TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe • Hacker News Board

Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

#441

Post by dinfinity » Fri, Feb 06, 2026, 11:01 PM UTC

programjames wrote: post #404

dinfinity wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. It's not that the producers or distributors (of food, content, etc.) are not malicious/amoral/evil/greedy. It's that the real solution lies in fixing the vulnerabilities in the consumers. You don't say to a heroin addict that they wouldn't have any problems if those pesky heroin dealers didn't make heroin so damn addictive. You realize that it's gonna take internal change (mental/cultural/social overrides to…

Doesn't the government try to ban heroin?? You have to live in the real world, not your ideal world, and in the real world people are not perfectly rational agents. They make mistakes. Each and every mistake could have been avoided if the individual just had a stronger will, was a little smarter, a little more prudent, or took a little more time to think, but just because mistakes can be avoided and some people are b…

> I'm not saying "let the producers run free". Intervening there is fine as long as we keep front of mind and mouth that people need to take their responsibility and that we need to do everything to help them to do so.

Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

#442

Post by computerthings » Fri, Feb 06, 2026, 11:17 PM UTC

jamesblonde wrote: post #45

I gave a talk at PyData Berlin on how to build your own TikTok recommendation algorithm. The TikTok personalized recommendation engine is the world's most valuable AI. It's TikTok's differentiation. It updates recommendations within 1 second of you clicking - at human perceivable latency. If your AI recommender has poor feature freshness, it will be perceived as slow, not intelligent - no matter how good the recommen…

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Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

#443

Post by hollerith » Fri, Feb 06, 2026, 11:18 PM UTC

haugis wrote: post #185

dfxm12 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The videos are the entertainment, not the endless recommendation algorithm. Additionally, this is not about self control. The claim is that the algorithm is designed to exploit users . Insiders (including a designer of infinite scroll!) have admitted as much going back years: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44640959 We should be uncomfortable with companies spending huge amounts of money to research and implement…

I see what you're saying, but I would much rather my 9-year old spends an hour on TikTok than an hour smoking Marlboros.

The choice would not be so clear-out to me. I'd have to think about it.

Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

#444

Post by Dweller1622 » Fri, Feb 06, 2026, 11:19 PM UTC

krapp wrote: post #208

zbentley wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that kind of absolutism isn't helpful either! "Government" isn't an external actor; most governments exist on the spectrum between "a big chunk of the public is OK with or supports what they're doing" and "directly influenced by public opinion" (democratic states). And yeah, they abuse power a lot! So do corporations, tribes, religions, etc.--governments are just the "big group with violence capability and power"…

>Well, liquor quite famously is considered as something to be protected in the U.S.; we had widespread civil unrest about removing legal restrictions on it! And yet there's no Constitutional right to liquor, nor is access to liquor generally recognized as a fundamental human right. The civil unrest was due to the obvious result of banning liquor being the creation of mafia-run black markets. Same as the "war on drugs…

The world at large seems to have descended into moral panic on all sorts of subjects and it's difficult for me to understand precisely how or why. Perhaps it's no coincidence that over the last decade and change there seems to have been broad political shifts to the right. Certainly the various moral panics would have interplay with that, but I'm not sure which came first if either.

Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

#445

Post by boelboel » Fri, Feb 06, 2026, 11:35 PM UTC

AreShoesFeet000 wrote: post #226

Forgeties79 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t agree tbh. This is part of how people wind up down extremist rabbit holes. If you’re just lazily scrolling it can easily trap you in its gravity well.

But you can get into extremist rabbit holes independently of control surface. Remember 4chan? Dangerous content is a matter of moderation regardless of interfacing.

4chan has a lot less extremism than people imagine, rspecially compared to platforms like Instagram or Facebook. It's mostly concentrated on certain boards. The reputation of being extremist did more 'in favour' of its extremism than the original userbase and design ever did.

Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

#446

Post by computerthings » Fri, Feb 06, 2026, 11:41 PM UTC

eggy wrote: post #71

I'm skeptical about banning design patterns just because people might overuse them. Growing up, I had to go to the theater to see movies, but that didn't make cliffhangers and sequels any less compelling. Now we binge entire Netflix series and that's fine, but short-form video needs government intervention? The real question is: where do we draw the line between protecting people from manipulative design and respecti…

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Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

#447

Post by sensanaty » Fri, Feb 06, 2026, 11:41 PM UTC

criddell wrote: post #43

lozenge wrote: post #5

I don't understand the legal side, but after gaining and kicking a Tiktok addiction during and after COVID, I believe it. I was there 4-8 hours a day and tried to scroll videos while washing dishes (and during nearly any other activity).

