- Curious as to where the line between “addictive feature” and "good UX" is. Is deliberate pagination actual impedance to use or merely an annoyance that's been weeded out with modern UX design?
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?
- > a feature that simply makes your product easier to use
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.
- You can do permanent urls with infinite scrolling. Nothing that prevents you from putting the page number in the url
- says you
- X posts have a permanent url.
- I think they meant how you can’t get a permalink to your feed/timeline view-state[1], so other people can see exactly what you see (not just what’s in the viewport but also the surrounding/offscreen content and broader context).
[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.
- Offset / page index is not exactly stable especially for the most common case of newest-first.
- “Anchor + Offset” is stable because the anchor param should uniquely identify a specific record from which the offset is applied; a sort-order, direction, and page-size may also be optimally specified.
- The reason infinite scroll is bad has nothing to do with the technicalities of the HTML behind it. You could always implement a technical solution for these technical issues but that wouldn't fix the real problem.
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.
- It's very much a slot machine, maybe the next short video will be interesting. Maybe not, who knows, but you keep scrolling through shorts and binge watching.
- It is when you do "?after=uuid" or "?after=timestamp".
- Actually newest first shouldn't be a problem, you need only to point to "last seen date" (up to ms precision)
An algorithmically "curated" TL, yes that's harder
- That's called a screenshot.
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.
- All Facebook posts have a permanent URL that you can copy.
- They do, but if you scroll past a post in your feed, and then try to scroll back to find it, there is very little guarantee that it will still be there.
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)
- > now drowning in an endless morass of lazy-loaded blocks and widgets
> so there is zero accountably if the user was shown something that they need to reference
You just sound angry...
- Infinite scroll is bad UX design and always has been.
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.
- Also creates a confusion that algorithm profiteers love, where before you could know a post you saw would be page 1 today and page 2 tomorrow now the homepage of every app is absolute chaos so you have to spend hours searching for something specific or you're just always seeing exactly what they want you to see (to increase engagement or whatever instead of any sensible order)
- I have always hated infinite scroll because it becomes way more difficult to understand the index of a search result or piece of content. For example, if I know that each page of results contains 25 hits, then it is easy for me to see which one is the 25th hit, and then which one is the 26th one (first one on the next page).
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.
- position: fixed has been around a long time
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
- You must have spoken to me, I hate it today has as much as I did back then.
- Steam fixes this by having a footer, and putting more content under the footer. Google search also did this on mobile for a little while.
- > It makes it impossible to click on any links in the footer of the page
That's a UI bug. Real infinite scroll does not have a footer.
- Yeah I hate infinite scroll. I have no idea what actual common sentiment is because you’d have to do broad polling to find that out. I always wonder if UI designers fall into the “everyone i talked loved it” where everyone consists of “other designers and developers who have a stake in making this a common feature” or “user surveys that are heavily loaded to arrive at the conclusion I want “
Could be I’m just an old man yelling at clouds though.
- I am pretty sure of that. Mostly because they always do the same impractical thing at the same time. And they discover it is bad few years later, also all at exactly the same time.
- Its also horrendous for accessibility and screen reader users.
- >It makes it impossible to click on any links in the footer of the page or even really reading what's in the footer.
But you can see the links! Maybe if your reflexes were just a little faster, if the mouse didn't lag!!!
- The way I see it, it's the incessant stimuli you get through these apps. There's just no point where the screen stays quiet, stimulus free. Moving elements capture our attention naturally, especially when the entire screen keeps moving. The endless scroll element just makes sure that the stimulus keeps getting renewed the moment you're done with it.
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.
- The problem with using scrolling as a metric is it assumes satisfaction with the content presented and ignores the fact that, on certain apps, many scroll miles go into skipping around articles or ads or reposts to get to the content you want, and imo a punishment for seeking more content while also diluting said content with forced ads at an alarming ratio is not indicative of addiction but scarcity of satisfaction and engaging content
- If you continue scrolling, that shows you think that the content presented is valuable enough that scrolling past some misses is worth it. A good scroll like TikTok carefully metes out the ads so that half of them you don't mind and the other half you enjoy. If you find a site whose scroll makes you feel this way, just stop scrolling and don't try to ban the concept for everyone else.
- What I'm about to say is going to sound very 'layman', and this is coming from someone who's been building UI's for like, 20 years.
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.
- Hello, what right do you have to regulate the presentation of speech? If you regulate this format because it’s now considered harmful, what stops El Presidente from moving to ban “zines” because the format is “harmful to young minds” and used by “antifa”? What stops CA from moving to ban forums because threaded formats are suddenly considered “too addicting”? Maybe we should ban VR or first person shooter video games?
There is no allowable constitutional authority for actions like this. CA is literally overstepping the 1A limits of the Constitution here.
- I doubt that this will run into any 1A issues. It will probably pass the test for allowable time/place/manner restrictions.
• 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.
- Time/place/manner restrictions typically apply to public property. These are private websites.
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.
- "No loud music between 10pm and 7am." That's on private property when it can be heard by others. Laws have all kind of restrictions on the time/place/manner of self-expression when what is being expressed has a negative effect on others. What you can't do is have laws that would say loud opera after 10pm is OK but loud Country & Western isn't.
- “No writing at home between 10pm and 7am.” Would that be allowed? I imagine you agree the answer is “no”. What, specifically, is the difference? Because the answer lies there.
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?
- Speaking as someone who agrees with you, it's much better to just make your point than to lay it out in hints like this. It's condescending and annoying. No offense intended, just a note.
- Fair enough, I just get bored of being the lone voice refuting these obvious talking points.
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.
- Honestly this is the big reason I have stopped participating in threads like this. Infinite scroll is not itself addictive. Hell, there are studies that suggest that us calling it "addictive" could itself create the very problem we're trying to "solve". There are also studies that completely refute the "social media is harmful" narrative too, and I'm talking on the order of millions of participants across more than 50 countries. Hell, even the kids don't agree with the narrative. I bring this up because all of this is so interconnected. I'll just leave this here for those curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vzbz--aPQLE
- Thanks for bringing this up. “Infinite scroll is literally cancer” is a new one that I’ve only seen in this thread, and I’m not even bothering to respond to. (Is infinite scroll annoying? Absolutely. But it’s not a “public health” threat, and even if it were that doesn’t trump 1A concerns!)
- > There are also studies that completely refute the "social media is harmful" narrative too, and I'm talking on the order of millions of participants across more than 50 countries.
Why not link to those instead of a youtube video?
- Because the youtube video essentially says what the studies do (and it's a developmental psychologist who's giving that talk too). I felt it would be a bit easier to digest than more than 6 separate studies that you'd have to read. But if you really want them here are at least 6 of them all essentially saying the same thing: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/18/yet-another-massive-stud...
- These are private websites accessible over the public internet, to be clear. Also, there are known relationships between the intelligence community and the big platforms, lets not pretend they have free reign.
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.
