361–370 of 464 posts
Instead of trying to whack a mole on all addictive mechanisms, just ban the business model driving all of them: targeted advertising.
That would cause most, if not all, modern tech companies to go out of business (or massively downsize). I support it.
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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…
First they came for the infinite scroll, and I said nothing... That was a little hyperbolic. The government already can regulate "speech" to some extent in limited, targeted ways, as this is. For example: they can (and increasingly will) require ADA accessibility standards on web and mobile sites and apps-- even private sector-- that deal with the public.
It may be that this isn’t as settled as you think when speech concerns are present. The existence of alternative accessible formats, or sufficient assistive technology in the marketplace, may be just as compliant. It’s likely that these will be favored over mandating changes that affect design or presentation, given the Court’s prior decisions on balancing speech concerns in other areas.
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Sophistry. The question is not whether or not regulation is authoritarian, it’s whether or not it’s constitutional. As in, whether or not the government is even allowed to make such a law. A law doesn’t just get a constitutional bypass because it’s addressing known harms or “anti-social” behavior or whatever. This is not the UK. Illuminated signs exist in the real, physical world. They can beam bright light into your…
Not that I think this significantly alters the point, but it's pretty common in the US to regulate or ban signage. e.g. billboards are illegal in my city and there are specific regulations about what kind of elements can be present on buildings to signal business names. I'm pretty certain illuminated signs beaming into people's homes would be illegal here. Actually I don't think light-up signs are allowed at all; I b…
We’re talking apples and oranges because a website is more like a book than an illuminated sign. You have to decide to view it, and it doesn’t shine through your window at night, disturbing the peaceful enjoyment of your home.
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That would cause most, if not all, modern tech companies to go out of business (or massively downsize). I support it.
Facebook really didn't like that apple made device IDs optional, it's strange that they quieted down about that. They must have found an alternative fingerprinting method.
I wrote an infinite-scroll implementation for my blog. Infinite scrolling through a static bank of content (even with some randomized elements) is not engaging. You eventually make it to the bottom and think "that's it?"
There are other types of Internet communities where people can connect with each other, that do not involve infinite scrolling, algorithmic curation, and using your collected interests for targeted advertising. I would love to see regulation, just to see the value of Meta's user-profiling-data-assets shrink.
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What's very obviously unnecessary is the need for a law to police this. You can just not use things you don't like. This need to project one's own morality upon others will be the source of endless conflict.
The law being discussed is for minors. As a society we don't think minors have sufficient executive function to make those decisions, so we find it acceptable to ban them in those context.
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Is your argument that unless we can make a law that is perfect and covers every conceivable use case of coercive design, then we shouldn't bother to make a law that covers any of them?
I'm pretty sure the point being made is that things like this are very difficult to actually encode into law in such a way that it doesn't cause significant damage downstream. Like, take the age verification/estimation laws that are going around. We see the big companies actively encouraging it because the laws will (ironically) benefit big tech rather than harming them in any substantial manner: companies like Meta…
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Absolutely. While we're at it, why should asbestos be regulated? You can just not go in buildings that have it.
This is basically the Californian Prop 65 compromise: put up a sign saying the building contains carcinogens, but not actually do anything about them.
... Prop 65 is dumb though. Kind of a trend in California law.
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What's very obviously unnecessary is the need for a law to police this. You can just not use things you don't like. This need to project one's own morality upon others will be the source of endless conflict.
> You can just not use things you don't like. The entire point of talking about addiction (or even harmless things like FOMO, network effect, etc) is that this is not true.
the most enforceable way to do this is making open apis mandatory. any user should be able to get api keys that let them do all the basic operations like view posts for a user, consume the firehose, read their own likes and follows, you get the idea. your api is incomplete? you get fined. needs a paid subscription or signing a contract? all views go through the recommender system? straight to jail.
we need to play hard with platforms but let users do what they want, at least if its not disruptive to other users.