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

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 respecting their ability to make their own choices? If we're worried about addictive patterns, those exist everywhere—streaming platforms, social feeds, gaming, even email notifications. My concern isn't whether TikTok's format is uniquely dangerous. It's whether we trust adults to manage their own media consumption, or if we need regulatory guardrails for every compelling app. I'd rather see us focus on media literacy and transparency than constantly asking governments to protect us from ourselves.

You can't legislate intelligence...

> Otherwise it just seems like the EU waits for years and years until a company is a big enough player and then retroactively decides they’ve been breaking the law for years.

Lol. It's never like this.

These companies are given plenty of warnings and deadlines. After years and years of ignoring them these companies get slapped with a fine and start playing the victim.

BTW at this point DSA has been in effect for three years

They should do the same with Instagram and Youtube shorts... but wait, they are not chinese, they are allowed to mine us...

They will pay upfront or put some geopolitical pressure https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c24g8v6qr1mo

You can try and squeeze a free speech absolutism story out of it, but the reality is that this has been a story since Microsoft got into cable news.

At that point it was a game of "I'm not slandering you" to chip away at every other valuation, that could have easily have just been called antitrust because they didn't build it. That was 1996-2005 and went completely unchecked.

This is similar but the stack was even cheaper, and closer to more people's faces.

Even if governments take no recourse, I don't see an issue with government using it's position to put a food pyramid in citizen's faces to say like, "this can be harmful." The church probably would have if this were long ago, except, instead of fire and brimstone, some sort of epic story of social isolation, permanent dissatisfaction, and self-imposed constraints, alien abduction, transformation into a pig by a wizard?

There's probably a lot of visceral fears that would be worthy analogs to the harms of the feed.

I don't think that this narrative has been explored enough, honestly. Corps keep building crap like this, even amazon has (had?) an influencer feed.

People who are in play/leisure should probably practice tolerating more choices than "express mild, momentary dissatisfaction and receive an instantaneous reward"... that's probably not a life everyone should be trained to live