Is it worse than walking around 8 hours a day listening to music? Having headphones on while washing dishes and walking the dog? I think it is, but it's hard for me to articulate without getting into teleological judgments.

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Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

#448

Post by sensanaty » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 12:21 AM UTC

amadeuspagel wrote: post #109

Banning infinite scroll comes close to banning good design. If removing pointless interruptions is illegal, we might as well throw every designer in prison. And why stop there? Why not force TikTok to add other pointless barriers, like making the user solve a puzzle before watching another video? What about other uninterrupted experiences, like watching TV? I find twitter more addictive then TikTok. Should it be forc…

I agree that endless scrolling can be a good UX paradigm, but really only in certain situations, like if I'm looking at my bank account it sure is nice to just keep scrolling to find a payment from 3 months ago rather than having to click a "next" button every 10 transactions.

But when it comes to these algorithmic feeds I think the endless scrolling becomes a dark pattern since it encourages that "one more swipe" headspace that gets people stuck scrolling for literal hours at a time. The platforms engineered their apps this way because they have a monetary incentive to get people sucked in, they even hire psychologists to target people as effectively as possible and I think it's pretty undeniable they've engineered quite an impressive dopamine harvesting engine in the worst way possible.

I do agree that banning recommendation algos is quite dumb, especially since they seem to be specifically singling out TikTok rather than all the apps with similar feeds, and I believe the problems are on a societal level and not necessarily something that can be smoothed over by laws banning predictive algorithms. Realistically if people had time and freedom for their hobbies and loved ones rather than wasting away at jobs that suck all motivation out of you, we'd have a lot less people addicted to this type of content.

Though I suspect there have to be some rules here regardless because even though we're working with incomprehensibly complicated hardware in our noggins the brain is also lazy, and in modern times it's proven quite easy to trap a brain with flashy lights and loud noises that would've been unimaginable a few decades ago.

Really it's just these business models encouraging such antisocial behaviour from the psychotic C-suite in charge that needs to die a violent death, but how we get there is a question I'm not sure I have the answer to.

Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

#449

Post by sensanaty » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 12:32 AM UTC

7tflutter7 wrote: post #346

alangibson wrote: post #269

Give a kid a phone with TikTok on it and observe them for a while. It's genuinely upsetting. They'll spend hours with their heads down just silently looking at the thing. All desire to do anything else just vanishes. Then they freak out when you try to take it away from them. The only obvious difference between them and someone on fent is the verticality of their posture.

Using this logic the government should regulate Minecraft too.

Minecraft at least engages their brains and can genuinely be used as a good tool for creative outlet. I have 3 kid nephews, and I'd much rather have them building random stuff in Minecraft for half the day than letting them anywhere near youtube shorts for even 10 minutes.

I actually witness this fairly regularly. The eldest has a phone (but only allowed to use it for an hour on weekends). He immediately becomes snappy, moody and basically is just a cunt of a kid as soon as he gets sucked into the brainless shit that youtube pushes on him, whereas he has never acted that way when it came to any video game. Sure he'll complain a bit about wanting to play more, but whether that's a video game or playing football with his friends he'd be complaining anyways, and I'm sure every single child in the history of humanity has complained about not being able to play for longer. Ripping the reels away though? It genuinely feels a lot more insidious to me the effect they have on his mental wellbeing, it turns him into an actual thoughtless zombie for a while as soon as he lays his eyes on them.

And this is coming from the Uncle that was obsessed with video games when I was his age (and I still am!), I'm very happy I didn't have anything like tiktok when I was growing up and was forced to dig holes in the dirt and throw marbles at my friends instead to get my entertainment.

Re: TikTok's 'addictive design' found to be illegal in Europe

#450

Post by sensanaty » Sat, Feb 07, 2026, 12:40 AM UTC

davidmurdoch wrote: post #169

islandfox100 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperpalatable_food , One could argue about the plastic usage of the Coca-Cola company, etc

Good call. Maybe the US needs a food score system on the label like they have in some European countries. Obviously that system has it's flaws though

The EU (Maybe it's only Dutch, not 100% sure) food score system is completely idiotic since it applies to products within the same food category only, but it's not really explicitly spelled out anywhere that that's the case and as far as I know there's not even a reliable way of knowing what product falls into what category (e.g. is a freezer pizza in the same category as potato chips/snacks, or is it a baked good?), or even how they came to the score at all. So a bag of chips, a 4 cheese pizza and a head of lettuce can all have an "A" grade, with nothing to indicate what that actually means.

I'm amazed at how many people, even now after a decade of this system being in place, get confused about why a bag of chips is apparently an A. It's very misleading IMO and not very useful for conveying info, that's what the ingredient list is for tbh.