the "juiciest" ones to make sure you take that bait and keep scrolling.
Pagination hides the juicy bait. It's still there waiting for you but it's hidden until you ask for it. That's a big difference.
The only stable way to share what you're seeing is with a screenshot.
An algorithmically "curated" TL, yes that's harder
Google search or a traditional paginated forum doesn't provide that either. No guarantee that page 15 of thread X will contain the same posts as it does now when the moderators wake up and delete the flame war.
When I worked at Meta there was a lot of employee pressure to implement a "deterministic feed", where scrolling back-and-forth would produce the same set of posts, but leadership constantly sandbagged the idea (nobody actually wants determinism, people prefer to be surprised/delighted, etc)
> so there is zero accountably if the user was shown something that they need to reference
You just sound angry...
you can't jump to the specific place on the website, you can't remember where something has been to have a map in mind, you can't go to "about" section or some sort of site settings
A soon as you want to revisit a previous post you are lost.
You may remember it‘s ten pages back but with infinite scroll that information is missing
So if they acted by the spirit of the law, this would be very easy.
Of course they won't as that goes against their core interests, so we will likely have a cat-and-mouse game of definitions and malicious compliance. I'm looking forward to a whole new era of "UI innovation" where companies scramble to think of patterns that are technically not autoscroll or autoplay, but practically have an even worse effect.
(Interestingly, the "have the user opt-in" loophole we had with cookies doesn't seem to exist here, so at least we hopefully won't see any more "consent popups" or deliberately bad alternatives)
As for the law, apparently it has this line:
> ...or “any other feature defined” by the attorney general “as an addictive feature.”
So essentially the attorney general has to guess the intent of a company behind a feature. It's strange that this power lies with the attorney general and not a judge or jury (not an expert on US law though), but in general, "guessing intents" is something the legal system does all the time for obvious reasons.
At addiction?
These feeds couple two features together: infinite scroll and automatic refresh. Without "pages" there is no technical way to refer to (and link) to a specific view, it's always generated. The best you have is a link to a particular item. Automatic refresh adds FOMO that you will not see the post again if you stop engagement right now.
Coupled together there is nothing about "product easier to use" and all about addictiion-inducing dark patterns.
Some apps do not tack on the auto refresh, meaning you can close the app at any time, reopen it and keep scrolling from the point you left, eliminating the addictive fomo.
Good question! Maybe when that which makes the application/product easier has more negative side effects than positive or useful intended effects?
There must be ample examples/collections on the net about convenience and/or ease of use doing ugly stuff to body and brain short-, mid-, long-term.
Infinite scroll doesn't have a positive UX. If it takes an infinite amount of time to use your product, your product is shit.
Unless your product is content, in which case endless scroll encourages thoughtless consumption behavior. That's not a good thing.
We as engineers shouldn't be building stuff that degrades the experience of existence (which is already shit enough), just because you can make money doing so doesn't mean it's not antisocial behavior, and because you can make money by being a really shitty human, it does require some external force to curtail that negative sum behavior.
I agree it's difficult to categorize, the solution is rapid iteration, not allowing the asshattery until the entirety of society figures out it's bad for your brain. Someone should probably fix the political system in the US so we can have rapid iteration on problems again.
I meant rapid as in rapid for the legislative context too. I don't mind slow (expected) speed, or laws that have a delay before they take effect. I do have a problem with how political points can and are won not by finding solutions, but exclusively by obstructing the process. I don't mind an imperfect solution that moves the needle into a new better local maximum.
Our problem is that a majority of legislators want to pass laws that they aren’t allowed to pass, although at cross purposes from each other, but they don’t want to go through the process for changing what they’re allowed to do. (Which may simply be evidence that the system is working as expected.)
We also have a problem with general legislative gridlock, entirely due to self-imposed rules that Congress isn’t willing to change. (Interestingly enough, however, the people could force a change through an amendment here too.)
It’s not about whether the law meets some abstract notion of good or bad, it’s about whether it is even possible to enact under the framework that governs us. Under the Constitution as it stands, it wouldn’t be possible.
It is entirely conceivable that Americans wake up to the absurd power and manipulation behind algorithmic feeds, and decide to intervene in the hypno-addictive horror-show.
