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The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

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Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#311

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #191
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…

"The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes"." Wikitionary (2026) Noun vibe (plural vibes) 1. (informal, originally New Age jargon, often in the plural) An atmosphere or aura felt to belong to a person, place or thing. [c. 1960s]

s/Wikit/Wikt

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#312

Post by BrenBarn »

whackernews wrote: post #229
BrenBarn wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say the first amendment is due for an overhaul anyway for a variety of reasons. (Heck, the whole constitution is.)

Which parts specifically?

Obvious examples of negative consequences of the first amendment include the profusion of false and misleading advertising, the scourge of political campaign spending, and the disastrous firehouse of misinformation being pushed out in various online forums. The idea that an abstract carte blanche for free speech outweighs those real and present ills is misguided. At the same time, we see that the limitation to only protection from government action enables effective quelling of speech by private actors.

At the core of the first amendment is the idea that people should not be punished for criticizing their government. I think that idea is worth preserving. But the idea that people are free to say anything they choose, in any context, regardless of its factual status, and also that their permission to do so is limited only by the resources they can muster to promulgate their speech, is an unwarranted extension of that concept.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#313

Post by lich_king »

gchamonlive wrote: post #225
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…

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.

I think that's revisionism. Social media existed before online advertising. Usenet was quite massive and vibrant, countless IRC servers were maintained by volunteers, web-based forums covered pretty much the same ground as Reddit does today. All supported by the goodwill of individuals, non-profits, and businesses such as ISPs that actively wanted the internet to be interesting because they were making money by selling access to it.

The thing that changed in the mid-2000s was that we found ways to not only provide these services, but extract billions of dollars while doing it. Good for Mark Zuckerberg, but I doubt the internet would be hurting without that.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#314

Post by tforcram »

tomnipotent wrote: post #279
coldtea wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 2026. We can have word of mouth, genuine, in forums and social media. We can have reviews, genuine, in websites. We can have websites which present new products and business, not as paid sponsorships. We can search on our own initiative and go to their website. We can have online catalogs. And tons of other ways.

And not a single one of these is tenable, even when combined. How do the people that post reviews, or spread something over word-of-mouth, discover the thing in the first place? Try your hand at starting a business and trying to sell goods or services using these methods and see how well it works.

Tenable for what, global business? Many local businesses do fine without advertising and/or using these methods.

Making global business harder and forcing things more local actually sounds like a great benefit.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#315

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

forgetfreeman wrote: post #299
gchamonlive wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Honestly, some of the shit with ClawdBot^W MoltBot^W OpenClaw and molt.church and molt.book has been some quality entertainment, enabled largely by the Internet. And it's AI slop but that only seems to matter when one of them gets miffed about its PR being rejected and posts an unhinged blog post about the maintainer who rejected said PR. And in a "comedy equals tragedy plus time" way, it's pretty easy to laugh at that, too.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#316

Post by coldtea »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #284
coldtea wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the parent is getting at is it's not a mystery, such definitions already exist in all kinds of jurisdictions. In any case it's trivial to come up with such a definition that covers most cases. Doesn't matter if it doesn't cover some gray areas or 100% of it. Laws can be supplemented and ammended. We don't have an all-encompassing definition of porn either, but we have legal definitions, and we have legal framewo…

> Doesn't matter if it doesn't cover some gray areas or 100% of it. That's exactly the thing that matters when you're dealing with something where every loophole is going to have a caravan of trucks driving through it. > We don't have an all-encompassing definition of porn either, but we have legal definitions, and we have legal frameworks regarding it. You're picking the thing which is a hopeless disaster as your ex…

>That's exactly the thing that matters when you're dealing with something where every loophole is going to have a caravan of trucks driving through it.

Everything with profit "is going to have a caravan of trucks driving through it". He have laws anyway for those things, and for the most part, they're effective. I'd take a relative improvement even if it's not 100% over free reign.

>You're picking the thing which is a hopeless disaster as your exemplar?

