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

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121–130 of 464 posts

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

#121

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…

It’s the wrong fix to the problem. The correct fix is enforcing an infinite scroll limit (time), after which the app tells you to take a break (for some amount of time).

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

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with using scrolling as a metric is it assumes satisfaction with the content presented and ignores the fact that, on certain apps, many scroll miles go into skipping around articles or ads or reposts to get to the content you want, and imo a punishment for seeking more content while also diluting said content with forced ads at an alarming ratio is not indicative of addiction but scarcity of satisfaction…

If you continue scrolling, that shows you think that the content presented is valuable enough that scrolling past some misses is worth it. A good scroll like TikTok carefully metes out the ads so that half of them you don't mind and the other half you enjoy. If you find a site whose scroll makes you feel this way, just stop scrolling and don't try to ban the concept for everyone else.

What I'm about to say is going to sound very 'layman', and this is coming from someone who's been building UI's for like, 20 years.

This discussion makes me both laugh and feel sad, because we all know this is bad for us and gives us zero ROI for our time... and yet there's a whole thread developing here to justify the pattern.

I don't think I have a point on that, just that observation.

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

#123

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…

It’s the wrong fix to the problem. The correct fix is enforcing an infinite scroll limit (time), after which the app tells you to take a break (for some amount of time).

Whatever the right “fix” is, why is a US state involved in deciding how my app presents my speech to you? Under what authority?

You know, I hate to give the oppo any decent ideas, but maybe there’s some allowable way to subsidize apps that use “healthy” patterns rather than attempting to “ban” things!

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

#124

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…

It’s the wrong fix to the problem. The correct fix is enforcing an infinite scroll limit (time), after which the app tells you to take a break (for some amount of time).

Get your nanny state out of my free market. I suppose next you will want some kind of warning label on my asbestos filter cigarettes.

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

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s the wrong fix to the problem. The correct fix is enforcing an infinite scroll limit (time), after which the app tells you to take a break (for some amount of time).

Get your nanny state out of my free market. I suppose next you will want some kind of warning label on my asbestos filter cigarettes.

Waah waah speech is cigarettes again. Stale. Why don’t you people address the actual constitutional issues (the ones that will get your law struck down hard)

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

#126

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…

What I like about Hacker News is each day I open it up, scan the first three pages, open 2-5 links to read, then close it again. Those pages make it easy to monitor my usage and set limits. I used to do the same with Reddit before that changed I'd fully support removing infinite scroll or even just banning it from under 18 year olds

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

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it doesn't remove any choice for users . users don't get a choice on the offending sites currently. they only get infinite scroll. so the eventual infinite scroll replacement will be just that, the replacement. on removing possible UI design choices for social media companies -- i have a very small violin on hand.

Any discussion on this topic within hacker news is pretty silly. To much financial incentive to keep the status quo, and to many bots pushing narratives. It’s like listening to the lawyers at a cigarette manufacturer, car manufacturers fight seat belts or gun manufacturers in kindergartens. The change is coming because real people are pissed.

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

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Infinite scroll is bad UX design and always has been. It makes it impossible to click on any links in the footer of the page or even really reading what's in the footer. I remember when it was initially introduced, everyone I spoke to about it hated it.

Also creates a confusion that algorithm profiteers love, where before you could know a post you saw would be page 1 today and page 2 tomorrow now the homepage of every app is absolute chaos so you have to spend hours searching for something specific or you're just always seeing exactly what they want you to see (to increase engagement or whatever instead of any sensible order)

I have always hated infinite scroll because it becomes way more difficult to understand the index of a search result or piece of content. For example, if I know that each page of results contains 25 hits, then it is easy for me to see which one is the 25th hit, and then which one is the 26th one (first one on the next page).

I don't mind that the order of search results might be shifted around over time, and I understand that there is some profit motive to inserting tangentially relevant or sponsored hits, but I really wish that there were an easy way of knowing what index each result has.

This grew out of a funny little habit I sometimes have where I like to pick a random number and see what search hit that corresponds to. It becomes too tedious with infinite scroll.

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

#129

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…

> a feature that simply makes your product easier to use

Except it doesn't. You lose context and are now drowning in an endless morass of lazy-loaded blocks and widgets, all hiding under invisible elements. Nothing has a permanent URL, so there is zero accountably if the user was shown something that they need to reference - unless it benefits the platform. And of course, it will eventually all force reload when the page complexity exhausts the available memory, or at least when it becomes too exhausted to reliably serve ads.

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

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ne…

Hello, what right do you have to regulate the presentation of speech ? If you regulate this format because it’s now considered harmful, what stops El Presidente from moving to ban “zines” because the format is “harmful to young minds” and used by “antifa”? What stops CA from moving to ban forums because threaded formats are suddenly considered “too addicting”? Maybe we should ban VR or first person shooter video game…

I disagree. Looking forward to reading your amicus brief.
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