- Courts already do lawfully regulate the “presentation of speech” as you’re calling it. Say facebook was to present each post surrounded by pornography for example. That’s clearly a “presentation of speech” in your framing. However courts have decided that it is possible to regulate the circumstances under which that would or would not be ok and 1A arguments have not prevailed in that case.
- That’s more likely to be publication in itself, not presentation, but regardless porn is one of the very few areas where the courts still listen to speech arguments. However, the remaining decisions allowing (limited) regulation of porn rely on complicated, twisted reasoning—it’s clear that the justices don’t like touching this subject and feel that there are still constitutional issues here that may eventually need to be resolved via amendment. Usually this involves classifying porn in some other context, so it’s no longer “just” speech. Then the non-speech part can be regulated. Whenever they do this, they like to draw a very tight line biased towards favoring speech wherever possible, and they have consistently made it clear that they are not looking for more areas to do this kind of tightrope walking.
- btw zines are already illegal in the USA. 30 year sentence. https://culture.org/art-and-culture/thirty-years-for-a-box-o...
- Funny. You're citation never says what he was sentenced for, specifically.
- That specific case is why I brought this up, no they aren’t illegal, this is Making Shit Up and exaggerating beyond what actually happened. But if people like you got your way, they could be made illegal.
- We already do limit harmful speech, at presence it's limited to speech and will immediately cause harm (the whole "shouting fire" thing) and the demonstrable addiction properties can be reasonably shown as harmful.
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.
- “Shouting fire” was a bad decision denying the right to protest the draft, and it’s since been overturned. (Thankfully, as we may need that right soon!)
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.
- Hang on, let's go back - clarify for me how we're calling an addictive feature in a product built by the wealthiest corporations on the planet a matter of individual free speech? Precisely whose free speech would be harmed here?
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 this law’s scope limited to only the world’s largest corporations, and not smaller competitors, new entrants, individual developers, or nonprofits? I didn’t realize that.
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.
- The 1A jurisprudence, to my understanding, basically results in the courts virtually never finding that the government has a legitimate, competing interest in limiting political speech.
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.
- Again, the fire in a crowded theater example was actually political, and the decision was overturned. It no longer stands as precedent.
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.
- Isn't it fascinating that the people making the most extensive use of infinite feeds and A/B testing for maximum user engagement are also the massive platforms with dominating network effects and captive audiences? It's like _specifically regulating large social media conglomerates with outsized impact, capacity for harm, and demonstrated propensity to maximize user addiction might provide an ideal balance of societal improvement without harming smaller actors_.
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.
- Sophistry. The question is not whether or not regulation is authoritarian, it’s whether or not it’s constitutional. As in, whether or not the government is even allowed to make such a law.
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.
- Not that I think this significantly alters the point, but it's pretty common in the US to regulate or ban signage. e.g. billboards are illegal in my city and there are specific regulations about what kind of elements can be present on buildings to signal business names. I'm pretty certain illuminated signs beaming into people's homes would be illegal here. Actually I don't think light-up signs are allowed at all; I believe they have to be lit via projected light pointed at the building the're on.
- Yes, my point is that things like illuminated signs or loudspeakers can actually physically affect neighbors, so speech concerns have to be balanced against other concerns. Often the speech still wins, but not always.
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.
- A website like mygeotechnicalblog.example.com is like a book that you have to seek out. But websites like Facebook and Twitter may be so ubiquitous that they are more akin to a street that you walk down for many purposes and shouldn't be bombarded by obnoxious advertisements on the way.
- While we’re just stretching metaphors to fit our preferences, comments like yours are so odious that they are akin to an open sewer, and should be regulated for public health reasons. Am I doing this right?
- It was not sophistry, it was completely valid.
> 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.
- IIRC it's actually illegal to publish DDoS control software due to the CFAA
- There's the constitution (basically a piece of toilet paper with scribbles on it) and then there's the actual reality of how the country operates, and the actual reality is that speech is restricted in many ways.
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"
- Well just throw it all out the window then, if we’re not going to pay attention to the constitution. First things first, let’s make a law to ban you.
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?
- Might has always and will always make right and there's nothing you can do about it. That's why we aim to make rightful organizations mighty.
- Too bad all the old “rightful” standbys have gone rogue, while rapidly losing their capacity to effect change.
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.
- First they came for the infinite scroll, and I said nothing...
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.
- Can they? Why haven’t they enforced this yet?
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.
- Someone would have to sue the website to get the ADA enforced
- I disagree. Looking forward to reading your amicus brief.
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- While I would agree, I think many are missing the even more fundamental issue. Even if you get rid of every single predatory thing imaginable, social media itself is full of incessant stimuli, FOMO and other features that make it destructive for everybody, but especially young people. For instance image crafting is going to harmful for everybody, because many adults have a tendency to engage in keeping up with the Joneses, but for children it's especially harmful because of much greater personal insecurities and proclivities towards envy.
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.
- Don’t give them any ideas or they’ll start working to outlaw “inducing envy in others”
- What I like about Hacker News is each day I open it up, scan the first three pages, open 2-5 links to read, then close it again. Those pages make it easy to monitor my usage and set limits. I used to do the same with Reddit before that changed
I'd fully support removing infinite scroll or even just banning it from under 18 year olds
- Infinite scroll evolved alongside algorithms that incentivise addictive content. So it’s “good” UX in that it’s effective for consuming addictive content…
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.
- On the contrary, pagination makes it impossible to keep your place in the list if it changes between page loads.
- How are you going to keep your place if the order changes anyway? What is your place if the order has changed?
If the order changes, all bets are off regardless of pagination or infinite scroll.
- When asked to load more items, simply take the entire list (which may have changed) and remove the items already shown on the screen.
- How does that differ from 'when asked to load more items, simply take the entire list (which may have changed) and remove the items already shown on previous pages'?
- The fact that, in general, you don’t know what was on the previous pages, if anything. The user may just randomly decide to open page 3 without having visited the previous two pages. Or they clicked “next” after having page 2 open on their computer for several days and meanwhile they used your website on a different device.
- If implementing this idea, it wouldn't just be page 3 any more, it would be page numbered 3 excluding IDs 75833,6857362,2737,...
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).
- The challenge is to retain an ordering over the result set. How would infinite scroll behave any differently in this case? The changing results seems to be an orthogonal concern to pagination/infinite scroll.
- Infinite scroll makes the problem much easier, even if it’s still a problem. The only action you need to support is loading more results, which you can do by loading all results and filtering out those already shown. With pagination, the user may say “give me page 3” and you have no idea what was on pages 1 and 2, if they were even loaded.
- If page 1 and 2 were 10 each you load results 21-30
Same as if you are scrolling and have reached result 20 And want to load more.
- But the underlying table changed since. I'm not very familiar with these myself, but it seams to me that the best solution is to keep a session cursor for the user, and these are a lot simpler when you only ever move it forward.
- It's slightly different but I don't see why there should be a notable difference in difficulty. You need to somehow represent what you saw so far and act based on that.
- With infinite scroll, “what you saw so far” is in the client. With pagination, it exists only in the user’s mind.