I don't consider it a "hopeless disaster" (except in it's effects on society). As a business it's regulated, and for the most part, stays and follows within those regulations. The existence of dark illegal versions of it, or exploitation in the industry, doesn't negate this.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#317

Post by coldtea »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #297
coldtea wrote: post #270

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? 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.

>And how do you self-host distribution?

You have your own website and your copy on it. Don't start that "but if you pay some hosting provider to host that website that would be advertising", or the

"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."

that borders on being obtuse on purpose.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#318

Post by coldtea »

tomnipotent wrote: post #279
coldtea wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 2026. We can have word of mouth, genuine, in forums and social media. We can have reviews, genuine, in websites. We can have websites which present new products and business, not as paid sponsorships. We can search on our own initiative and go to their website. We can have online catalogs. And tons of other ways.

And not a single one of these is tenable, even when combined. How do the people that post reviews, or spread something over word-of-mouth, discover the thing in the first place? Try your hand at starting a business and trying to sell goods or services using these methods and see how well it works.

>How do the people that post reviews, or spread something over word-of-mouth, discover the thing in the first place?

The follow industry conventions, visit registries of industry websites, have professional lists where companies submit their announcements (and not to the general public) and so on.

>Try your hand at starting a business and trying to sell goods or services using these methods and see how well it works.

If advertising is banned, it will work just as good as for any competitor.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#319

Post by tzs »

joe_mamba wrote: post #113
tzs wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That only worked though because Romania is using a voting method for President that is completely terrible for countries that have several viable political parties. They use a two-round system to elect their President that works like this: 1. If a candidates gets more than 50% in the first round they are the winner, and there is no second round. 2. If there is no clear winner in the first round, the top two from the…

>That only worked though because Romania is using a voting method for President that is completely terrible for countries that have several viable political parties. [...] They really need to be using something like ranked choice. Firstly, there's many forms of elections, each with their own pros and cons, but I don't think the voting method is the core problem here. Let's assume Norway would have the exact same syst…

> Let's assume Norway would have the exact same system and parties like Romania. Do you think Norwegians would have been swayed by a an online ad campaign to vote a Russian puppet off tiktok to the last round?

> Maybe the education level, standard of living of the population and being a high trust society, is actually what filters malicious candidates, and not some magic election method.

My point isn't about filtering malicious candidates. My point is that a "top two advance to runoff if no one wins the first round" system often does a poor job in the face of a plethora of candidates of picking a winner with majority support.

Yes, there are many forms of elections each with their own pros and cons, and that is one of the main cons of that system (and of one round systems where the winner is whoever gets the most votes even if it is not a majority).

Consider an election with 11 candidates and where there is one particular issue X that 80% of the voters go one way on and 20% the other way. The voters will only vote for a candidate that goes their way on X. 9 of the candidates go the same was as 80% of the voters, and the other 2 go the other way. All the candidates differ on many non-X issues but voters don't feel strongly on those. They will pick a candidate that agrees with them on as many of those as they can, but would be OK with a winner that disagrees with them on the non-X issues as long as they agree on X. This results in the vote being pretty evenly split among the candidates that agree on X.

The 9 candidates that agree with the 80% that go one way on X then end up with about 8.9% of the vote each, and the 2 that go the other way end with 10% each. Those two make it to the runoff and wins.

Result: a winner that would lose 80-20 in a head to head matchup against any of the 9 who were eliminated in the first round.

Note I didn't say that the 2 on the 20% side of issue X were malicious. They just held a position on that issue the 80% disagree with.

Such a system is also more vulnerable to manipulation like what happened with TikTok in Romania, because with a large field of candidates with roughly similar positions you might not need to persuade a large number of people to vote for an extreme candidate to get that candidate into the runoff.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#320

Post by nxm »

skissane wrote: post #232
thesmtsolver2 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How will you ban that without infringing on free speech. That is a thing in the US and a lot of countries outside the EU.

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…

“Free speech” and yet people are arrested for mean memes
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