Also, I've been thinking about how curation at the scale of the modern internet is much more analogous to speech than it ever was before. Whatever you want to say, just find someone else who's said it-- or just astroturf via 3rd party and beam it into the skinner boxes. In this frame, freedom of speech actually demands open access to indeces and content. Is it acceptable that network-effect-fueled cartels are the only ones that get to speak through algorithms?
Regardless, this doesn’t change anything about the first amendment, because changes in technology and their consequences don’t alter the Constitution. If you think free speech needs a separate concept of “reach” then you need to pass an amendment.
Its all very well saying "we will ban x" but unless you can define "x" reliably in a way that stands up to court arguing, you're not banning it, you're putting a lawyer tax on it.
The issue is, the vauger the terms, or harder it is to prove, the more money can warp the outcome.
There will always been cornercases to all laws, so you need to choose what you are going to hit and why.
Dark UX patterns can be hard to prove, you need to show that a normal person is not reasonably able to understand. That changes with time. (ie in the 90s asking someone to login and press a link would have been onerous, when a phone service/postal/fax was the done thing.)
So you either build in a proof, which can be gamed, or you target a specific action or thing, which will need updating.
the Law is hard, and, increasingly made by people who are not experts.
No, it's seeking to ban presenting content at a faster rate than a person can meaningfully digest.
There's a limit to that rate over which the platform doesn't become "too good", it just becomes worse, as it's showing too much too fast and breaking attention.
According to who? US law is established as heading into this absurd notion of subjectivity, so the interpreter and viewer of the law as written is now as important as the law being written in the first place.
Gerrymandering black voters out of being able to elect a black representative? Well as long as the people doing it don't admit being racist, it's all fine! Want to take bribes from foreign governments? Well, if you're the head of the executive branch of government or a close personal friend, you can interpret that better than the bestest out there so those anti-corruption laws clearly don't apply, right?
"That's not a dark pattern, your honour!", Shady McShadeface attests in court, "we're just trying to make offers we think the customer is interested in before they confirm their final and terrible decision with awful consequences for them!". How else would the poor uninformed consumer not be aware of that special deep discount (today only, 4 hours left!), on that pillow set that they absolutely must need to consider on their way out of the door?
Infinite scroll is deemed by many a dark pattern, and by others a particularly clean way of dealing with a UX challenge. Subjective, eye of the beholder, and all that.
It reminds me a little of the "I know pornography when I see it" argument, and I think it's fair to call it a dark pattern given the evidence against it, but like pornography, consenting adults should be able to consent to exposure to it for their own "convenience", perhaps. I just personally think the button to turn it on should be hidden behind 3 screens and in a 3 point font...
I guess I'm agreeing with your point that its hard to pre-emptively define what "bad UI" is when it's often so close to "efficient UX", so just go downstream.
So to your question about the line between good UX and addictive features, at least in some cases, there is an ocean between them, though to your point, it's hard to find that line in the ocean. "Fallacy of the beard" and whatnot.
It won't, become some parties are proposing a narrative of "shielding the innocent from harmful content" (such as themselves).
keir starmer seems to suppose nudity would be indecent, against an implicitly stated decent itself and british politics.
Age verification and how enthusiastic gov'ts are about it is concerning.
That said, I like the idea of an option. Options are good!
Theres no "freedom to be a corporation".
In fact just end the limitation of corporate liability and let the courts sort it out.
A lot simpler than targeting a random expression of communication in protcols courts dont understand.
Here's how to solve this ...
Social media companies measure engagement. Decide what the safe metric is, pass laws that hold social media companies to that metric for whatever age or demographic. Apply fines proportional to revenue when they are found to exceed the metric. Fines can't be reasonable to the cost of doing business.
That stops any social media company from incentivizing employees to increase engagement for that demographic.
The tech giants have flown to close to the sun, real people are pissed.
- would they be able to make as much as they do now? I think it would be significantly less.
From Meta's official Financial Report for 2025 [0]:
Total Revenue: $200,966 Million
-Advertising: $196,175 million (97.6%)
-Other rev: $ 4,791 Million ( 2.4%)
[0] https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...
Addictive content feeds are expensive with the live HD video playing everywhere and the constant tweaks needed from teams working to further refine targeting based on behavior.
(I’m not sure if it’s even possible to ban targeted ads, haven’t thought much about it. Perhaps there’s a regulation of commerce angle. I do think that businesses could be forced to provide more clarity about the exchange that’s taking place, the value of the data, how the data is used, and so on.)