- Is the client sending that info back to the server every time it requests more posts? You can do the same thing with pagination. Embed a list of post IDs into the next button.
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)
- IMO "pages of search results" is one of the problems where the closer you look, the more potential problems and inconsistencies you see until you realize it's a leaky abstraction, and sometimes it gets too leaky.
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.
- You can implement pagination exactly the same way. It's a UX decision that has nothing to do with underlying queries, although it typically maps.
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.
- Just use really long pages and require them to hit next page after viewing 100 items, then start showing the next batch of feedslop. How is that changing anything?
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.
- Just use cursor based pagination. How is this any different whether it’s infinite scroll or separate pages?
- Cursor based pagination only works if the items are sorted in strict chronological order. Otherwise, the problem remains. Consider the list
where the brackets represent the first page. If the user clicks the next page button (asking for the next page after C), but meanwhile the order changed, they get this:[A B C] D E F G H …
Notice how they now see B twice and completely miss out on D. In constrast, infinite scroll will take the new infinite list and remove A B C, leaving D F E …A D C [B F E] G H … - I guess the argument is that, while it's the same whether the user asks for "give me page 3" or "give me scrollbar Y coordinate 2160", the user is more likely to do the first or at least to care about the correctness of its result?
- Why does the user need to see a page number? You could just show a “forward” and a “back” button. Keep records of what they’ve seen recently so you can replay prior pages. If they view too many pages just silently drop earlier pages; it’s a feed, not a perfect paginated list.
- I mean sure, if you do it that way. But its easy to encode the page starting index and pagenate from there. Its even exactly the same algorithm as infinite scroll.
- Ah yes, let me just look at Instagram for the ideal model of infinite scroll UX. You can't even scroll up to something you've actually subscribed to that you didn't mean to scroll past without it tossing it into the memory hole and replacing it with something you don't care about.
- Did you think HN has an unusable and bad interface? It seems to be a remarkably popular website despite having hard pages that change order on every refresh.
- > Did you think HN has an unusable and bad interface?
In thems of pagination, yes, which is why I prefer to use https://hckrnews.com/.
- ‹looks at hn›
- > On the contrary, pagination makes it impossible to keep your place in the list if it changes between page loads.
Well, that's obviously false. There are two styles of pagination:
That second style will never change (unless you insert entries into the past). The first style will change. But it hardly makes it impossible to keep your place in the list; if you come back three years later, you'll find that that link goes to a random location, but if you come back next week, that link is going to go to a place that is very close to the place you left off, requiring minimal adjustment to find your place again.https://yourblog.zox/archives?page=4 https://yourblog.zox/archives?before=2019-06-03&count=10- The second style makes it impossible to sort by anything other than time.
- If it's the only thing you make available. If you want other options you can add other options.
- and places other than reddit dont need it
- Why is the list constantly changing anyway?
- Because other people keep adding new posts (and upvoting existing posts, which changes their order).
- While that's true I think that once the feed has been observed in a certain way the advantages of stability outweigh the advantages of showing a tweaked version the second time it is loaded.
- The user expectation is that if you refresh the page, you will see fresh content.
- mine isnt?
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
- Yeah, this is terrible UX that we somehow normalized.
At the very least we should be able to scroll backwards after a page refresh to see previous posts.
- Not if you’re on page 2
- So you'd rather something like Slack was paginated? I think that would be disastrously bad.
- Slack isn’t infinite. At some point there are no more old messages or no more new messages depending on which way you’re scrolling.
The problem is infinite content.
- Pagination works just as well with infinite content.
- Good. Use pagination instead.
- What good does it serve to have to constantly hit 'next page' in the middle of a real-time conversation? That's a bad UX.
- Maybe re-read the thread? A real-time conversation is not infinite content, it’s chronological and it ends when there are no more new or old messages. You shouldn’t use pagination, and I don’t expect this law or any similar law to enforce pagination on real-time conversations.
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- Seems like one of those situations where the outcomes should be measured, not the implementation. If you've created a product that is leading to hundreds of hours of wasted time (and the users themselves are sick of the amount of time they spend) maybe its time to investigate?
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.
- Good UX makes you achieve your goals on a website faster. It implies that the website has a purpose apart from spending your time on it. If it has no such purpose, and yet people are spending a lot of time there, it's probably addictive
- Infinite scroll is not necessarily a problem in and of itself. If the content is static, no biggie. At some point diminishing returns and you will want to use search for it.
It is the algorithm they attach to infinite scroll which is problematic. It is not a UI design problem.
- > If the unsubscribe button is hidden behind 3 screens and is in 3 point font that's pretty clearly a dark pattern.
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 think it's about user agency. When we say that infinite scroll is addictive, we mean that the user keeps on scrolling even when they wish they could stop. It's also about harm. Trapping users on their phones is harmful to their well-being. A person who wants to quit should be able to do so, addictivity that prevents that is harmful.
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
- Your edit is actually the nub of the matter.
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.
- > Curious as to where the line between “addictive feature” and "good UX" is. Is deliberate pagination actual impedance to use or merely an annoyance that's been weeded out with modern UX design? When does a feature that simply makes your product easier to use cross into a territory that it's illegal?
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.
- > When does a feature that simply makes your product easier to use cross into a territory that it's illegal?
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.
- > This seeks to regulate the opposite basically "your platform is, too easy, too good at serving your content"
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.
- We know there's a big problem with addictive ux in general.
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.
- Exactly correct - there is no way to disable the infinite scrolling reel nonsense in Snapchat while still allowing messaging. So, my son is either cut off from his friends or gets crap shovelled into his eyes. This is a business decision: to leverage their having insinuated themselves between him and his friends against his mental health. Ban it all immediiately
- This is the sort of thing that should / will be decided by courts, I think. We have many fuzzy laws where evaluating on a case-by-case basis makes more sense than deciding an arbitrary hard line. In this case, apps and platforms as a whole would be taken into account; infinite scroll alone might not be against this law, but if an app has a consistent pattern of addictive behavior and is harming its users because of it, something like infinite scroll might be forbidden for that app in a lawsuit.
- First, I believe the companies would have a very easy time to distinguish those features, as they know which feature was developed with the intent of keeping users in the app.
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.
- This is a question that needs to be answered empirically. It should be forced to a point where it is not obviously addictive and then stay there imo
- > where the line between “addictive feature” and "good UX" is.
At addiction?
- I know it when I see it.
- Do they have to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt? If it was a crime, they would.
- infinite scroll/algorithms don't need to be completely gone - just no longer the default setting
- > Curious as to where the line between “addictive feature” and "good UX" is. Is deliberate pagination actual impedance to use or merely an annoyance that's been weeded out with modern UX design?
Neither? Pagination is good UX; infinite scroll is a way to make your usable page unusable instead.
- Good UX for what? Maximising engagement time?
- infinite scroll breaks the back button and its really annoying
- Infinite scroll makes it only easier to use when your consumption only has one way.
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
- A lot of this is states trying to figure out a way around the first amendment to regulate social media that the courts will wink and accept. That is why you see so many convoluted laws being drawn up by state legislatures about this.
