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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

#761

Post by gpm »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #726
Eisenstein wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You're making the counter argument. Government funded media may be cut or controlled in times of (wannabe) dictators, but the same applies to privately funded media (see Kimmel, Colbert, CBS, Washington Post, etc)

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#763

Post by duskdozer »

andsoitis wrote: post #477
foxygen wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moving the goalposts much? Of course there aren't any free services serving millions currently, how could they, when Facebook/X spends millions to make sure everyone stays on their platform? Which non tech savvy would want to move to a platform without all their friends? That's the gotcha with social networks, once you grow big enough, it is really hard for people to move off of it. Still, funny how you ignored IRCs/…

> Still, funny how you ignored IRCs/forums that I mentioned. Those were used by MANY people, and could scale infinitely. At its peak (late 1990s to early 2000s), IRC was estimated to have about 3–4 million concurrent users worldwide at any given moment, with tens of millions of total users over time. Pales in comparison with the scale that’s needed today, given the number of people, variety of media, and bandwidth re…

Part of the amount of bandwidth and computing power required today is specifically due to advertising and activities in the same cluster: tons of media files and javascript for ads and analytics and dark patterns and 'catchy' interfaces, all entirely unnecessary and providing no real value.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#764

Post by Eisenstein »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #726
Eisenstein wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And I would argue that they have been able to do this because a small group of private individuals control the information networks and either desired that purpose or are ambivalent to their cause in it.

The potential failure of the system because of the effect of the wrong choice in this matter is evidence in favor of my argument, not against it.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#765

Post by true_religion »

kenjackson wrote: post #745
stingraycharles wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertising = compensating someone to promote a product / company. It’s about the compensation. That makes it advertising. Regular booking.com is fine. Paying booking.com to allow your results to appear higher is not. Regular Google Maps to register your restaurant is fine. Paying Google Maps to promote your restaurant is not. It’s not that hard to implement. Advertising is pretty well defined.

What people who advertise indirectly on the internet. For example the ads around a baseball field - can that baseball game no longer be streamed? Product placement in a movie - can that movie only be in theaters and DVD, but not Netflix? Could streaming companies show previews of coming shows on their own platform? I also assume it means that sites like X could no longer charge for verified accounts.

I'm curious what the point is in calling out obvious edge cases that can be addressed by either the legislation allowing for discretion in enforcement via the FCC or other department, or having the court system directly address this factors?

What's important is agreeing or disagreeing with the spirit of the law, not trying to get a HN comment to give you a bullet-proof wording.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#766

Post by shaky-carrousel »

permo-w wrote: post #737
shaky-carrousel wrote: post #659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be way smaller and with real content, instead of crappy slop (AI or otherwise).

It would be dead. Google would shut it down or sell it, but who is going to buy billions of dollars a year in costs for no advertising revenue in return? Youtube's hosting costs would put a massive dent in even some hypothetical really nice billionaire's wallet. Apple could afford it and they'd run it a million times better, but would they even consider putting so much loss on their books for the sake of ... PR?

A subscription based YouTube dead? That makes no sense. And a YouTube without terabytes of slop would be way easier to maintain.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#767

Post by dahart »

xg15 wrote: post #644
dahart wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Promotion of anything at all is advertising, with or without compensation. The word advertising is pretty well defined, and the dictionary definitions don’t usually mention compensation, e.g. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/advertise . An example I’m sure you would consider advertising - consider Google advertising Google Fiber in Google search results, or Facebook advertising business services on Facebook…

Yes, but if we're talking about incentives and "primordial domino tiles" then compensated advertising is what createa the incentives for the whole attention economy and addictive design in the first place. Feel free to keep doing "pro-bono" advertising, but shareholders definitely wouldn't.

I don’t understand what you mean about shareholders and pro-bono, can you elaborate? Apple advertises Apple products on Apple channels, and Apple’s shareholders love that, and it’s not “pro-bono”.

I don’t think you have the incentives correctly summarized. The incentive of businesses like Google, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram are to make money, and the only way they’ve figured out how to do that at scale is advertising. None of those sites had ads when they started.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#769

Post by direwolf20 »

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.

Shouting fire in a crowded theater is also speech. So is publishing a highly detailed plan for anyone to kill the president and usurp power. So is child pornography. There's a long list of precedents that free speech in America is not absolute.

And this is about Europe, which has never had an absolutist view of rights to begin with. In Europe, rights are seen as intended to be balanced against each other instead of maximizing an arbitrary set of them to 100%. You have the right to free expression (except in... most countries, so let's call it a theoretical right) as well as the right to not be preyed upon. Although it's legal to distribute chemicals, some of them are highly addictive so they're restricted. Same with social media.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#770

Post by piva00 »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #203
jjcm wrote: 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…

> The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes". They point to certain features they'd like them to change, but there is no specific ruling around what you can/can't do. The issue is: If you do a precise wording of what you don't want a lawyer will go through it wird by word and the company finds a way to build something which violated the spirit, but not the exact…

I think it's a general misunderstanding of Americans about other law systems, the American way of codifying laws leaves a lot of loopholes (intentionally or unintentionally) due to it being a game to be played, the spirit of the law is second to the letter of the law. They expect precise and well-defined constraints in the letter of the law.

Most European countries, and the EU as a legislative body, work with the premise of the spirit of the law. It is less precise and requires real world judgment to determine its boundaries but it can be much harder to side-step with technicalities and "gotchas" using loopholes in the letter of the law.

It's just a different system, in my opinion it's less exploitable even though it's riskier. I prefer the spirit of the law to be defended instead of a whole system of gaming technicalities, really don't like the whole vibe of playing Munchkin the USA has in its legal system. Makes some good legal drama though.

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