Valve started supporting Linux and making their own Linux gaming hardware because Microsoft briefly tried to lock down Windows so that games could only be installed from the Microsoft Store.
Have you seen many people mindlessly watching people talk in public for hours on end? When a plane lands, people aren't zombified listening to another passenger talk, they're zombified doom scrolling on tic-tok etc.
personally I am against internet identification, and I think teenagers should be allowed on social media, so I have to ask: why only children? if these features are so bad, ban them outright.
Having said that, we also expect adults to make all kinds of bad decisions so they too are prohibited from many things, like shooting smack or freebasing meth.
I think there's a good case to be made not for banning kids from social media, but for banning everyone. In that case, it'd be easier to do it from the supply side than the demand side.
I think a better solution would to mandate that platforms offer a ranked feed and a chronological feed and make the setting sticky for users.
I think giving users the agency over how much they consume is good but mandating a “UX” pattern feels too specific.
EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48858292)
> The investigation focuses on features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and the platforms' highly personalised recommender systems.
Infinite scroll is very obviously unnecessary. It is very obviously intended to keep people on an app longer than they would otherwise use it. You can lazy load into a finite scroll. Just make people click something every once in a while.
But why? This is EU Cookies Banner level of state interference making UX worse for everyone just because some lawmaker doesn't like something.
Didn’t think so, and we didn’t ask for your opinion
A couple of comments up in this thread.
it's basically malicious compliance. They're supposed to be super annoying ... Instead of complying, they choose this obnoxious practice so they could continue ... monitoring every action a visitor does.
You don't need a cookie banner to be allowed to create Cookies. You only need them if you're using them for something like tracking. [1]
Regulators didn't enforce cookie banners. Cookie banners are a form of malicious compliance. When you complain about them, you are doing the lobbying work of ad companies for free. The correct solution is to just not spy on people, and the problem is that the EU didn't go far enough and just ban the behavior altogether. [2]
Cookie pops are malicious compliance to regulations that legitimately protect consumers. You’ve cherry picked one bad side effect to throw out all the ways the EU is way ahead of anyone else in protecting consumers [3]
No they did absolutely not say that! They said I need informed consent before I collect your personal identifiable information. Nothing prevents me from instead of using a banner, for example having a small widget in the footer or elsewhere on my site if I were to want to collect it (I have no analytics or cookies on my site at all).
And next thing you know, there'd be people complaining about "dark patterns" where the small widget is designed to be very easy to overlook and (more importantly) someone may inadvertently use the site briefly before noticing that they can turn off tracking. Whoops, you just got tracked.
A modal makes it obvious what's happening on the site and gives you a chance to opt-out before proceeding. There really is no better way to do it that's going keep everyone happy. People just don't want to admit that the only way to properly implement this feature is to annoy people.
The fundamental and default part of the law is to NOT track. Tracking by default (opt-out) is illegal. A modal is just a way to annoy you until you consent against your will.
https://gdpr.eu/article-6-how-to-process-personal-data-legal...
Explain how you'd do that without a banner or similarly annoying UX
Of course if your answer is “people should just stop using cookies” then I have bad news for you.
... virtually no website owners opted for (1), a minority opted for (2), and most opted for (3). Yet every technolibertarian thinks (3) is the law's doing and not the consequence of other technolibertarians.
All the different flavors of yogurt in the grocery store are unnecessary. We only need 2.
There is a very real harm to allowing an engagement optimizing algorithm (which, if programmed effectively, almost always ends up a negative emotion firehose).
I don't know if this is the right solution, but I don't see that an extensive yogurt selection is the same thing as whatever the fuck is going on with Facebook feeding an endless stream of corrosive bullshit to users.
Well, one thing that definitely changed everywhere in a way well-correlated with local access to smartphones, is reduced fertility, so something definitely happened, but was that something infinite scroll, or something else?
Online radicalization is a documented issue. Engagement optimizing algorithms pushing extreme and polarizing content is also well documented. Even the excess screen time on algorithmic feeds is well documented as harmful in young populations even if the radical content issues are ignored.
So while we did have shootings before, we did not have incels, groypers, ISIS sleepers and other weird people encouraging and glorifying them. If we can stop one at the cost of eliminating endless scrolling on Facebook, I think it’s a fair trade.