- What should be changed is the exemption algorithmically curated feeds still get under section 230. This has always seemed like a huge loophole. Once social media feeds are picking and choosing what to show users based on opaque criteria they are no longer neutral carriers of information but more like newspaper editors. They should be liable for what the users see.
- > What should be changed is the exemption algorithmically curated feeds still get under section 230.
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.
- In theory they are already exempt. YouTube is not liable for hosting a Nazi video but section 230 doesn't prevent it being liable for the choice to algorithmically show that video.
- coke cola used to have cocaine in it, it doesn't anymore, people in taste tests prefer the taste of Pepsi... Coke is still the leader in sales.
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.
- Rapid iteration on political issues is how you end up with oppression and legal terrorism. The brakes are there for a reason. But so is the valid process for changing the fundamental system (amendments).
- I don't think rapid iteration causes legal terrorism. Do you have an example, or just vibes?
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.
- Perhaps I should clarify, I am using “legal terrorism” as a term of art for legislative terror, such as that inflicted during the French Revolution or the reign of Oliver Cromwell, or Germany’s Enabling Act. Without strong checks, which slow down the process, legislative bodies can get caught up in a frenzy of passing laws in order to address “urgent” problems.
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.)
- Another alternative to avoid legal terrorism is low penalties. If the law would rapidly shift to say infinite scroll is illegal, but the only penalty is being ordered to remove it (and then penalised more if you fail to do so after being notified) I don't think that's really that bad?
- You’d need a Constitution that allows laws regarding speech. And probably a mechanism to prevent legislators from assigning excessive penalties.
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.
- Not true. Speech and reach are obviously different.
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?
- Let's not get too distracted from the fact that good things are good and bad things are bad.
- Good and bad things both exist independent of your preferences.
- It’s the wrong fix to the problem. The correct fix is enforcing an infinite scroll limit (time), after which the app tells you to take a break (for some amount of time).
- Get your nanny state out of my free market. I suppose next you will want some kind of warning label on my asbestos filter cigarettes.
- Waah waah speech is cigarettes again. Stale. Why don’t you people address the actual constitutional issues (the ones that will get your law struck down hard)
- Whatever the right “fix” is, why is a US state involved in deciding how my app presents my speech to you? Under what authority?
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!
- States get to regulate things that happen within the state. That's how it's always worked. They're like mini-countries.
- Not if they violate rights as enumerated in the Bill of Rights and later amendments.
- Right because that’s worked so well with gun control too!
- It has, I have no problem with my guns!
- We can all agree that the internet was great and now it is less great, but the second someone articulates a very, very simple rule, the "well ackchyually" crew comes out of the woodwork.
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.
- Should all buttons require a confirmation dialog to prevent people from making decisions too hastily? Should we ensure all interactions have at least 100ms of latency so users don’t get mesmerized by a smooth experience? Maybe we should set a max color saturation so nothing looks too enticing. We also don’t really need box shadows or gradients, they’re clearly meant to mesmerize users into making bad decisions.
What an absurd and pointless precedent to set.
- Is your argument that unless we can make a law that is perfect and covers every conceivable use case of coercive design, then we shouldn't bother to make a law that covers any of them?
- I'm pretty sure the point being made is that things like this are very difficult to actually encode into law in such a way that it doesn't cause significant damage downstream. Like, take the age verification/estimation laws that are going around. We see the big companies actively encouraging it because the laws will (ironically) benefit big tech rather than harming them in any substantial manner: companies like Meta have the money and resources to implement them. But everyone who isn't a super big powerful company will be harmed because they will be unable to comply (or will find it incredibly costly to do so).
- Ok, but you're just talking about a completely different law. How is that comparable to what's being proposed?
- Because the point applies to the subject of this thread too, that's why. People think that all of this is super easy to just ban by fiat (law) but the problem is that the "simple" solutions oftentimes have harmful downstream effects that must be considered. For example, let's hypothetically say that we ban "addictive algorithms". What even counts as an "addictive algorithm"? Does my Mastodon home timeline count as an "addictive algorithm"? How about the Bluesky feed? Does the HN home page count as one? (Someone could (reasonably!) make this argument too, given that HN does dynamically update it's home page depending on rankings of submissions to end-users, even if such an update requires a page refresh.) So what I was trying to say (and the reason I brought up age verification/estimation) is that if we take the simple path we're going to catch a bunch of entities up in the ban that we... Probably shouldn't be banning. But you are also going to suffer a lot of pain trying to (not) cause this problem too.
- But we're not talking about banning addictive algorithms, we're talking about banning endless scrolling. You're trying to straw man by bringing in completely different examples.
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.
- No my point is that none of these are by themselves even coercive design, there’s no distinction between a smooth or pleasant UX experience and a coercive design without context.
- But this isn't about banning those things, it's about banning endless scrolling.
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.
- Talking of heavy-handed confirmation dialogs, there's a good example of this in Apple's Preview.app (PDF viewer). They made an unconfigurable change a few years ago, such that every single time you click any web link in a PDF, you have to confirm with a dialog that you want to open the link. You used to be able to just click links!
- Don't quote me on this but I once heard that in the EU you always need to confirm purchases, ie. you cannot have the Amazon 1-click system.
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.
- The point is that - unrestricted - digital media maximises for time and attention. Given that incentive, addictive behaviours are not only inevitable, but an ideal outcome financially.
It's easy to say that it's absurd, but what would you do?
- Every business wants you to be addicted to their products, whether it’s social media, cigarettes, video games, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, supplements, fashion, electronics. Even seemingly innocuous things like reading the news or exercising are often addictions, people are running away from their fears and insecurities. It’s a systemic problem in western society, removing infinite scroll is such a ridiculous idea in the face of a core societal problem like this.
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.
- > Every business wants you to be addicted to their products
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.
- Either all buttons should require a confirmation or no buttons should. There is no in-between. There is no good judgement. There is no middle ground. All or nothing. It's black or white!
- Obviously, the buttons in the confirmation dialog also need their own confirmations...
- Yes, buttons should only require confirmation if it’s a Required Confirmation Button as defined by Section 23554, but not if it’s an Exempt Button as defined by Section 23587. Of course, this only applies to Apps With Some Required Buttons as defined in Section 48994; Apps Always Requiring Confirmation as defined in Section 48985(b) must always request confirmation for every button. This applies only to Registered App Developers as defined in Section 15324. Unregistered App Developers should refer to Section 39406 for requirements. (Button itself is defined in Section 1144114(c), and is not to be confused with a Toggle, a Clickable Rectangle, a Clickable Text Container, or a False Button as defined in the same section.)
- "Should all inhaleable substances be controlled? But then people won't be able to breathe. So smoking must be permitted unconditionally!"
- If you don't like the website, log off, but don't force everyone else to agree with your particular likes and dislikes
- What's very obviously unnecessary is the need for a law to police this. You can just not use things you don't like. This need to project one's own morality upon others will be the source of endless conflict.
