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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

#381

Post by intended »

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.

Going too far - laws state that if you were paid for a testimonial by a firm, or if the firm provided the service or product you disclose / it counts as paid endorsements /

You don’t need to go too far down the rabbit hole. You need to introduce friction to ads.

Subscription revenues are tiny when compared ad revenue, so I expect people will resist this idea ferociously.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#382

Post by jason_oster »

yallpendantools wrote: post #213
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…

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…

Ads are mostly evil. No one said that ads were inherently evil. It's bad enough that ads are mostly evil.

Let's be clear what we mean by "evil". My time is valuable. I have a finite number of heartbeats before I die. If I have to spend 30 seconds watching a damn soap commercial before I get to watch a Twitch stream, that's 36 heartbeats I will never get back. Sure, I could press mute and do something else for 30 seconds that seems more valuable, but that doesn't fit my schedule. Stealing heartbeats is evil.

I have so far optimized against wasting my heartbeats by paying subscriptions to remove ads. Spotify, Twitch, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, and a bunch of others I'm forgetting. Because it's worth $150/month or whatever to not waste my time with the most boring, uninteresting, irrelevant, nauseating crap that advertisers come up with.

And thank science for SponsorBlock, because sponsored segments in videos are the devil. Sponsored segments use the old non-tracking advertisement model. They pay publishers practically nothing because they aren't paying for conversions, but for an estimate based on impressions and track record woo. Bad for publishers, bad for advertisers, and bad for content consumers. Everybody loses. I'm well over my lifetime quota of BS from VPNs, MOBAs, and plots of land scams. So many heartbeats lost.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#383

Post by fooker »

phire wrote: post #380
fooker wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 interne…

Good policy in my opinion.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#384

Post by gpm »

WarmWash wrote: post #377
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.

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

Of course they have. Off the top of my head examples include: Grants in the form of tax dollars (e.g. arxiv). To benefit the authors reputation (e.g. numerous scientists, developers, etc personal sites. zacklabe.com as a useful example). As a hobby (I think aiarena.net falls into this category). To collect data for research purposes (e.g. the original chatgpt release, and early recaptcha)...

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#385

Post by fooker »

AmbroseBierce wrote: post #372
fooker wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You'll see that none of these things are banned unilaterally.

Interestingly, there are autocratic governments who do try to ban vague things. The goal there is selective enforcement, not good public policy.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#386

Post by SoftTalker »

MBCook wrote: post #274
tokyobreakfast wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTTP Error 402: Payment Required was created for a reason. Maybe we need to rethink micropayments.

There’s nothing wrong with macro payments either. Five dollars a month to subscribe or whatever. If people get the value out of it, you can get them to pay it.

Subscription fatigue will quickly limit that. Yes, people used to subscribe to magazines but usually just a few. And by the way, those magazines were full of ads too.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#387

Post by presentation »

MBCook wrote: post #274
tokyobreakfast wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTTP Error 402: Payment Required was created for a reason. Maybe we need to rethink micropayments.

There’s nothing wrong with macro payments either. Five dollars a month to subscribe or whatever. If people get the value out of it, you can get them to pay it.

Half of the people on this site think that subscriptions are evil too, though.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#388

Post by Findecanor »

tokyobreakfast wrote: post #39
poncho_romero wrote: post #25

I hope this goes through. Trillion dollar companies are waging a war on our attention, using everything at their disposal to make these apps addictive. It isn't a fair fight and the existence of infinite feeds is bad both for people and democracy. Regulating consumer products that cause harm to millions is nothing new.

> Trillion dollar companies are waging a war on our attention, using everything at their disposal to make these apps addictive. Or you could just shut the phone off and/or not install the app. It's a simple solution, really, and one that is available at your disposal today at no cost.

People start using these apps and sites to stay in touch with friends and with current events — and those things are real needs. People should not be exploited for them.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#389

Post by esprehn »

I wish they would go after the fake spinning wheel discount pattern and the "app exclusive" or "better in the app" pattern. That's all a way to get people to install apps that will then bombard folks with notifications or slurp data off the device.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#390

Post by jbxntuehineoh »

BurningFrog wrote: post #335
coldtea wrote: post #250

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.

> mmmmm yes thank you daddy may I have some more?
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