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The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

politico.eu

341–350 of 979 posts

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#341
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Searchable catalogues of products with prices and features listed.

That assumes the customer is aware that the product exists.

how did business do before the internet?! assuming people bought things before we had the internet?

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have we come to such a low cultural point that ads are seen as some kind of basic human right? Fuck ads. What's absurd is tolerating them and the damage they do to media, consumers, kids, lesser and/or more honest businesses, culture, products, and so on all the way to the Windows and macOS system UIs.

Freedom of speech is a basic human right. Ads are speech.

We already ban tobacco ads on tv (in the us) is their freedom of speech violated?

I don’t think you need to count companies being able to put any message out there as free speech.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#343
post #266
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?" Hear me out: banning advertising on the Internet. It's the only way. It's the primordial domino tile. You knock that one over, every other tile follows suit. It's the mother of chain reactions. There would be no social media, no Internet as we know it. Imagine having TikTok, YouTube or X trying to survive on subscriptions alone in their current iter…

Then X will become the only social media as Musk can keep it free unlike any competition and use it to push politics he likes or finds it beneficial for his other companies. In fact, according to reports X is already not making much ad money so it’s already there.

There's already free ad-free social media, see countless services in the fediverse

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#344
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?" Hear me out: banning advertising on the Internet. It's the only way. It's the primordial domino tile. You knock that one over, every other tile follows suit. It's the mother of chain reactions. There would be no social media, no Internet as we know it. Imagine having TikTok, YouTube or X trying to survive on subscriptions alone in their current iter…

Ads per se are not evil. The motherfucker we'd want to shoot, however, is targeted advertising and especially those that rely on harvested user data. In a sense, I'm just agreeing with a fellow comment in the vicinity of this thread that said GDPR is already the EU's shot at banning (targeted) ads---it's just implemented piss-poorly. Personally formulated, my sentiment is that GDPR as it stands today is a step in the…

Yeah I want my cake and to eat it too. I get annoyed when ads are irrelevant to me, and I get creeped out when they are too relevant.

I want to be able to browse the internet for free, where the sites have a sustainable business model and can therefore make high-quality content, but I don't want to have to sign up to a subscription for everything.

I want to be able to host websites that get lots of views, but I don't want that popularity to cost me.

Can someone please come up with something that solves all of these dilemmas for me?

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#345
post #158
post #64

Here's the actual statement from the European Comission: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_... It's important to note they aren't creating laws against infinite scrolling , but are ruling against addictive design and pointing to infinite scrolling as an example of it. The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes". They point to certain feat…

>"well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?" Hear me out: banning advertising on the Internet. It's the only way. It's the primordial domino tile. You knock that one over, every other tile follows suit. It's the mother of chain reactions. There would be no social media, no Internet as we know it. Imagine having TikTok, YouTube or X trying to survive on subscriptions alone in their current iter…

Banning ads is not possible.

But we can build a culture that knows how to avoid ads and the technology to enable it.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#346
post #64

Here's the actual statement from the European Comission: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_... It's important to note they aren't creating laws against infinite scrolling , but are ruling against addictive design and pointing to infinite scrolling as an example of it. The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes". They point to certain feat…

"what specific laws ...?"

If a company chooses a design and it can be proved through a subpoena of their communications that the design was intended and chosen for its addictive traits, even if there has been no evidence collected for the addictiveness, then the company (or person) can be deemed to have created a design in bad faith to society and penalized for it.

(Well that's my attempt. I tried to apply "innocent until proven guilty" here.)

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#347
post #158
post #64

Here's the actual statement from the European Comission: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_... It's important to note they aren't creating laws against infinite scrolling , but are ruling against addictive design and pointing to infinite scrolling as an example of it. The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes". They point to certain feat…

>"well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?" Hear me out: banning advertising on the Internet. It's the only way. It's the primordial domino tile. You knock that one over, every other tile follows suit. It's the mother of chain reactions. There would be no social media, no Internet as we know it. Imagine having TikTok, YouTube or X trying to survive on subscriptions alone in their current iter…

Thats too vague and drastic, every "show HN" is an ads, for notoriety at least. I would prefer we draw the line at "content pushed by a third party against payment must be displaid only with regard to where it is displaid and must not use information about to whom it is displaid" .

I.e displaying an ads about Sentry on a ads technica page, find . Displaying an ads about hiking equipment on ars techbica because i made a google search abd it is estimated I like that -> not fine. It would kill all the incentive to overtrack the ROI will no more justify the cost.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#348
post #158
post #64

Here's the actual statement from the European Comission: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_... It's important to note they aren't creating laws against infinite scrolling , but are ruling against addictive design and pointing to infinite scrolling as an example of it. The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes". They point to certain feat…

>"well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?" Hear me out: banning advertising on the Internet. It's the only way. It's the primordial domino tile. You knock that one over, every other tile follows suit. It's the mother of chain reactions. There would be no social media, no Internet as we know it. Imagine having TikTok, YouTube or X trying to survive on subscriptions alone in their current iter…

How would you ban advertising? Would astroturfing be banned? Would LLM-assisted astroturfing be banned?

Using an ad-blocker gets rid of most visible ads online, but there's still paid content in various forms which may be more effective than straight adverts anyway.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And how do you self-host distribution? You have your own website and your copy on it. Don't start that "but if you pay some hosting provider to host that website that would be advertising", or the "And how do you self-host distribution? You would have to run your own fiber to every customer's house or spin up your own postal service or you're paying someone to do that." that borders on being obtuse on purpose.

If you pay some hosting provider then you're obviously paying someone, and now you have the caravan of trucks going through the loophole because Facebook et al get into the hosting business and then their "spam filter" trusts the things on their own hosting service so using it becomes the way to get seen.

>If you pay some hosting provider then you're obviously paying someone

Yes. You're still allowed to pay someone - for YOUR OWN corporate website. Still your copy is not on my fucking social media, news websites, forums, tv programming, and so on.

>and now you have the caravan of trucks going through the loophole because Facebook et al get into the hosting business and then their "spam filter" trusts the things on their own hosting service so using it becomes the way to get seen.

They can go into the hosting business all they want. If they show what they host (i.e. ads) on my social media feed, or links to it there, they're breaking the law. What they host should only be accessible when somebody consciously navigates to it in some hierarchical scheme or directly enters the address/handle.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#350
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?" Hear me out: banning advertising on the Internet. It's the only way. It's the primordial domino tile. You knock that one over, every other tile follows suit. It's the mother of chain reactions. There would be no social media, no Internet as we know it. Imagine having TikTok, YouTube or X trying to survive on subscriptions alone in their current iter…

Infrastructure costs money. There's no way around it. I'm all up for banning ads. But there should be another viable business model to replace it.

Paying for content works just fine
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