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The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

politico.eu

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Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#361

Post by skissane »

nickff wrote: post #307
skissane wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Seems to be about as strong as the Soviet Constitution's protections: In the 2015 case Perinçek v. Switzerland , the European Court of Human Rights applied Article 10 to find against a Swiss law making it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide. Can you imagine a Soviet court ever striking down a genocide denial law? The decision is controversial because it introduces a double standard into the Court's case law – it…

I can definitely imagine the Soviet Union making arbitrary rules about which genocides were recognized and ‘protected’, and which were not.

But can you imagine a Soviet court declaring a law to be in violation of human rights?

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#362

Post by mrtksn »

tcfhgj wrote: post #343
mrtksn wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Who pays for the costs of those and why?

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#363

Post by forgetfreeman »

gchamonlive wrote: post #303
forgetfreeman wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What part of an endless sea of SEO spam, AI slop, malware, polarized astroturf, and addictive-by-design walled gardens strikes you as the win? Seriously, where is the win?

But the internet is so much more than that, isn't it?

It really isn't. It was so much more than that but a couple decades of "innovation" and here we are.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#364

Post by AnthonyMouse »

mrob wrote: post #327
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it's genuinely the case that whole product categories are unknown to many people who could realistically benefit from them, as determined by a disinterested third party, an exception could be made for advertising that does not mention specific products or brands. Now all of the "brought to you by America's " ads are back in. So is every pharma ad and every other patented product because they don't have to tell y…

An industry group is not a disinterested party. Minimum competition requirements can be imposed. As I said elsewhere in the thread, a solution being imperfect is not a good reason to leave the problem unaddressed.

> An industry group is not a disinterested party.

No, but they can convince a disinterested party that people aren't aware of because that's actually true.

> Minimum competition requirements can be imposed.

But that brings back the original problem. Company invents new patented invention, how does anybody find out about it?

> a solution being imperfect is not a good reason to leave the problem unaddressed.

This is the legislator's fallacy. Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do this.

If a proposal is full of problems and holes, the alternative isn't necessarily to do nothing, but rather to find a different approach to the problem.

Proposals that are full of holes are often worse than nothing, because the costs are evaluated in comparison to the ostensible benefit, but then in practice you get only a fraction of the benefit because of the holes. And then people say "well a little is better than nothing" while not accounting for the fact that weighing all of the costs against only a fraction of the benefit has left you underwater.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#365

Post by bigstrat2003 »

BrenBarn wrote: post #312
whackernews wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which parts specifically?

Obvious examples of negative consequences of the first amendment include the profusion of false and misleading advertising, the scourge of political campaign spending, and the disastrous firehouse of misinformation being pushed out in various online forums. The idea that an abstract carte blanche for free speech outweighs those real and present ills is misguided. At the same time, we see that the limitation to only p…

I think you would find that the cure is far, far worse than the disease. We speak of rights, and those are important, but there's also a very important practical reason why we have freedom of speech: because you cannot trust that future government officials will stick to banning speech that is justly banned. Once you open that door, sooner or later someone is going to start abusing the power. How would you like it if the Trump administration was able to (with complete legality) declare that claims Biden fairly won the 2020 election are "misinformation", and punish people who make those claims? Or if you're a Trump guy, how would you like it if the next Democrat administration declared it to be "misinformation" to claim that Trump fairly won the same election, and punish people for it?

The cold hard reality is that no matter how much you trust the people in the government today, eventually they will be replaced by people you consider to be the scum of the earth. And when that day comes, you will curse the day you allowed the government to punish speech, because you'll see speech you consider perfectly justified become illegal.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#366

Post by fooker »

Funes- wrote: post #158
jjcm wrote: 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…

What counts as an advertisement? What about a testimonial?

If you try to regulate this, everything will be an ad in disguise.

In my opinion, that's the direction we are heading towards with AI anyway.

I'm surprised we haven't seen an instance of 'pay to increase bias towards my product in training' yet.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#367

Post by ahallock »

gchamonlive wrote: post #280
ahallock wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banning ads? That's just so authoritarian and absurd. I hope you never become king

Regulation is freedom. Think of ads powering the web as current day's lead in gas.

Regulation is freedom? Peace is war, too, I guess.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#368

Post by fooker »

gpm wrote: post #255
gchamonlive wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think we have a right to a business model. Either you figure one out for your particular site (selling access to the website, donations, etc) or you don't and stop and either is ok.

That works great when everyone has resources to pay for things online.

In practice, this cuts of 80% of the worlds population.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#369

Post by forgetfreeman »

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote: post #315
forgetfreeman wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What part of an endless sea of SEO spam, AI slop, malware, polarized astroturf, and addictive-by-design walled gardens strikes you as the win? Seriously, where is the win?

Honestly, some of the shit with ClawdBot^W MoltBot^W OpenClaw and molt.church and molt.book has been some quality entertainment, enabled largely by the Internet. And it's AI slop but that only seems to matter when one of them gets miffed about its PR being rejected and posts an unhinged blog post about the maintainer who rejected said PR. And in a "comedy equals tragedy plus time" way, it's pretty easy to laugh at th…

You know there's individuals who will unironically defend any dark pattern one cares to point to so your take here is pretty unsurprising. I feel like this is getting excited over finding a kernel of undigested corn in a random turd.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#370

Post by plagiarist »

lich_king wrote: post #313
gchamonlive wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think that's revisionism. Social media existed before online advertising. Usenet was quite massive and vibrant, countless IRC servers were maintained by volunteers, web-based forums covered pretty much the same ground as Reddit does today. All supported by the goodwill of individuals, non-profits, and businesses such as ISPs that actively wanted the internet to be interesting because they were making money by selli…

The internet was absolutely better without that. I arrived after the original Eternal September, but there have been more and more until now everyone is perpetually online 24/7.

Now fucking everything about the world is a hustle to monetize every possible nook and cranny around content. There isn't even content anymore, it's nearly all AI slop as a substrate to grow ads on.

I am nostalgic for the era when I found "punch the monkey" irritating. People used to make websites as a labor of love.

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