- Absolutely. While we're at it, why should asbestos be regulated? You can just not go in buildings that have it.
- I’d have no problem with this as long as the building makes it known that it contains asbestos.
Infinite scroll is immediately evident. Just don’t use it if you don’t like it
- This is basically the Californian Prop 65 compromise: put up a sign saying the building contains carcinogens, but not actually do anything about them.
- So log off? If you think it's really that bad why are you anywhere near a screen at all?
- Do you know what a negative externality is?
- There's good reason for a lot of the inaction around asbestos. If it's not moving, not being touched and not accessible to kids / pets etc then it's fine to leave alone. The alternative being extremely costly remediation, and there are still millions of structures with asbestos in them.
... Prop 65 is dumb though. Kind of a trend in California law.
- Call me when "infinite scroll" causes cancer.
- I would agree that infinite scrolling social media feeds do induce a kind of sickness. But a mental one.
- It is a cancer of the body politic.
- it kinda does?
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- This isn't useful advice for addictive things that have high short term reward and high long term regret though. Especially so when the other party has a strong incentive to keep you trapped in that loop of regret.
- Exactly. Also, for responders, let's skip past the "if addicts didn't want to use them they wouldn't," and go straight to framing it as a moral failing implying that they deserve it.
- That statement leans very hard on the word “like”. Do addicts “like” their addictive behaviors? In a way it doesn’t matter, they’re going to keep doing it anyway.
- We can decide to pass laws to protect people from addictive behaviors. Do you support bringing cigarette advertising back for example?
- I don't smoke but you have to admit that the McLaren F1 car in Marlboro livery was pretty cool.
- Conversely it isn't very cool seeing the person who grew up as a McLaren fan dying prematurely due to being influenced to start a deadly habit from a young age. And I say this as someone who enjoys smoking.
- Yes.
- What is the cost-benefit analysis that led you to that conclusion? I ask as someone who enjoys smoking but struggles to see any good argument for the return of tobacco advertising.
- No cost-benefit analysis, I have a philosophical aversion to controlling speech.
- Interesting. I guess I don’t see corporations as people, and thus I don’t see this as a violation of free speech.
- Hm, even if a corporation wasn’t simply a group of people, it seems like cig ads are banned even if it’s a single person wanting to air one.
- The law being discussed is for minors. As a society we don't think minors have sufficient executive function to make those decisions, so we find it acceptable to ban them in those context.
- Alternatively: As a society we don't think ALL minors have sufficient executive function to make those decisions, so we let parents who do make that decision.
- > You can just not use things you don't like.
The entire point of talking about addiction (or even harmless things like FOMO, network effect, etc) is that this is not true.
- This societal view that you are a powerless NPC slave to ones desires/addictions is highly toxic. It is not in fact binary for most people and people do have free will to make different choices. To absolve the individual of accountability is to undermine the very fabric of society. The way individuals typically overcome addiction is through reliance on close family & friends. Those family & friends can "take the phone away" or "uninstall the app" if there is really an issue. Laws are a blunt instrument and should be used sparingly.
- I’m a Buddhist, so I really do see what you’re saying about personal responsibility and agency, but the other problem I see is that the companies at the forefront of these ultra-addictive industries (including mass social media) get busted eventually every single time for working overtime to hide what they knew about how damaging their products can be, and in fact to convince the public that their products do the opposite of what they actually do.
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.
- This is sparingly. The government basically let the tech industry run amok for 20 years and only acted when the problems it was causing were serious and undeniable.
- > only acted when the problems it was causing were serious and undeniable.
I wish we lived in the word you think we live in :(
In reality regulatory capture has infested nearly everything.
- > 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.
- "Some lawmaker" is democracy. The point is that people are pissed off about the addictive UX, same as cigarettes, and candy. If you want to make a serious argument, just argue that you should be able to opt out, which is an entirely reasonable position.
- Democracy is bound by the limits of the Constitution, outside of an amendment or a revolution. (Note that the latter is usually considered a Bad Thing; occasionally it works out for the better, but just as often for the worse.)
- the EU doesn't have a constitution
- It does, it's just not the US constitution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaties_of_the_European_Union
- Right, it has a set of treaties, not a unified constitution. And there have been a number of cases in which member state laws clashed with EU laws:
- Is CA in the US or the EU?
Didn’t think so, and we didn’t ask for your opinion
- > This is EU Cookies Banner level of state interference making UX worse for everyone
A couple of comments up in this thread.
- As many have said before:
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29529148it'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]- The EU Council are some of the worst offenders when it comes to annoying cookie banners. All regulation and compliance do is make things more burdensome for new entrants, which inevitably allows big companies to build moats that don't have competition. The side effect of passing such legislation was easily foreseeable and yet the EU did it anyway. There are legitimate reasons for companies to track and if you felt that the tracking was malicious, then don't do business with the company. The regulation was never needed.
- For one, compliance is compliance. For another, "You only need them if you're using them for something like tracking." yeah, sites want to track user behavior and the eu said if you want to do that you gotta have a banner. How is that "malicious"? Seems like the eu got exactly what they wanted?
- > and the eu said if you want to do that you gotta have a banner.
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).
- > for example having a small widget in the footer or elsewhere on my site
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.
- I can’t emphasise enough how much you are missing the point of the law! The law requires me to NOT track you unless I get specific, informed, consent.
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...
- I want to decline a websites ability to track my behavior and/or decline that they pass the data to another company. Most websites allow me to decline it. I prefer to have to opt in which is a minor inconvenience - then not having the option at all. Also the banners we got are deliberately bad and cumbersome so people just click on allow.
- When it came time for website owners to decide whether they (1) would remove unnecessary cookies, (2) receive consent from their users for extra cookies via reasonable banners, or (3) circumvent consent from their users for extra cookies via dark-patterned banners...
... 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.
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- Not only it's unnecessary, it also bad GUI. In apps with infinite scrolling your position doesn't get its own state, so if you eg. go view a post & return to Instagram timeline it opens at the beginning. If you use media more thoughtfully as opposed to mindless scrolling, it just doesn't work.
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
- They can randomize (with bias for hot/recent content) entries on each page, but paginate them. FOMO will keep people clicking next even once they recognize some entries.
- I doubt they would do that, it's just weird. But even still knowing how many pages you went through is already good
- then we pass a law to prevent randomization
- Yep. continue regulation until abuse stops
- Stateless infinite scroll is just lazy/incomplete implementation though - there’s no reason you can’t keep your place via permalink. Just pop the state into history using the uuid of each card as it shows in the viewport, then when the user returns using that url, drop them in at that point in the feed with some reasonable before/after preloaded.
- Sure. But thing is a bare competent pagination implementation gets this by default while with infinite scroll it requires extra effort
- > Infinite scroll is very obviously unnecessary
All the different flavors of yogurt in the grocery store are unnecessary. We only need 2.
- I mean, unironically, yeah. If you want flavor, just mix jam in your plain yogurt.
- Nobody has ever been guided down an extremist rabbit hole ending in a misogynist shooting because of yogurt. At least, not to my knowledge.
