Live data from Hacker News

The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

politico.eu

721–730 of 979 posts

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#721
post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Viewing this thread, and the back and forth of it, I need to say something. Advertising sucks in this thread too. By that I mean, people are not speaking plainly, and it is almost ingrained into our societies now. We "sell" our position in a discussion, a debate. For example, regulation does curtail freedom. Completely. However, lack of regulation can harm people. Significantly. Thus, regulation does not give people…

> Regulation does curtail freedom. Completely.

This depends on what definition of freedom you are using.

Take this definition.

> the ability to do as one wills and what one has the power to do

Being able to walk down a street because there is a regulation restricting cars would enhance my freedom.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#722

Given how badly scrolling has cooked the brain of the average American, seems like a smart thing for the EU to ban.

And based on some of the replies in this thread we better act fast before it's too late.

Reading some comments I don’t know whether some use fallacious arguments deliberately or are simply incapable of logical reasoning.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#723
post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay what if I am in Florida and Facebook sees that all of my posts are in Spanish, should it not be allowed to target me with Spanish speaking ads?

Correct. The proposal is to not be able to use your posts to determine which ads to show. But showing you ads in Spanish because you’re in southern Florida or Puerto Rico would be acceptable.

Are we also going to target in app advertising? If not, every website will just tell you you must use their app

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What could possible go wrong with the government funding media? It’s not like they would take away funding for media that they don’t agree with.

PBS and BBC are both pretty well regarded and receive public funding.

The government has been threatening to cut PBS funding since at least 1969

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Rogers%27s_1969_United_St...

And Trump just cut funding for both PBS and NPR

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#725
post #158
post #64

Here's the actual statement from the European Comission: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_... It's important to note they aren't creating laws against infinite scrolling , but are ruling against addictive design and pointing to infinite scrolling as an example of it. The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes". They point to certain feat…

>"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…

The major loss would be Youtube. Youtube is possibly the greatest educational tool the world has ever seen. Yeah there's some bad stuff, but you want to know how to do almost anything from tying your shoelaces to building a mega laser first-hand from an expert, and watch it be done? It's on Youtube, for free. Remove advertising and it dies and all of that goes with it. Even if the EU, say, buy it off Google and take it into public ownership, which the US government very probably wouldn't allow and also isn't really part of the EU's philosophy, you're still going to have to continuously pay creators for their work and hosting costs, forever. Otherwise I think it's a great idea. Maybe just carve out an exception for educational content

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What could possible go wrong with the government funding media? It’s not like they would take away funding for media that they don’t agree with.

Why would a government elected in a democracy be less trustworthy than a few private individuals? Do heads of large corporations not have an interest in controlling information?

Why are you acting like this is something hypothetical? The Trump administration just cut funding for both NPR and PBS because they are “too woke”

The same government who threatened to take ABC broadcast license because Kimmel made a joke about a dead podcaster

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, and then the legal teams tell me they don't care, and we should put up the cookie banner anyway. I feel like you didn't read my original comment.

I've built software used by EU governments, and we don't use a cookie banner for our login cookies either. If your legal team genuinely suggests that, it's likely your company uses the login cookies for some additional purposes.

The problem is that I spend hours explaining the actual technical nature of what we're doing to the legal team and I feel that there's often some kind of breakdown in communication because they don't understand the underlying technologies as well as the engineers do. And I haven't had this experience at one company, I've had it at multiple companies, several of which folks in this thread will have heard of.

To put a finer point on some of this, in one instance, I was writing an application that would allow our customers to deploy their own website with content that they had created through the tool that my company had provided. My company wasn't adding any tracking whatsoever to these pages. We were simply taking their content, rendering it properly, and hosting it for them. We ended up enforcing a cookie banner on these pages because the lawyers couldn't guarantee that there wouldn't be tracking content on that page that was added by the customers. But the end result is that every page, the vast majority of which don't have any tracking, still have cookie banners.

In essence, the law created a new legal hazard, and people aren't sure when they're going to run into it, so they end up putting up fences all over the place. Between this and malicious compliance, the end user experience has suffered greatly.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#729
post #64

Here's the actual statement from the European Comission: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_... It's important to note they aren't creating laws against infinite scrolling , but are ruling against addictive design and pointing to infinite scrolling as an example of it. The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes". They point to certain feat…

What will probably happen is that someone will develop an industry standard for "non-addictive design" and go around certifying products or product development practices. Like for example, they might disallow optimizing time spent, or they might require more transparency or customizability for your recommendation algorithm.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#730
post #708
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…

This is a brilliant idea, really, but unfotunately it is not a fit for the society we have constructed so far. There are little to no governments around which would willingly hit the brakes on Consumerism — it is having a hypnotic effect on the people they herd as well as being very profitable for them

And it's part owner of the forces keeping fundamentalist religion under wraps too. Why fight over god when you can fight over your football team or your games console or your phone brand or your car
Post reply on HN