In no way is this like yogurt. If I don't like that one yogurt has trace amounts of heroin in it, I can buy a different yogurt. If I don't like that reddit has an infinite scroll, I have to miss out on conversations in communities I like. There simply aren't similar communities I've ever been able to find for certain topics. And anything similar also has an infinite scroll (Facebook, twitter, etc.).
If, in your example, all yogurts had trace amounts of heroin in them, I would agree with the comparison.
By the way heroin use was widespread in the early 1900s, it took decades to regulate it even though the addictive and detrimental effects were very obvious to everyone. And let's not get started on nicotine. See the similarities?
The fonts and margins dont communicate anything by themselves. There is a book that communicates ideas/opinions and that is what's protected by the first amendment. If someone found a font that exploits the brains reward mechanism and causes all sorts of mental health problems perhaps that should be regulated too.
Infinite scroll doesn't communicate anything by itself, it is purely a revenue maximizing feature that, as it turns out, has negative effects for people. There is no underlying idea or opinion here that Meta is communicating that should be protected by free speech.
... Prop 65 is dumb though. Kind of a trend in California law.
Infinite scroll is immediately evident. Just don’t use it if you don’t like it
What are your thoughts on introducing a law that requires social media sites with infinite scroll to feature an addiction warning, something like: "Using this platform may cause addiction in some users."?
Your position is absurd, I’m sorry.
I would support a law that enforces a "This product may cause addiction in some users" warning on social media sites with infinite scroll.
The entire point of talking about addiction (or even harmless things like FOMO, network effect, etc) is that this is not true.
I wish we lived in the word you think we live in :(
In reality regulatory capture has infested nearly everything.
Does nicotine have some beneficial health effects? Yeah, it actually does. But do they outweigh the downsides (and societal costs)? Absolutely not.
I do believe strongly in individual freedom of choice, but only under a paradigm of informed consent, and companies like Meta have never allowed that to happen and they never will, because the truth getting out could destroy their bottom line.
What are the downsides and societal costs of social media addiction? We have decades of strong evidence on the harms of nicotine and cigarettes, but the evidence regarding social media addiction is nowhere near as clear-cut, at least from what I've read. Likewise, the causal relationship between cigarettes and their harms is well established, whereas the relationship between social media use and addiction-related harms is much harder to disentangle from other contributing factors.
Not to mention, nicotine is highly addictive for almost any user, while most people who use social media do not become addicted.
I understand the broader point you're making. I'm just not convinced there's enough evidence to justify treating social media addiction as comparable to cigarette addiction.
That article gives a superficial overview of some of the research, which for obvious reasons is still in its infancy.
I didn’t mean to compare the harms to tobacco, but to how these companies tend to operate.
That said, the fallout of social media addiction and overuse is far weirder than the fallout from tobacco (which mostly just gives people cancer). Social media appears to be tearing the fabric of society apart.
I don’t have studies to cite but it seems like half of americans are one type of conspiracy theorist or another now, and that’s directly attributable to these new media channels.
I think the negative effects have been most pronounced on young women (body image issues and bulemia) and people with low media literacy (the misinformation plague).
There’s also the algorithmic “extremism” pipeline, where anything you show a little interest in gets turned into more and more extreme iterations to keep you engaged.
So maybe “addiction” isn’t even the right word to use here. But just look around outside in any major city or event in America and see how compulsively almost everyone uses their phones during downtime. It’s reflexive at this point, not really a conscious decision.
Some of the scariest stuff is coming from primary school teachers. Most of them act like late gen z and gen alpha are genuinely illiterate. It makes sense, you have little kids trying to swipe on physical photos in picture frames and stuff. That says something big about their lifestyles and then imagine the downstream effects of that…
I think it really tells you something when the CEOs and people who work for social media companies don’t let their own kids use the product, or drastically limit access to it.
What an absurd and pointless precedent to set.
Edit: rereading the article, they want to ban "psychologically exploitative features intended to maximize engagement that foreseeably lead to compulsive use." It seems like it's pretty straightforward to apply that logic to your hypotheticals.
edit: I get that you're trying to provide counterexamples to be able to say "here's something that _could_ be construed as coercive/addictive design, so the law is going to end up banning those" - but that's the whole reason we have courts to interpret these laws. If you can reasonably conclude that a 100ms delay is helpful for user input - then it's probably not addictive design! That's the whole reason courts exist, because there is always going to be ambiguity; laws are not algorithms.