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.
- Yeah there were no shootings before the internet
- Just because we can’t eliminate all harms doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to minimize them.
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.
- Meta claims itself to be beneficial because of all the ads it sells in support of small businesses. We had ads and small businesses before the internet, too. The question that both Meta and anyone opposed to infinite scroll has to answer is: did this change anything?
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?
- This is a false equivalence. I don't use a product _because_ it's got an endless scroll. I use a product and then they add that "feature" without giving me an option. I would, and have, turned it off when possible. But it's not currently possible to do so on apps like Reddit.
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.
- Fortunately social media contains neither heroin nor nicotine. All clear!
- You seem incredibly sure about the health safety of a technology we've had for ~20 years and of which the daily usage has been steadily rising in that time. US kids average 5 hours/day on social media.
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?
- I wasn’t aware that there was a public health exemption to the first amendment, and I’m having trouble finding it. Can you show me where to find it?
- ony if you explain how infinite scroll is necessary for freedom of speech and of the press
- It doesn’t have to be necessary to be protected. 1A does not require that speech be “necessary”. Your rights are your rights.
- You still are missing the point which is: how does infinite scroll relate to freedom of speech? It just doesn't.
- How does choosing your book’s font and margins apply to freedom of speech? Why should you get to choose that as an author/publisher?
- > How does choosing your book’s font and margins apply to freedom of speech?
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.
- Tell me you’ve never done serious graphic design work without telling me
- Fonts are protected, you say? Then what if someone makes a font where every character is a different scene of child pornography? Would it be protected?
- should we check with you every time we want to do anything or...?
- The issue is that "Infinite Scroll" is just a manifestation of a deeper problem. You can't cure a problem by legislating away symptoms.
- > but the second someone articulates a very, very simple rule, the "well ackchyually" crew comes out of the woodwork.
On HN definitely, if half of the people here are really invested in that stuff themselves.
- > It is very obviously intended to keep people on an app longer than they would otherwise use it.
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
- "Exert some willpower!"
People exert willpower through the democratically elected legislature
"No not like that!"
- "Please politician, I'm a helpless carbon blob who cannot tear themselves away from the bad screen, pwease help me"*
- Is it? It appears consumers prefer it. Are they all wrong? Should we ignore the preferences of other people because you are the all-knowing lord of the internet?
Give me a break
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- As a leftist, I'd be really happy to see most CA legislators banned. Let's start with Gavin, and his pro-utility, anti-consumer CPUC.
Now that that problems solved, let's just ban meta, the twit-verse, and twerk-tik completely. The whole asocial media industry is just a giant waste of time and space.
One has to winder if the whole thing wasn't bootstrapped as a feed industry for the mental illness industry...
- I have similar contempt for these politicians and for the affected companies. But as a leftist, surely you must understand that these centrist wonks want this creeping regulation as a tool against you just as much as anyone. Being the idiots that they are, they blame their lack of control over social media for their continued losses, and not their absolute failure at governance. But they hate you just as much as (maybe more than) those on the right, as is clear any time a left-leaning candidate starts to gain ground politically.
- Instead of trying to whack a mole on all addictive mechanisms, just ban the business model driving all of them: targeted advertising.
- That would cause most, if not all, modern tech companies to go out of business (or massively downsize). I support it.
- Facebook really didn't like that apple made device IDs optional, it's strange that they quieted down about that. They must have found an alternative fingerprinting method.
- I believe it's why they went all-in on Metaverse/VR. They want to own the next platform so that could never happen to them again. IIRC, Zuck has stated the latter openly.
- Reminds me this is the same reason Valve went half-in on Linux. I guess this force can be used for good or evil.
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.
- I’m not sure that suffices. If a site has a very “good” (at keeping people glued to the screen) content ranking algorithm, they can still make money, albeit less, serving non-targeted ads. Longer engagement time by viewers = more ad impressions, targeted or not.
- "they can still make money, albeit less, serving non-targeted ads."
- 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...
- Presumably significantly less. But GP's point is that reducing advertising revenue doesn't remove the incentive to maximize engagement.
- In fact, it would almost certainly encourage them to keep you engaged even longer in an attempt to make up some of the money lost with the end of targeted advertising.
- Wouldn’t it lead to the opposite? You spending time on the platform earns them money because they’re gathering data for targeted ads, and showing you those ads. Non-targeted ads barely pay anything.
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.
- For typical social media sites, engagement will pretty much always be proportional to both revenue and cost per user. Either revenue > cost, and the site is incentivized to increase engagement, or revenue < cost and the site dies. There is no middle ground where a site gets a healthy revenue that's greater than its costs, but increasing engagement won't increase revenue. The exceptions are niche sites that do things like fixed subscriptions, or cost money to create content but not to consume it (but even in these cases, increasing engagement probably still increases the chance users start/continue to be paid customers).
- You assume that subscriptions wouldn’t become more common without targeted ads. It’s certainly possible.
(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.)
- So we should ban all ads, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269
- s/targeted //
- Infinite scroll/death of the page as model is one of the reasons we're at where we are. Plus iPhone, plus share button, and of course ads and data harvesting and siloed walls.
- I've heard a lot of negative talk about Californian politicians, but compared to how the discussion is going on in Norway about the same issue, this is great. It's very refreshing to see politicians actually understand the problem at hand instead of just throwing age checks at it.
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.
- The California solution to age verification was a really good alternative. Instead of actually verifying anything, it just asks you when you buy the device. Presumably adults buy devices for their kids, and by the time you're old enough to buy your own, you're old enough to be in the grey area where it doesn't really matter if you lie.
- These Estonian MEPs are at least suggesting general regulations rather than age limits.
https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-should-stand-up-to-bi...
- It should just be universally required to give an option to disable addictive features. Should prevent age verification, and giving users optionality is always a good thing (for them).
- How will you measure purely psychological addiction using a neutral process that can’t be easily captured by political interests?
That said, I like the idea of an option. Options are good!
- Clearly there is a fuzzy line of demarcation. I was thinking for a simple opt-out of any rec-sys
- While I’m uncomfortable with any legislation regarding the presentation of speech, in fact it’s definitely unconstitutional, this isn’t bad if you ignore the 1A issues. Hard to ignore that though
- Why do some Americans build their whole political and philosophical personality off of 1A maximalism? I'm an American, and it's a great principle. Freedom of speech deserves to be enshrined in the Constitution as a Good Thing, up there with the pursuit of happiness, freedom of the press, and all else. But this idea that nothing that ever even tangentially inconvenience's someone's (or some megacorporation's) expression is a legislative no-go, is a weirdly religious amount of conviction in an abstract principle. This principle, like every other in the Constitution, must carry finite weight.
- The amendment process is there for a reason. We must begin to use (and respect) it again, or fall as a country. That’s my take.
- Not an american but I would rather enshrine freedom of communication, and just explode the corporations I dont like because they suck.
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.
- This would be 100% constitutional. Corporations are a legal construct, the law gave them and the law can take them away.
- > Should prevent age verification
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.
