Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

politico.eu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 979 posts

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#371

Post by AnthonyMouse »

jason_oster wrote: post #355
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose a company wants to write some product documentation so customers and prospective customers know what features their product has and how to use them. They hire someone to write the documentation and then someone else to distribute it. Is there a good way to distinguish this from advertising? The most plausible way would be if the one you're paying to distribute it has some kind of exclusive control or market p…

Advertising is a monetary transaction between an advertiser and a publisher. The customer (or product) is not involved in the transaction; it is their attention that is being bought and sold. That's a different model than paying a technical writer to do technical writing.

You're contrasting authorship with distribution. The advertising equivalent to paying a technical writer is paying an ad agency to create the ad. The customer isn't a party to that transaction either.

But now how are you distributing either of them?

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#372

Post by AmbroseBierce »

fooker wrote: post #366
Funes- wrote: 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…

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.

What counts as pornography? What counts as art? What counts as music? Please, yeah we know, we absolutely know categorization is hard, doesn't mean there is no benefit in having them and shaping them as we go.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#373

Post by relaxing »

mh2266 wrote: post #337
relaxing wrote: post #234

Good. Infinite scrolling is a scourge. Give me back my time ordered feed that if I navigate away stays on the page where I left off.

What does ranking vs. chronological having to do with infinite scrolling? You can have a ranked paginated UI. You can also have an "infinite" (until you run out of items, but this is not different for ranked) chronological UI.

Moving away from chronological allows them to feed you more addicting content, as does the infinite feed. They involved together because they work together synergistically.

It’s of no value to point out both can technically be implemented independently. That isn’t what happened, and even if it did it would still be user hostile.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#374

Post by bigstrat2003 »

rendx wrote: post #28
rpdillon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked at multiple companies and talked to multiple legal teams about this, they tend to be very conservative. So the guidance I've gotten is that if we store any information at all on the person's computer, even to know whether they've visited the site before, we still need a cookie banner. Basically, the law created enough fear among the lawyers that software developers are being advised to include the cooki…

So? You're not arguing that we should get rid of 'reasonable' laws out of misinterpretations of them, are you?

I'm willing to argue that, sure (though it's purely a hypothetical point as I'm not a citizen of the EU and thus I don't and shouldn't have a voice in the laws there). I don't judge a law by a deontological measure of worth, but rather by whether it seems to be making things better or worse. The GDPR has overwhelmingly made my experience browsing the web worse, not better. Whether it should have resulted in that is beside the point: it has resulted in that, so that is what I judge it by. Therefore, I think it makes sense to get rid of the law as it seems that it is making things worse for people, not better.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#375

Post by Der_Einzige »

fooker wrote: post #368
gpm wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh you mean we can reverse the eternal September? Sign me up! Gatekeeping is good, actually! The “let people enjoy things” crowd is responsibility for facilitating the mass enshittification of everything.

Catering to the lowest common denominator is how we got the Burger King guy on spirit airlines.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#376

Post by AmbroseBierce »

ahallock wrote: post #367
gchamonlive wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Regulation took away your freedom when it took asbestos out of your house right? Please be serious.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#377

Post by WarmWash »

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.

Please, continue that "etc"...

Its been 30 years and no one has been able to continue that "etc".

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#378

Post by AnthonyMouse »

coldtea wrote: post #349
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> If they show what they host (i.e. ads) on my social media feed, or links to it there, they're breaking the law.

They're already hosting everything in your feed, and if there were actually no ads then everyone on the site would be paying them to do it, at which point what do you expect to be in your feed?

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#379

Post by fooker »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #375
fooker wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That works great when everyone has resources to pay for things online. In practice, this cuts of 80% of the worlds population.

Oh you mean we can reverse the eternal September? Sign me up! Gatekeeping is good, actually! The “let people enjoy things” crowd is responsibility for facilitating the mass enshittification of everything. Catering to the lowest common denominator is how we got the Burger King guy on spirit airlines.

Why are you commenting here instead of a website that gatekeeps commenters?

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#380

Post by phire »

fooker wrote: post #366
Funes- wrote: 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…

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.

I think you can get most of the benefit by just banning targeted advertising.

Require that every user must be shown the exact same ads (probabilistically). Don't allow any kind of interest or demographic based targeting for paid content.

Advertisers would still be able to place Ads on pages they know there target audience goes, but wouldn't be able to make those same Ads follow that target audience around the internet.

Post reply on HN