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The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

politico.eu

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Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#61

Post by happytoexplain »

tokyobreakfast wrote: post #39
poncho_romero wrote: post #25

I hope this goes through. Trillion dollar companies are waging a war on our attention, using everything at their disposal to make these apps addictive. It isn't a fair fight and the existence of infinite feeds is bad both for people and democracy. Regulating consumer products that cause harm to millions is nothing new.

> Trillion dollar companies are waging a war on our attention, using everything at their disposal to make these apps addictive. Or you could just shut the phone off and/or not install the app. It's a simple solution, really, and one that is available at your disposal today at no cost.

"Just" is the all time champion weight lifter of the English language.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#64

Post by jjcm »

Here's the actual statement from the European Comission: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_...

It's important to note they aren't creating laws against infinite scrolling, but are ruling against addictive design and pointing to infinite scrolling as an example of it. The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes". They point to certain features they'd like them to change, but there is no specific ruling around what you can/can't do.

My initial reaction was that this was a terrible precedent, but after thinking on it more I asked myself, "well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?". Everything I thought of would have some way or workaround that could be found, and equally would have terrible consequences on situations where this is actually quite valuable. IE if you disallow infinite scrolling, what page sizes are allowed? Can I just have a page of 10,000 elements that lazy load?

Regardless of your take around whether this is EU overreach, I'm glad they're not implementing strict laws around what you can/can't do - there are valuable situations for these UI patterns, even if in combination they can create addictive experiences. Still, I do think that overregulation here will lead to services being fractured. I was writing about this earlier this morning (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47005367), but the regulated friction of major platforms (ie discord w/ ID laws) is on a collision course with the ease of vibe coding up your own. When that happens, these comissions are going to need to think long and hard around having a few large companies to watch over is better than millions of small micro-niche ones.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#65

Post by baq »

tokyobreakfast wrote: post #39
poncho_romero wrote: post #25

I hope this goes through. Trillion dollar companies are waging a war on our attention, using everything at their disposal to make these apps addictive. It isn't a fair fight and the existence of infinite feeds is bad both for people and democracy. Regulating consumer products that cause harm to millions is nothing new.

> Trillion dollar companies are waging a war on our attention, using everything at their disposal to make these apps addictive. Or you could just shut the phone off and/or not install the app. It's a simple solution, really, and one that is available at your disposal today at no cost.

Engineering addiction should be a punishable offense. It already is if you’re a chemist.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#66

Post by mytailorisrich »

linuxdude314 wrote: post #7

[flagged]

We have great freedoms in Europe. We just need to apply in advance with our detailed plan, in three copies and the Commission will decide whether to deny our application or to deny it and fine us for unhealthy thoughts, too.

Sarcasm now, but maybe what the near future will look like...

More to the point: this is indeed a massive overreach with the Commission being the police, judge, jury, and executioner... what could go wrong? Exactly what we are seeing is taking shape, precedent by precedent.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#67

Post by manuelmoreale »

tokyobreakfast wrote: post #39
poncho_romero wrote: post #25

I hope this goes through. Trillion dollar companies are waging a war on our attention, using everything at their disposal to make these apps addictive. It isn't a fair fight and the existence of infinite feeds is bad both for people and democracy. Regulating consumer products that cause harm to millions is nothing new.

> Trillion dollar companies are waging a war on our attention, using everything at their disposal to make these apps addictive. Or you could just shut the phone off and/or not install the app. It's a simple solution, really, and one that is available at your disposal today at no cost.

You could say that about literally every single type of addictive behavior present on the face of the planet. You could just stop smoking and/or not buying cigarettes. You could just stop drinking and/or stop buying alcohol. It's a completely pointless observation. There's a reason why these are addictions.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#68

Post by shadowgovt »

stephenr wrote: post #33
rpdillon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked at multiple companies and talked to multiple legal teams about this, they tend to be very conservative. So the guidance I've gotten is that if we store any information at all on the person's computer, even to know whether they've visited the site before, we still need a cookie banner. Basically, the law created enough fear among the lawyers that software developers are being advised to include the cooki…

> even to know whether they've visited the site before So uh, don't do that. You don't need to notify if you use cookies for required functionality like login sessions or remembering a functional setting. If you're tracking whether they're returning or not your activity is exactly the kind of behaviour the rule is covering because, in legal terms, it's skeezy as fuck.

> You don't need to notify if you use cookies for required functionality like login sessions or remembering a functional setting

Nobody wants to be the EU test case on precisely how "required functionality" is defined. Regardless of what the plaintext of the law says, it should be self-evident that companies will be more conservative than that, especially when the cost is as low as adding one cooke banner and tracking one preference.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#70

Post by ben_w »

woodpanel wrote: post #36
poncho_romero wrote: post #25

I hope this goes through. Trillion dollar companies are waging a war on our attention, using everything at their disposal to make these apps addictive. It isn't a fair fight and the existence of infinite feeds is bad both for people and democracy. Regulating consumer products that cause harm to millions is nothing new.

[flagged]

I imagine there was a similar argument a century ago about how if alcohol kills your marriage, it wasn't a very strong marriage.

I wonder if we'll get speakeasies where people can get endogenous dopamine kicks from experiencing dark patterns?

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