- Yeah I meant it would avoid the necessity of age verification to solve this problem.
Age verification and how enthusiastic gov'ts are about it is concerning.
- I find the reply button to be pretty addictive
- Its the combination of infinite scroll and algorithmic curation of audiovisual media, that is addictive. Its equivalent to a TV channel tailored just for your interests, and TV was considered very addictive in the past.
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.
- Brainstorming here, hear me out: after 2 pages or 3 minutes of infinite scrolling the only content that shows up is various forms of goatse. We could make a browser extension for this.
- The problem with infinity scroll is the lack of "pagination", which essentialy make most of content to get hidden away. For instance. Let assume you have 3000 comments on a YouTube video, your browser will crash way before it "infinite scroll" to the end (I know that that are tools to bypass this, but I'm talking about the default experience).
- This is exactly why I force my kids to always create accounts as 30-years old (by specifying a birth data in the 90s), to avoid as much State interference as possible. Did you know that if your child has a "kid" account you cannot follow him on google maps? We had to make one for "adults" in order to be able to do so.
- Zood Location is pretty good. Open source, location data is end-to-end encrypted (encrypted to the keys of the people you are sharing with before it leaves your device).
- How about OwnTracks?
- its the same wrong answer again and again. how long will it take for lawmakers to realize that the best way to fight big tech is give people choice. infinite scroll, recommender systems, targeted ads, all the other "toxic" features should be optional with massive fines for anyone who tries to force people into using them (that includes making them inconvenient to turn off or charging for it).
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.
- I know this is about addictive social media feeds as a whole, but I'd like to think a law is being passed to "endanger", no, better outright ban infinite scrolling.
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...
- Headline makes it sound like that's a bad thing.
- it's based on age and I think that the age verification it would require is pretty universally reviled, at least here on HN
- I want it to be forbidden for anybody. They have stolen our attention for years
- How about you just petition for an option to chose. That way you get yours and I get mine. You don’t need to make that decision for me.
- Removing choice is generally a bad thing, IMO.
- it doesn't remove any choice for users. users don't get a choice on the offending sites currently. they only get infinite scroll. so the eventual infinite scroll replacement will be just that, the replacement.
on removing possible UI design choices for social media companies -- i have a very small violin on hand.
- Any discussion on this topic within hacker news is pretty silly. To much financial incentive to keep the status quo, and to many bots pushing narratives.
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.
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- Who are you people glazing this functionality? The term doom scrolling came about, in large part, because of infinite scrolling. I have never, in nearly two decades of smart phones being everywhere, met someone who liked infinite scrolling enough to say so. People _use_ these things, sure, but that's because they're addictive and ubiquitous and not because they materially improve someone's life.
- We had a choice when there were alternative clients for all major platforms. Make open APIs mandatory for large platforms and a lot of problems will disappear. UIs will be designed for the best user experience again instead of maximizing engagement. It will hurt their revenue but so be it.
- > they only get infinite scroll
(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.)
- Come on now you can't leave us hanging. What is this sorcery you speak of? Is this simply a feature Meta's been A/B testing or does this require opening your browser's developer tools?
- i originally wrote users from the wider public or something but then decided to edit the comment down. fair point i suppose for the ~1% of users of these sites that are super tech nerds
- > super tech nerds
"Resourceful"?
- What choice? When did I ever choose infinite scroll?
- You never had an option to have Google show a list of curated links or Yahoo show a simple search bar. You chose to go to the site you liked better and in aggregate the market chose the simple search. I could still be going to Slashdot or Things You Wouldn't Know Unless We Blogged It, but I and the content creators found that we preferred infinite scroll instead.
- You could say the same thing about nutritional facts being printed on foods. The entire point is externalities that favor the company. These things are never going to be on products unless they are regulated. If you're going to make an argument for "choice" at least argue for opt out rather than "fuck it, let them put trans fats in the food and if you don't like it eat broccoli."
- Too late, we now exclusively stock NicoSugar broccoli in the stores. I mean, I guess we chose it? It's not the market's fault that the human brain likes sugar and nicotine.
- That seems like cute libertarian nonsense. The key word is choice. People have less free will than you think. Every time a teen goes to insta/facebook/tiktok etc they are an individual up against a huge corporation of thousands of people and ML whose job it is to hijack their dopamine circuit. Usage of these apps decreases attention span which effectively means other activities become boring so the users experience a withdrawal symptom like a drug addict.
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.
- "First they came for the infinite scroll, but I did not speak out - because my mind was numb from the infinite scrolling."
- I think the most frustrating thing for me is when a website has infinite scroll, but also a footer with links that you want to access. I end up going to the dev tools to look at the code.
- Thank God. We need more legislation against the cognitive poisoning of two generations.
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- I'm well acquainted with "Everything Bad Is Good For You" -- this is not the same.
- Both of those are already dead.
- r/whoosh...
- The article isn't making moralistic grandstanding illegal so I don't know how you got to cognitive poisoning.
- The source of the disease isn't moralistic grandstanding -- it's the lack of empathy and biblical greed behind the machine.
- note that this is going after "psychologically exploitative features intended to maximize engagement" of all kinds, not just infinite feeds. it also poses an ultimatum banning people under 16 from websites that provide such addictive features to anyone.
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.
- same as alcohol, we've decided adults are fair prey
- Adults are supposed to have acquired enough life experience to make more reasonable decisions than children.
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.
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- As somebody with not-enough self control, I would love this for myself. Self-locks help, but the temptation is always there.
- It was a good UX in FriendFeed as it was still a chronological feed. However once it was mixed with algorithmic feed it shifted from better UX to keep em' hooked.
- This seems like an arms race that will be very hard for the state to win, meta is prepared to spend billions throwing engineers phds and compute at making the most addicting platform possible within the bounds set by the law, while this kind of law would make it hard for small entrants into the market, I’m not against trying to do things that are reasonable to prevent addictive behavior, but I hope these rules are gated on size somehow so that indie developers and random websites don’t get caught in the dragnet of needing to comply, like what happened with the UK moderation bill.
- This is exactly what will happen, Meta will just add a “next page” thing after 100 items that does a cool animation when you click it and the feed will continue as usual. Meanwhile we’ll start stacking up similar bills everywhere else and small operators will close down when they start getting worried about keeping up with 50 states worth of different regulations.
Goal achieved: media centralized.
- I'm trying to think of a small operator that absolutely needs inifinite scroll on their site for their product to "work" and nothing comes to mind.
- This is irrelevant. It’s a question of rights and of creeping unconstitutional “regulation” that will begin to infect all aspects of software development and online publishing. The line has to be defended here.
- What exactly is unconstitutional about regulating infinite scroll? Did your founding fathers fight for indipendence from GDPR?
- Regulating the format and presentation of displayed information, on some kind of online publication, is almost certainly regulation of speech. 1A violation.
- It's as much of a 1A violation as regulating that you can't preach the gospel with a megaphone in the middle of Times Square.
