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The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

politico.eu

41–50 of 979 posts

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#42

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…

But it should not be obnoxious, look at steam how is a small banner with two simple actions, vs all other cookie banners.

Agreed! Many sites don't actually comply with the GDPR because they don't provide simple tools to control the cookies and instead force you through a flow. Part of my gripe with the law is the way those violations are not being systematically cited.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#45

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Why would someone care about a destructive addiction that's plaguing the lives of the majority of the planet, leading to mental health issues and proliferating massive levels of misinformation. I wonder. Freedom to be manipulated by algorithms, yay!

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#46

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.

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Eh, its not like it is happening overnight. Its like a cancer that slowly spreads without much notice and then one day the democracy collapses and its too late to do anything about it.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree it's not a net positive, I find it dangerous to equate all addictions.

He’s not equating all addictions beyond saying they are all addictions and should be treated as such.

But that's the problem - different substances require different solutions.

You reduce sugar intake, not eliminate it.

You eliminate cocaine intake, not just reduce it.

Treating social media design as equal to something that can kill people in excess unnerves me.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#49
Dunno about using legislative moves, but yes please. The stupidest solution to a problem no one had. Moving layouts, unreachable footers, no or unsatisfactory indication of one's position.

All just to remove navigation clicks no one minded and reduce server loads, in exchange for users suffering laggy lazy loading (or, what a hate-inducing pattern!) inability to preload, print, search or link.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#50

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.

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This. If all it took was a $300k ad campaign on tiktok to get the population of a country(Romania in this case to be specific) to vote for a shady no-name candidate that came out of nowhere, instead of the well known candidates of the establishment, that should tell you the politics of your country betrayed its electorate so badly that they would rather commit national suicide instead of voting the establishment again to screw them over for the n-th time. Tiktok only exposed that, it didn't cause that.

I'm not saying social media isn't cancerous and shouldn't be regulated, because it is and it should, I'm saying that in this specific case it's a symptom of a much bigger existing disease and not the root cause of it.

What I'm mostly afraid of now, is that the lesson governments took from this is not that social media should be regulated and defanged of data collection and addictiveness, but instead that governments should keep and seize control of said data collection and addictiveness so they can weaponize it themselves to advance their agendas over the population.

Case in point, the now US-controlled tiktok does more data harvesting than when it was Chinese owned.[1] At least China couldn't send ICE to your house using that data.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tiktok-new-terms-of-service-pri...

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