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The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes

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Re: The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes

#41
post #33
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is the list constantly changing anyway?

Because other people keep adding new posts (and upvoting existing posts, which changes their order).

While that's true I think that once the feed has been observed in a certain way the advantages of stability outweigh the advantages of showing a tweaked version the second time it is loaded.

Re: The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes

#42

Curious as to where the line between “addictive feature” and "good UX" is. Is deliberate pagination actual impedance to use or merely an annoyance that's been weeded out with modern UX design? When does a feature that simply makes your product easier to use cross into a territory that it's illegal? What about media previews, in a platform like reddit if you can preview or expand media directly from the main list is t…

The way I see it, it's the incessant stimuli you get through these apps. There's just no point where the screen stays quiet, stimulus free. Moving elements capture our attention naturally, especially when the entire screen keeps moving. The endless scroll element just makes sure that the stimulus keeps getting renewed the moment you're done with it.

Instead, a scroll should give you a break before heading into the next video. I'm willing to bet this would help severely with addiction. People are then forced to reconsider whether they actually want to play the next video. "Done" should not always lead to "here's the next stimulus". That's what's addictive. The brain isn't made to break out of that loop easily.

Re: The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes

#43
post #12

It should just be universally required to give an option to disable addictive features. Should prevent age verification, and giving users optionality is always a good thing (for them).

> Should prevent age verification It won't, become some parties are proposing a narrative of "shielding the innocent from harmful content" (such as themselves). keir starmer seems to suppose nudity would be indecent, against an implicitly stated decent itself and british politics.

Yeah I meant it would avoid the necessity of age verification to solve this problem.

Age verification and how enthusiastic gov'ts are about it is concerning.

Re: The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes

#44
Related:

EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48858292)

> The investigation focuses on features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and the platforms' highly personalised recommender systems.

Re: The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes

#45
post #41
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because other people keep adding new posts (and upvoting existing posts, which changes their order).

While that's true I think that once the feed has been observed in a certain way the advantages of stability outweigh the advantages of showing a tweaked version the second time it is loaded.

The user expectation is that if you refresh the page, you will see fresh content.

Re: The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes

#46
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The challenge is to retain an ordering over the result set. How would infinite scroll behave any differently in this case? The changing results seems to be an orthogonal concern to pagination/infinite scroll.

Infinite scroll makes the problem much easier, even if it’s still a problem. The only action you need to support is loading more results, which you can do by loading all results and filtering out those already shown. With pagination, the user may say “give me page 3” and you have no idea what was on pages 1 and 2, if they were even loaded.

If page 1 and 2 were 10 each you load results 21-30

Same as if you are scrolling and have reached result 20 And want to load more.

Re: The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes

#47

Instead of trying to whack a mole on all addictive mechanisms, just ban the business model driving all of them: targeted advertising.

I’m not sure that suffices. If a site has a very “good” (at keeping people glued to the screen) content ranking algorithm, they can still make money, albeit less, serving non-targeted ads. Longer engagement time by viewers = more ad impressions, targeted or not.

Re: The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes

#48
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Infinite scroll makes the problem much easier, even if it’s still a problem. The only action you need to support is loading more results, which you can do by loading all results and filtering out those already shown. With pagination, the user may say “give me page 3” and you have no idea what was on pages 1 and 2, if they were even loaded.

If page 1 and 2 were 10 each you load results 21-30 Same as if you are scrolling and have reached result 20 And want to load more.

But the underlying table changed since. I'm not very familiar with these myself, but it seams to me that the best solution is to keep a session cursor for the user, and these are a lot simpler when you only ever move it forward.

Re: The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes

#49

note that this is going after "psychologically exploitative features intended to maximize engagement" of all kinds, not just infinite feeds. it also poses an ultimatum banning people under 16 from websites that provide such addictive features to anyone. personally I am against internet identification, and I think teenagers should be allowed on social media, so I have to ask: why only children? if these features are s…

[dead]

Re: The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes

#50

Curious as to where the line between “addictive feature” and "good UX" is. Is deliberate pagination actual impedance to use or merely an annoyance that's been weeded out with modern UX design? When does a feature that simply makes your product easier to use cross into a territory that it's illegal? What about media previews, in a platform like reddit if you can preview or expand media directly from the main list is t…

Infinite scroll evolved alongside algorithms that incentivise addictive content. So it’s “good” UX in that it’s effective for consuming addictive content… When I’m trying to do something constructive, like search or browse, infinite scroll is IMHO disastrously bad. You can’t keep your place in the list, or jump ahead/back.

So you'd rather something like Slack was paginated? I think that would be disastrously bad.
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