Web developers are already hard at work on this.
But in general, yes, having a confirmation dialog on important buttons is good UX; similarly as to setting minimum/maximum saturation will increase accessibility by visually impaired people, epileptic people etc.
That seems rather accident prone.
It's easy to say that it's absurd, but what would you do?
My suggestion would be to look at something like the rat park studies. When mice lived in a nice communal space with other mice, they preferred regular ware over drug laced addictive water. I suspect people are similar, they’re not intrinsically prone to addiction, they’re just trying to treat psychological problems like fear, loneliness, insecurity. We need to attack this root of the problem, but there’s so much money in ensuring that people feel empty so they’ll buy shit to fulfill themselves that there’s no actual motivation from anyone with power to do anything. That’s why you get these dumb ideas for laws, they’re not enough to impact the businesses (who are the real constituents) but politicians can still say they’re doing something and something is better than nothing.
It simply isn't true a) that businesses are all as unscrupulous as digital media platforms and b) that most products even have potential to be addictive.
It's certainly true that most companies would like you to be a loyal repeat customer, but that falls a long way short of addiction.
Give me a break
With pagination you could say return to IG after a week, go through 5 pages of whoever you're following, check out a post, go back knowing you stopped at 5th, and continue from there. You can also set a limit (I'll check 10 pages tops and then go to sleep), which is helpful even with algorithmic feed.
I'm sure they can screw up pagination too if they wanted, but typical implementations don't have this issue
On HN definitely, if half of the people here are really invested in that stuff themselves.
What are you, protoplasm with eyes? Exert some willpower and get a grip. I've never known such a wimpy whining generation as this one
People exert willpower through the democratically elected legislature
"No not like that!"
but it's not the actual problem, but it's a part of the problem, and it's also something really easy to identify.
Goal achieved: media centralized.
That said, such a regulation would actually be unconstitutional unless it’s narrowly aimed at real concerns like blocking traffic. Snyder v. Phelps established that you can go protest with signs saying “God Hates F*gs” and yell at people during a military funeral. Believe it or not, sometimes free speech may be distasteful and disruptive.
The virtual world is very different. The audience is willing, there’s no passerby, no blocking traffic. Competing rights go out the window.
For reference, in Norway, you basically have 3 camps:
* Age verification is a detriment to democracy if implemented at a large scale as a requirement to speak in public. Well documented (activists and subject matter experts generally agree on this)
* We will solve the problem of kids online and we will solve it now. The solution must be age verification. Experts loud protest, and even committee findings that warn against are completely ignored (usually people who want a quick and easy solution, politicians who want the bragging rights of having saved the kids)
* We want to solve the problem, but the only obvious solution is age verification so I guess it can't be helped (not really educated on the topic. Just like most of us when it comes to a random political question. Not really a matter of intelligence)
Absolute circus.
I think most people here used the internet as a kid to learn about things and talk to adults in the field there were interested in. For today's kids this happens mostly on the few big sites like twitter and discord.
I'm more than happy to sacrifice endless scroll and recommendation algorithms (at least the type that is thrown at you without consent) to not have to verify my age to speak online.
https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-should-stand-up-to-bi...
on the contrary, infinite scrolls are impossible to get back to after some time away and eventually start lagging
and the technology marches onward
I know I spend more time on Reddit than I should, so... Oh well.
I wrote an infinite-scroll implementation for my blog. Infinite scrolling through a static bank of content (even with some randomized elements) is not engaging. You eventually make it to the bottom and think "that's it?"
There are other types of Internet communities where people can connect with each other, that do not involve infinite scrolling, algorithmic curation, and using your collected interests for targeted advertising. I would love to see regulation, just to see the value of Meta's user-profiling-data-assets shrink.
the most enforceable way to do this is making open apis mandatory. any user should be able to get api keys that let them do all the basic operations like view posts for a user, consume the firehose, read their own likes and follows, you get the idea. your api is incomplete? you get fined. needs a paid subscription or signing a contract? all views go through the recommender system? straight to jail.
we need to play hard with platforms but let users do what they want, at least if its not disruptive to other users.
Ubiquitous infinite scroll is one of the things I hate most about "modern" UI design.
Call it the "pagination law" and combine it with banning personalized feeds as a whole, apart from fully transparent choices made by the user (e.g. follows).
One can dream...