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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

#501

Post by terminalshort »

coldtea wrote: post #258
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.

Easy: free speech was never meant for and fought for advertising. Any judicial body who says otherwise is bullshiting people. Conflating advertising with free speech is like conflating sex work with reproductive rights.

A restriction on prostitution is absolutely a restriction on reproductive rights, but there is no such right in the constitution.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#502

Post by terminalshort »

layer8 wrote: post #199
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.

It would be worth a try to outlaw compensation for advertising. The spirit of free speech is usually that you aren’t being paid for it.

The spirit of free speech is that I can say whatever I damn well please for any purpose that suits me including that someone paid me to.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#503

Post by kaibee »

terminalshort wrote: post #491
phire wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you can get most of the benefit by just banning targeted advertising. Require that every user must be shown the exact same ads (probabilistically). Don't allow any kind of interest or demographic based targeting for paid content. Advertisers would still be able to place Ads on pages they know there target audience goes, but wouldn't be able to make those same Ads follow that target audience around the interne…

How will they know where their target audience goes if there is no tracking?

Use 0.01% of brain power? How is it that Fox News always has the buy/sell gold ads? Hyper-segmenting society into advertising bubbles is about the same as if you hyper-segmented your body into cell clumps. You need unintentional cross-pollination, otherwise there is no more society.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#505

Post by kaibee »

mrtksn wrote: post #480
NeutralCrane wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe low traction is a good thing. We don’t need social media to be an all consuming addictive mega platform.

I could have agreed if the high traction ones that do all the bad things didn’t exist.

We've come full circle to banning advertising. It seems like we have good reason to believe that people will create the infrastructure for the communities that they _want_ to exist and fund them. So just banning advertising will probably be fine. Worst case scenario, we gradually loosen the ban. The advertising hellscape will grow back immediately, nothing of value will be lost.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#506

Post by kaibee »

andsoitis wrote: post #477
foxygen wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moving the goalposts much? Of course there aren't any free services serving millions currently, how could they, when Facebook/X spends millions to make sure everyone stays on their platform? Which non tech savvy would want to move to a platform without all their friends? That's the gotcha with social networks, once you grow big enough, it is really hard for people to move off of it. Still, funny how you ignored IRCs/…

> Still, funny how you ignored IRCs/forums that I mentioned. Those were used by MANY people, and could scale infinitely. At its peak (late 1990s to early 2000s), IRC was estimated to have about 3–4 million concurrent users worldwide at any given moment, with tens of millions of total users over time. Pales in comparison with the scale that’s needed today, given the number of people, variety of media, and bandwidth re…

Storage/compute/etc were orders of magnitude more expensive at the time, so the fact that it was 3-4 million is uh, pretty impressive? You could host a Matrix server for your 1,000 closest friends for basically no money.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#507

Post by kerkeslager »

bruce511 wrote: post #439
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…

Define "advertising". I feel this might be hard to do. For example is my blog talking about Windows considered as Advertising? What about my blog discussing products we make? What about the web site for my local restaurant? If I add my restaurant location to Google maps, is that advertising? Are review sites? If I'm an aggregator (like booking.com) and I display the results for a search is that advertising? I assume…

Let's drop the charade where you pretend you don't know what advertising is. You're smarter than that, and your playing dumb act would be more persuasive if you didn't ask leading questions that clearly show you know the answers. This isn't a good faith argument.

I mean are you really asking whether creators embedding "sponsored by" scenes is an ad as if you don't know? C'mon, don't insult your readers with this nonsense.

HN commenters are not legislators, and even if random HN commenters can't draft legislation, that doesn't mean that a minimally-funded team of experts would have any difficulty with the problem.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#508

Post by seydor »

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 is vague enough so they canm milk american/chinese companies for fines in a few months. EU being sad again

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#509

Post by reddalo »

bruce511 wrote: post #439
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…

Define "advertising". I feel this might be hard to do. For example is my blog talking about Windows considered as Advertising? What about my blog discussing products we make? What about the web site for my local restaurant? If I add my restaurant location to Google maps, is that advertising? Are review sites? If I'm an aggregator (like booking.com) and I display the results for a search is that advertising? I assume…

What about just banning personalized advertising? Like: you can pay Google Maps to show your result as sponsored, but Google can only show it to either everybody or randomized people.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#510

Post by reddalo »

nozzlegear wrote: post #99
mcny wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to have a cookie popup if you don't do stupid stuff. Don't use anything other than strictly necessary cookies and you are good to go. Disclaimer: I anal and this is not legal advice.

Don't several of the EU's own government information websites use cookie popups?

Yes; but usually it's because they embed videos from YouTube or other external sources that force cookies to be set.
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