Live data from Hacker News

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

sfgate.com

151–160 of 464 posts

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

#151
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Slack isn’t infinite. At some point there are no more old messages or no more new messages depending on which way you’re scrolling.

The problem is infinite content.

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

#153

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 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.

Steam fixes this by having a footer, and putting more content under the footer. Google search also did this on mobile for a little while.

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

#154
post #81

We can all agree that the internet was great and now it is less great, but the second someone articulates a very, very simple rule, the "well ackchyually" crew comes out of the woodwork. Infinite scroll is very obviously unnecessary. It is very obviously intended to keep people on an app longer than they would otherwise use it. You can lazy load into a finite scroll. Just make people click something every once in a w…

[flagged]

As a leftist, I'd be really happy to see most CA legislators banned. Let's start with Gavin, and his pro-utility, anti-consumer CPUC.

Now that that problems solved, let's just ban meta, the twit-verse, and twerk-tik completely. The whole asocial media industry is just a giant waste of time and space.

One has to winder if the whole thing wasn't bootstrapped as a feed industry for the mental illness industry...

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

#155
post #81

We can all agree that the internet was great and now it is less great, but the second someone articulates a very, very simple rule, the "well ackchyually" crew comes out of the woodwork. Infinite scroll is very obviously unnecessary. It is very obviously intended to keep people on an app longer than they would otherwise use it. You can lazy load into a finite scroll. Just make people click something every once in a w…

Should all buttons require a confirmation dialog to prevent people from making decisions too hastily? Should we ensure all interactions have at least 100ms of latency so users don’t get mesmerized by a smooth experience? Maybe we should set a max color saturation so nothing looks too enticing. We also don’t really need box shadows or gradients, they’re clearly meant to mesmerize users into making bad decisions.

What an absurd and pointless precedent to set.

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

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly there is a fuzzy line of demarcation. I was thinking for a simple opt-out of any rec-sys

While I’m uncomfortable with any legislation regarding the presentation of speech, in fact it’s definitely unconstitutional, this isn’t bad if you ignore the 1A issues. Hard to ignore that though

Why do some Americans build their whole political and philosophical personality off of 1A maximalism? I'm an American, and it's a great principle. Freedom of speech deserves to be enshrined in the Constitution as a Good Thing, up there with the pursuit of happiness, freedom of the press, and all else. But this idea that nothing that ever even tangentially inconvenience's someone's (or some megacorporation's) expression is a legislative no-go, is a weirdly religious amount of conviction in an abstract principle. This principle, like every other in the Constitution, must carry finite weight.

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

#157
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just make people click something every once in a while But why? This is EU Cookies Banner level of state interference making UX worse for everyone just because some lawmaker doesn't like something.

As many have said before: it's basically malicious compliance. They're supposed to be super annoying ... Instead of complying, they choose this obnoxious practice so they could continue ... monitoring every action a visitor does. You don't need a cookie banner to be allowed to create Cookies. You only need them if you're using them for something like tracking. [1] Regulators didn't enforce cookie banners. Cookie bann…

The EU Council are some of the worst offenders when it comes to annoying cookie banners. All regulation and compliance do is make things more burdensome for new entrants, which inevitably allows big companies to build moats that don't have competition. The side effect of passing such legislation was easily foreseeable and yet the EU did it anyway. There are legitimate reasons for companies to track and if you felt that the tracking was malicious, then don't do business with the company. The regulation was never needed.

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

#158
post #64
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

mine isnt? if i refresh the page it should be almost the same. maybe a couple new things at the very top, but i should still be able to find the thing i was just looking at. by comparison, facebook auto-reloads while you're halfway down a page, and wont show you any of the same things. its an incredibly poor experience

Yeah, this is terrible UX that we somehow normalized.

At the very least we should be able to scroll backwards after a page refresh to see previous posts.

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

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Shouting fire” was a bad decision denying the right to protest the draft, and it’s since been overturned. (Thankfully, as we may need that right soon!) The First Amendment is clear: there shall be no law abridging freedom of speech. Courts have bent around that in the past, in earlier eras, but they were wrong to do so. Their mistakes have mostly been corrected although there’s still a few left. The document that go…

Hang on, let's go back - clarify for me how we're calling an addictive feature in a product built by the wealthiest corporations on the planet a matter of individual free speech? Precisely whose free speech would be harmed here? Seriously, this diffusion of individual liberties into corporations has no presence in the constitution, and courts have fabricated this wholesale. There is no idea, no concept, no notion tha…

Oh is this law’s scope limited to only the world’s largest corporations, and not smaller competitors, new entrants, individual developers, or nonprofits? I didn’t realize that.

Oh is the presentation of text and images not “speech” because it’s “addictive”? I didn’t realize that.

Your strategy with billboards is more clever than I’ve usually seen from you lot; I’ll give you credit for that. A billboard is actually a physical structure. The message on the billboard is the speech. If I stopped here you’d have a “gotcha”; the software must be like the billboard! But no, because first of all, code is speech, and secondly, the layout of items on the screen and how they interact is also just speech. It’s just graphic and UX design! There is no physical structure here. You’re attempting to regulate the presentation of information—design.

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

#160
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You never had an option to have Google show a list of curated links or Yahoo show a simple search bar. You chose to go to the site you liked better and in aggregate the market chose the simple search. I could still be going to Slashdot or Things You Wouldn't Know Unless We Blogged It, but I and the content creators found that we preferred infinite scroll instead.

You could say the same thing about nutritional facts being printed on foods. The entire point is externalities that favor the company. These things are never going to be on products unless they are regulated. If you're going to make an argument for "choice" at least argue for opt out rather than "fuck it, let them put trans fats in the food and if you don't like it eat broccoli."

Too late, we now exclusively stock NicoSugar broccoli in the stores. I mean, I guess we chose it? It's not the market's fault that the human brain likes sugar and nicotine.
Post reply on HN