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EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA
141–150 of 204 posts
Re: EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many, including me, don't see e.g. personal privacy and freedom as the same case as regulating commercial activities. In fact, large business interests are well capable of authoritarian power themselves.
I mean that's probably the most European take I've ever heard the government should be able to read all your messages and companies shouldn't be able to blink more than 3 times a second.
This is not about government reading messages, it's about how large social media companies present content. The European part probably is that these two things are not seen as the same thing. Corporations and individuals don't enjoy the same rights and freedoms in this mindset.
Re: EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many, including me, don't see e.g. personal privacy and freedom as the same case as regulating commercial activities. In fact, large business interests are well capable of authoritarian power themselves.
When you grant the government more control over the world to supposedly “protect” you, unfortunately those powers aren’t always wielded by people you would have voted for. But this is often fine if there’s real harm there. Eliminating the harm often outweighs the risk of centralized abuse of power. But when the harms you’re supposedly protecting against aren’t actually real (the social media hysteria is a classic mor…
The government is an institution protecting us from commercial interests. The government also protects against e.g. abject poverty and dying of easily treatable medical conditions. And also upholds e.g. property rights, which you probably hold absolutely necessary.
Society works on balance of power. The government is part of that balance. Ideally the government serves the interests of people, that's the democracy part. In practice that's far from perfect, but it's still not some absolute evil constantly repressing us.
Re: EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
No one buying shit anymore. People still buying shit elsewhere. GDP and tax revenues fall relative to others. Deflationary aspects. Market leaders complain through lobbying groups. Repeal. Back to square one.
That’s just a restatement of your previous point. Pretend I restated my response.
I don't agree. They are two separate depictions of what might happen as a result of applying a tax on advertising. They may well coincide with each other, however. Saying that the second is a restatement of the first is like saying two interpretations of Piero Manzoni's "Artist's Shit" are restating the same fact.
Re: EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA
#145this is the wrong approach. they should enforce a choice between addictive and "ethical" algorithms (or even better allow third party feeds), make them transparent with what kind of data they use to personalize and strictly ban any kind of political bias. things like bluesky fyp should always stay legal and not in a gray area. even if someone comes up with a design thats more addictive than hard drugs people should h…
Open sourcing the algorithm and showing the weights used to generate the feed each time would be great.
Re: EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. HN feed is also addictive. EU should ban HN feed and only allow searching for new posts. Quite honestly, I've been addicted to using my air fryer for cooking nowadays. The design is too good and convenient and the food comes out too tasty. I think EU should focus on making them less addictive.
HN openly violates GDPR and is proud of it. Why would they follow this?
Your posts are archived really fast once submitted, removing comments would not be an effective approach to improve people's privacy on this site.
Re: EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA
#147Just ban the discovery feed. Search only.
That could be their punishment. Also subscribed feed.
Re: EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Social media, even before the era of dark patterns and 'engagement' maximization was still extremely addictive. It just had a less pronounced effect in large part because fewer people were using it. For instance there was a time when Facebook was university only and invite only. And this is all for people that are of the 'legal age' so to speak using it. For kids, who are going to be even more insecure, have more ong…
Back then, you had 20, 30, 50 'friends' on facebook and basically all the content you saw was made by them. Except for chatting, you could basically view all the 'daily content' (all the posts by everyone you had on your friends list) in maybe 10 minutes. Then facebook turned to "let's show you random political articles instead of your friends dinner plates", and people moved to instagram... which stopped showing you…
I think you're conflating issues. There's the algorithm pushing garbage and then the general issues of social media itself - cyber-bullying, image crafting + social comparison, FOMO, and so on. The latter is the main driver of the negative effects in children. It's basically just taking all the normal negative issues that happen in a school environment and then bumping everything up exponentially.
Even consider your innocuous example of dinner pics. Kids are extremely insecure and prone to envy. Obviously some are going to be eating much more nicely than others on average. Think about the knock-on effects of that when suddenly that's being shoved in their face. And again that is for a behavior that you yourself offered as ostensibly harmless. In practice far worse things happen, and constantly.
Re: EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the olden days, those people wrote for things we called ‘magazines’. Without infinite free content at people’s fingertips, actually paying for curated content will likely make a comeback.
It’s a bit harder to find stuff in a magazine that helps troubleshoot a water pump at night…
That information used to come with the water pump
Re: EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA
#150Forcing social media apps to have a less addictive design is a much better way to protect young people's brains than a social media age limit is (and frankly adults need help here too).
What about calling these stuffs something like "junk media"? Using the words of the offenders to depict the landscape is giving a major concession in this battle for critical thinking.
Junk media is the shoe that fits.
I'm definitely going to start calling it that when discussing it from now on.