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The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

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Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#291

Post by buzzerbetrayed »

kuerbel wrote: post #87
PlatoIsADisease wrote: post #21

I have a proud European coworker trying to get their H1B... They talk about how great Europe is, how they like their 1-2 hour coffee/smoke breaks... These kind of moves give me that same vibe. But why are so many Europeans trying to move to the US? Why isn't the opposite happening? My hypothesis is that these kind of popular policies are short sighted. They are super popular, they use intuition and feeling. But maybe…

Well, your freeeeedooooms include having to pay taxes when living outside of the US. I'd say that's a pretty big factor in deciding if it's worth it to leave the country.

Jobs in the EU don’t even pay enough to require paying taxes in the US lol. Nice try though.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#292

Post by kaycey2022 »

Funes- wrote: post #158
jjcm wrote: post #64

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 feat…

>"well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?" Hear me out: banning advertising on the Internet. It's the only way. It's the primordial domino tile. You knock that one over, every other tile follows suit. It's the mother of chain reactions. There would be no social media, no Internet as we know it. Imagine having TikTok, YouTube or X trying to survive on subscriptions alone in their current iter…

If you want to ban something, then ban free social media. There has to be a minimum charge like 100$ or something a month (keep it tax free for all I care), to access any social media service with more than a 1000 members.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#293

Post by forgetfreeman »

ahallock wrote: post #240
gchamonlive wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Infrastructure costs money. There's no way around it. I'm all up for banning ads. But there should be another viable business model to replace it.

Banning ads? That's just so authoritarian and absurd. I hope you never become king

Tell that to the tobacco industry yeah?

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#294

Post by MBCook »

yallpendantools wrote: post #213
Funes- wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?" Hear me out: banning advertising on the Internet. It's the only way. It's the primordial domino tile. You knock that one over, every other tile follows suit. It's the mother of chain reactions. There would be no social media, no Internet as we know it. Imagine having TikTok, YouTube or X trying to survive on subscriptions alone in their current iter…

Ads per se are not evil. The motherfucker we'd want to shoot, however, is targeted advertising and especially those that rely on harvested user data. In a sense, I'm just agreeing with a fellow comment in the vicinity of this thread that said GDPR is already the EU's shot at banning (targeted) ads---it's just implemented piss-poorly. Personally formulated, my sentiment is that GDPR as it stands today is a step in the…

I’ve never figured out what I think advertising should be. I currently do basically everything I can to get rid of it in my life.

I’m totally fine with outlining targeted advertising. But even classic broadcast stuff poses the dilemma for me.

I have absolutely noticed I miss out some. As an easy example I don’t tend to know about new TV shows or movies that I might like the way I used to. There’s never that serendipity where you were watching the show and all of a sudden a trailer from a movie comes on and you say “What is THAT? I’ve got to see that.”

Maybe some restaurant I like is moving into the area. Maybe some product I used to like is now back on the market. It really can be useful.

Sure the information is still out there and I could seek it out, but I don’t.

On the other hand I do not miss being assaulted with pharmaceutical ads, scam products, junk food ads, whatever the latest McDonald’s toy is, my local car dealerships yelling at me, and so much other trash.

I’ve never figured out how someone could draw a line to allow the useful parts of advertising without the bad parts.

“You’re only allowed to show a picture of your product, say its name, and a five word description of what it’s for”.

Nothing like that is gonna be workable.

Such a hard problem.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#295

Post by skissane »

nickff wrote: post #241
skissane wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free speech is a thing in the EU too. To become a member of the EU, you have to first join the Council of Europe and its European Convention on Human Rights – article 10 of which guarantees the right to free expression. The EU also has its own Charter of Fundamental Rights which says the same thing. And the plan is for the EU to become a party to the Convention in its own right, although that's got bogged down in tec…

https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/human-rights/human-right... > "Article 10 of the Human Rights Act: Freedom of expression 1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broad…

> Seems to be about as strong as the Soviet Constitution's protections:

In the 2015 case Perinçek v. Switzerland, the European Court of Human Rights applied Article 10 to find against a Swiss law making it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide. Can you imagine a Soviet court ever striking down a genocide denial law?

The decision is controversial because it introduces a double standard into the Court's case law – it had previously upheld laws criminalising Holocaust denial, now it sought to distinguish the Holocaust from the Armenian genocide in a way many find arbitrary and distasteful – the consistent thing would be to either allow denying both or disallow denying both.

But still, it just shows how mistaken your Soviet comparison is.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#296

Post by forgetfreeman »

lobf wrote: post #285
coldtea wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have we come to such a low cultural point that ads are seen as some kind of basic human right? Fuck ads. What's absurd is tolerating them and the damage they do to media, consumers, kids, lesser and/or more honest businesses, culture, products, and so on all the way to the Windows and macOS system UIs.

I work in ads... :-/

Work in something else. I make significantly more doing poison ivy removal than I ever did or was ever going to working in tech.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#297

Post by AnthonyMouse »

coldtea wrote: post #270
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose a company wants to write some product documentation so customers and prospective customers know what features their product has and how to use them. They hire someone to write the documentation and then someone else to distribute it. Is there a good way to distinguish this from advertising? The most plausible way would be if the one you're paying to distribute it has some kind of exclusive control or market p…

> Suppose a company wants to write some product documentation so customers and prospective customers know what features their product has and how to use them. They hire someone to write the documentation and then someone else to distribute it. Is there a good way to distinguish this from advertising? Yes. You self host it as a company, and it can only be reproduced (if they wish) in outlets (say review sites) when th…

It's a corporation though. It can't do anything without paying someone to do it, unless someone volunteers to do it for free, which isn't very likely. And how do you self-host distribution? You would have to run your own fiber to every customer's house or spin up your own postal service or you're paying someone to do that.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#298

Post by nickff »

coldtea wrote: post #260
nickff wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could one not categorize material published in a book, magazine, or on television as 'commercial speech', liable to restrictive licensing and censorship? This seems like a slippery slope which the USA is on the correct side of.

Commercial speech is not the same as advertising. The product is the same as the speech, whereas in advertising the speech is in sycophantic service of another product.

I agree that commercial speech is not the same as advertising, but the comment I replied to was talking about restricting commercial speech, not advertising.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#299

Post by forgetfreeman »

gchamonlive wrote: post #268
recursive wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Serious question. The internet was a mistake.

How can your question be serious if you already decided the internet was a mistake? I don't think it was. Far from it.

What part of an endless sea of SEO spam, AI slop, malware, polarized astroturf, and addictive-by-design walled gardens strikes you as the win? Seriously, where is the win?
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