- Times Square is a physical place with limited space. It has multiple uses and the road or sidewalk you’re standing on is a publicly owned thoroughfare. Your megaphone might damage the hearing of non-audience passerby if you have it turned up really loud.
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.
- Is it illegal to preach with a megaphone in Times Square? I actually don't know.
- Apparently NYC requires an inexpensive permit, this approach is sometimes allowed to balance competing uses.
- What would be the alternative though?
- Follow the constitution, and don’t attempt to regulate the presentation of protected speech. Maybe go after targeted ads or something.
- The presentation of speech is regulated in many ways already. The idea that any type of regulation on speech whatsoever is unconstitutional is false. Also, how is a hypothetical regulation on infinite scroll unconstitutional, but “go after targeted ads” isn’t?
- Targeted ads involve a complex system of transactions behind the scenes. It may be possible to regulate these under the Commerce Clause. Worth a shot.
In any case this is much more likely to succeed than regulation of speech. Contrary to what you’ve just said, presentation of speech is not heavily regulated, especially for privately owned venues.
- That would be amazing.
Ubiquitous infinite scroll is one of the things I hate most about "modern" UI design.
- I (personally) think this is the wrong kind of solution.
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.
- I think Tristan from The Social Dilemma documentary - his co-founder's dad - was the one who invented the infinite scroll and he deeply regretted it.
- > people will just ask AI how to create an infinite scroll that complies with CA law
and the technology marches onward
- Whack-a-mole lawmaking solves nothing. All this law does is ask social media companies to find another way for their platform to be addictive to children.
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.
- Or just stop social media below a certain age and enact that policy for older adults.
The tech giants have flown to close to the sun, real people are pissed.
- It's stupid laws like this that continue to drive innovation out of California.
- Oh, I might be able to use bookmarks again?
I know I spend more time on Reddit than I should, so... Oh well.
- There is no way to enforce any of these types of laws without an iron curtain that clearly violates the first amendment. If you have free speech infront of children in public I don't see how having infinite scroll on your website or app is any different. Parents should parent their children instead of the state. Its crazy how avoident California is of solving actually important problems like homelessness, mental health resources, housing crisis, yet infinite scrolling somehow is a priority.
- I didn't realize that putting labels on cigarette packs made the country literally East Germany (the original iron curtain).
- Pretty sure most parents care about their kids more than nearly any other issue you mention. Social media excess has pushed to far and become less well liked than lawyers at this point. Thats only going to end one way.
- Parents certainly care about all the things I mentioned, it even impacts their kids. This approach to safeguard kids online is completely impractical and utterly unenforceable and seems like a total waste of time.
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- > If you have free speech in front of children in public I don't see how having infinite scroll on your website or app is any different.
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.
- why are we making laws about how scrolling works this is crazy
- because it's a problem
but it's not the actual problem, but it's a part of the problem, and it's also something really easy to identify.
- tumblr still has pages and it has never impeded me
on the contrary, infinite scrolls are impossible to get back to after some time away and eventually start lagging
- I'm no fan of the government trying to regulate such things, but I won't shed any tears if infinite scroll is forced to go away. It's one of the things I hate the most about the so-called "modern" web.
- Guitar Hero is an infinite scroll of notes coming at you. Will that game be allowed in the dystopia?
- The notes end when the song does, then you can start another song or stop playing. Do you ever run out of posts when scrolling?
- Oh no. First the Europeans took away Lightning connectors and now this.
- What's European about a Californian law?
- Sometimes the jokes just don't land.
- Watch if there's a carve-out for business apps, or it only applies to consumer apps. Then watch as your enterprise apps adopt infinite-scroll sidebars of "useful" stuff...
- best solution would be to serve paginated by default but you can change page size in the settings or even enable infinite. whoever really wants infinite can use it, it's just not forced on everyone. sated wolves, intact sheep
- Worries about particulars like infinite scroll miss the point: fundamentally, the advertising business model is a market distorting one that companies use to provide goods and services below cost. It is paid advertising that should be banned. Doing so would eliminate the incentive to create addictive products in the first place since increased usage would no longer drive increased revenue.
- If advertising was banned I suspect the entire capitalism would collapse.
- Alternatively, products would be cheaper as we'd legislate away defection in that particular instance of the prisoners dilemma.
- There would be less products. Severely less. All drinks would be made by Coke, all potato chips would be made by Pepsi (who owns Lays). They would be much cheaper (or more profitable), and there would be no opportunity for competition ever again. Everyone who works for a company other than the above would be laid off because their company couldn't sell enough product to remain in business.
- Old people who think that the "scrolling" part of Doom Scrolling is literal. Ugh, I'm sorry for California.
- Is infinite scroll really the problem or is it really the whole malicious toolbox and intention of "maximizing engagement"?
- I agree, I don't think an "infinite refresh" like if YouTube had a limited homepage and changed on each refresh, would be much better. But infinite scroll is likely the most addictive.
- Regulate the business model, not the interface.
- This will accomplish nothing.
- I’m going to be honest, this kind of regulation would make me disable the site(s) for the state (if there are fines, etc). I don’t have the time to play these games for my tiny projects
- Don't most people have AI agent that consumes the infinite scroll and then presents a custom summarization? I don't see how this ban is a good idea.
- If you don't have an agent swarm that's already trained to re-scroll all the unscrolled feeds and translate them to binaural beats during your micronaps you're ngmi
- No, they do not.
- Everyone clutching their pearls over this bill should take note that this is already the massively watered-down version. The precedent from other countries was a blanket ban of everyone below 16. That was reduced to "well, don't use those specific UI elements and we're fine".
- Related:
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.
- It is amusing we pass laws to fix bad UX. But if it works, can't argue with it. I would like a law against unwanted popovers now please.
- I honestly think that this may have some benefit as the infinite scroll has made our attention spans incredibly short. Although, I'm sure people will find there way around it.
- misses the mark, it's not about the functionality it's about the algorithm populating it
- Oh my god yes, kill it, please.
- I hate infinite scroll. Also how do you really prohibit a software feature? Seriously..
- State-approved UI components lmao
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- In principle, do you support uniform packaging with warnings for cigarettes? Do you support ban on selling flavored cigarettes/vapes to children?
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- Let's bring back child labor and asbestos and leaded gasoline and banks discriminating against women and all manner of businesses discriminating against Blacks, because banning those was terrible and should never have been done.
Banning anything is always bad. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
- Fantastic, I’m a big fan of all of these. (Heavily invested in a promising child labor startup.)
- Good
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- Infinite scroll is a real drug
- Good riddance
- Endangered? This is great news! It's one of the things that make social media a drug.
- Good riddance
- Adults like me need these protections too.
- The law should force social media to be subscription-only.
- Legislators, please require 10 seconds of load screen with a picture of a tree, for every online video. It worked for cigarette packs.
- Why only focus on youngsters? Many of the older generations that I see online seem to have been impacted massively by social media in a negative way. Yes in theory adults should have freedom to choose, but when your app is the digital version of crack cocaine I think there should be some rules.
216 points by Stratoscope 1 day ago | 415 comments