841–850 of 979 posts
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There is likely no overlap between software engineers and the people with below average IQ that the EU tries to protect from themself.
Do you enjoy being so demeaning towards other people?
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Why are you assuming that the hosting locale is even relevant? I’m not going to ban anything, but if @phire’s idea was law, it would probably ban anything advertiser from choosing which ads to show you based on your personal data. It’s irrelevant where the ads or site is hosted, I assume. If ads from foreign countries don’t target individuals, their ads would be legal. If ads from foreign countries, or from the US, u…
How are you going to police foreign countries? If they don’t comply are you going to tell ISPs they must block any foreign site that has targeted ads?
Again, why are foreign sites relevant, and why does this idea seem hard to grasp?
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Do you have a specific example of a subscription based platform that is as insidiously addicting as the ad supported ones?
- Games. - Gambling while rarely subscription based is usually paid for directly rather than ad funded. - Newspaper subscriptions are no less addictive for news junkies than purely ad funded newspapers. - I watch a lot of Youtube, far more than I used to before I started paying for the subscription. - Netflix and in the olden days TV. I'm not entirely sure what "insidiously addictive" actually means. I do sometimes s…
An example of a game development pattern that I would consider "merely addictive" would be a game developer trying to make their game as fun as possible. Does maximizing fun inherently make a game more likely to be addictive? Of course, but addiction was not the criteria being optimized for.
An example of an insidiously addictive video game would be one where the developers specifically created features in the hopes that they would create a dependency with the product to drive subscriptions or sales. It's at least partially about the level of cynicism with which the product is being developed.
A more stark example would be a fast food restaurant refining their recipe to make it more delicious versus one adding drugs to the food to make people addicted.
Newspapers and Youtube are both examples of services that are engineered to be ad-based but have a subscription option, so they're most likely still driven by the same attention-seeking incentives.
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It's the eternal hacker news debate: "let's regulate x" "but surely we can't regulate x because defining x is complicated" "plenty of things are complex and are regulated, also here is a definition that covers almost all cases and the rest can be left to judicial nous" "but people will just evade the law anyway" Honestly pick a post about the EU at random and you'll be able to find some variety of this chain of conve…
I once had the idea to create a HackerNews equivalent to tvtropes called hntropes that crowd sources all of these patterns.
I conceptualize this as something like the Hamming Distance, where you can measure the number of replies the conversation will have before an inevitable pivot to generic American stuff.
So the conversation could start with "Why back in 2013 I had a lovely time fishing in Scotland. The lakes there are remarkable."
"Boy me too that fishing was just great caught such and such fish blah blah blah love those lakes"
"Why that reminds me of the time I went fishing in Kentucky, boy the lakes there let me tell you..."
"Kentucky you say? Why I was just in Kentucky the other day! Boy they sure have
and now it's a conversation about Kentucky real estate instead of a conversation about fishing in Scotland.
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…
I thought about it for only a few seconds, but here is one way to do it. Have users self-report an "addiction factor", then fine the company based on the aggregate score using a progressive scale. There is obviously a lot of detail to work out here-- which specific question do you ask users, who administers the survey, what function do you use scale the fines, etc. But this would force the companies to pay for the ad…
Specifying the requirement in terms of measured impact is a good strategy because it motivates the app companies to do the research and find effective ways to address addiction, not just replace specific addictive UI patterns with different addictive UI patterns.
Building measurement into the law also produces a metric for how well the law is working and helps inform improvements to the law.
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Everything single one of those local businesses is also doing advertising, and is probably how you found them in the first place. They're buying local newspaper adverts, using flyers, or participating in valpaks/coupon mailers.
Actually all of those sound fine to me... I guess it's really just Internet advertising that feels wrong to me, especially when they try to fill in as the source of revenue themselves rather than a means to drive revenue for the main product.
The idea that we should eliminate that because a higher-income bracket of consumers is inconvenienced by ads just comes across oddly haughty and privelaged to me.
Heck, I wouldn't have my successful career today if it wasn't for the ad-supported ISP NetZero CD I came stumbled upon in 1999.
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Isn't this the standard EU way? First, they publish a statement, declaring what they want to see. 'Deal with addictive design', in this case. We've had 'Deal with the zillion different connectors on cell phones' in the past. It is now up to the industry to do this, in whatever way they see fit. If this happens, no law will be written. However, if the industry doesn't deal with it adequately, Laws will Follow, and the…
> claiming there is no law against it Is there a law against it?
There's a strong hint that something's wrong, and that good corporate citizens would change course and try to become positive forces for the world.
Or else.
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How are you going to police foreign countries? If they don’t comply are you going to tell ISPs they must block any foreign site that has targeted ads?
I don’t know, maybe by not showing the targeted ads? By putting legal liability on the US based advertising channels & distributors? By making it illegal for US sites to share an individual’s tracking and history information with advertisers? I can imagine a lot of ways this might work. Again, why are foreign sites relevant, and why does this idea seem hard to grasp?
Do we tell US companies they can’t buy advertising on foreign sites and that those foreign sites can’t be accesed from the US?
We have an existence proof of what happens when a government tries to restrict what people can see on the internet. I live in one of the states that require porn sites to validate ID. If you add all of the sites that ignored the law completely and all of the sites that you can access via a VPN, the number you get is 100%
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Even though I gave an example of a huge swath of advertising that isn’t “compensated”?
Surely you're just being pedantic by pointing out that platforms can advertise themselves without paying money to themselves. If those same advertisements were on another platform they would be compensated ads.