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

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391–400 of 464 posts

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

#391

There is no way to enforce any of these types of laws without an iron curtain that clearly violates the first amendment. If you have free speech infront of children in public I don't see how having infinite scroll on your website or app is any different. Parents should parent their children instead of the state. Its crazy how avoident California is of solving actually important problems like homelessness, mental heal…

I didn't realize that putting labels on cigarette packs made the country literally East Germany (the original iron curtain).

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

#393

Worries about particulars like infinite scroll miss the point: fundamentally, the advertising business model is a market distorting one that companies use to provide goods and services below cost. It is paid advertising that should be banned. Doing so would eliminate the incentive to create addictive products in the first place since increased usage would no longer drive increased revenue.

If advertising was banned I suspect the entire capitalism would collapse.

Alternatively, products would be cheaper as we'd legislate away defection in that particular instance of the prisoners dilemma.

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

#394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If advertising was banned I suspect the entire capitalism would collapse.

Alternatively, products would be cheaper as we'd legislate away defection in that particular instance of the prisoners dilemma.

There would be less products. Severely less. All drinks would be made by Coke, all potato chips would be made by Pepsi (who owns Lays). They would be much cheaper (or more profitable), and there would be no opportunity for competition ever again. Everyone who works for a company other than the above would be laid off because their company couldn't sell enough product to remain in business.

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

#395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The point is that - unrestricted - digital media maximises for time and attention. Given that incentive, addictive behaviours are not only inevitable, but an ideal outcome financially. It's easy to say that it's absurd, but what would you do?

Every business wants you to be addicted to their products, whether it’s social media, cigarettes, video games, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, supplements, fashion, electronics. Even seemingly innocuous things like reading the news or exercising are often addictions, people are running away from their fears and insecurities. It’s a systemic problem in western society, removing infinite scroll is such a ridiculous idea in the face of a core societal problem like this.

My suggestion would be to look at something like the rat park studies. When mice lived in a nice communal space with other mice, they preferred regular ware over drug laced addictive water. I suspect people are similar, they’re not intrinsically prone to addiction, they’re just trying to treat psychological problems like fear, loneliness, insecurity. We need to attack this root of the problem, but there’s so much money in ensuring that people feel empty so they’ll buy shit to fulfill themselves that there’s no actual motivation from anyone with power to do anything. That’s why you get these dumb ideas for laws, they’re not enough to impact the businesses (who are the real constituents) but politicians can still say they’re doing something and something is better than nothing.

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

#396
post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ok, but you're just talking about a completely different law. How is that comparable to what's being proposed?

Because the point applies to the subject of this thread too, that's why. People think that all of this is super easy to just ban by fiat (law) but the problem is that the "simple" solutions oftentimes have harmful downstream effects that must be considered. For example, let's hypothetically say that we ban "addictive algorithms". What even counts as an "addictive algorithm"? Does my Mastodon home timeline count as an "addictive algorithm"? How about the Bluesky feed? Does the HN home page count as one? (Someone could (reasonably!) make this argument too, given that HN does dynamically update it's home page depending on rankings of submissions to end-users, even if such an update requires a page refresh.) So what I was trying to say (and the reason I brought up age verification/estimation) is that if we take the simple path we're going to catch a bunch of entities up in the ban that we... Probably shouldn't be banning. But you are also going to suffer a lot of pain trying to (not) cause this problem too.

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

#397
post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly this is the big reason I have stopped participating in threads like this. Infinite scroll is not itself addictive. Hell, there are studies that suggest that us calling it "addictive" could itself create the very problem we're trying to "solve". There are also studies that completely refute the "social media is harmful" narrative too, and I'm talking on the order of millions of participants across more than 5…

> There are also studies that completely refute the "social media is harmful" narrative too, and I'm talking on the order of millions of participants across more than 50 countries. Why not link to those instead of a youtube video?

Because the youtube video essentially says what the studies do (and it's a developmental psychologist who's giving that talk too). I felt it would be a bit easier to digest than more than 6 separate studies that you'd have to read. But if you really want them here are at least 6 of them all essentially saying the same thing: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/18/yet-another-massive-stud...

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

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps I should clarify, I am using “legal terrorism” as a term of art for legislative terror, such as that inflicted during the French Revolution or the reign of Oliver Cromwell, or Germany’s Enabling Act. Without strong checks, which slow down the process, legislative bodies can get caught up in a frenzy of passing laws in order to address “urgent” problems. Our problem is that a majority of legislators want to pa…

Another alternative to avoid legal terrorism is low penalties. If the law would rapidly shift to say infinite scroll is illegal, but the only penalty is being ordered to remove it (and then penalised more if you fail to do so after being notified) I don't think that's really that bad?

You’d need a Constitution that allows laws regarding speech. And probably a mechanism to prevent legislators from assigning excessive penalties.

It’s not about whether the law meets some abstract notion of good or bad, it’s about whether it is even possible to enact under the framework that governs us. Under the Constitution as it stands, it wouldn’t be possible.

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

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pagination works just as well with infinite content.

Good. Use pagination instead.
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