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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

#851

Post by rockskon »

ben_w wrote: post #88
rockskon wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's the problem - different substances require different solutions. You reduce sugar intake, not eliminate it. You eliminate cocaine intake, not just reduce it. Treating social media design as equal to something that can kill people in excess unnerves me.

> Treating social media design as equal to something that can kill people in excess unnerves me. As it should, because there's a really obvious "slippery slope" argument right there. But… it can kill people. There is a certain fraction of the population who, for whatever reason, can be manipulated, to the point of becoming killers or of causing injury to themselves. Social media… actually, worse than that, all A/B te…

That robs people of any notion of autonomy and free will. Not thrilled with that.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#852

Post by dahart »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #849
dahart wrote: post #842

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because the internet exists outside of the US and you can get to foreign sites on the Internet? 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 al…

We also have an existence proof that region-specific laws can change web advertising practices globally with the GDPR.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#853

Post by fsflover »

dahart wrote: post #850
ajam1507 wrote: post #812

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And? Those ads aren’t on other platforms, and they won’t go away if you ban compensated advertising. Surely you’re just being completely naive if you think banning “compensated” advertising would change the advertising rather than the compensation mechanisms.

Any compensation mechanism will become outlawed, so what are you talking about?

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#854

Post by zestyping »

vanviegen wrote: post #553
coffeemug wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And what about games that are actually just great fun? That would be easy to confuse with addictive, right?

The important indicator is "I spend more time on this than I myself want to." That applies equally well to games or anything else.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#855

Post by relaxing »

mh2266 wrote: post #417
relaxing wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moving away from chronological allows them to feed you more addicting content, as does the infinite feed. They involved together because they work together synergistically. It’s of no value to point out both can technically be implemented independently. That isn’t what happened, and even if it did it would still be user hostile.

I still don't understand. If TikTok simply showed the user every single TikTok ever created, strictly in reverse chronological order, it would still be an infinite scrolling UI. The sorting algorithm that they choose isn't what makes a UI infinite scrolling or not, they're completely orthogonal. In MVC architecture terms they're model and view respectively...

This would never happen, because it’s of no value to anyone. Not the advertisers or the users.

Stop getting hung up on whether things are technically possible, and instead think critically about the actual effects of design choices.

The architecturally boundary between view and model (famously difficult to keep cleanly separated, by the way) is what’s orthogonal here. These are business decisions, not software decisions.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#856

Post by rendx »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #374
rendx wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? You're not arguing that we should get rid of 'reasonable' laws out of misinterpretations of them, are you?

I'm willing to argue that, sure (though it's purely a hypothetical point as I'm not a citizen of the EU and thus I don't and shouldn't have a voice in the laws there). I don't judge a law by a deontological measure of worth, but rather by whether it seems to be making things better or worse. The GDPR has overwhelmingly made my experience browsing the web worse, not better. Whether it should have resulted in that is b…

> The GDPR has overwhelmingly made my experience browsing the web worse, not better.

From where I sit that's hard to evaluate since you cannot actually see most data abuses and privacy concerns, and you also don't know how it would have been without it. You also see the effects of various laws and regulations in combination, so the ones related to GDPR are not easy to be singled out. Are you thinking only of the cookie banners? Maybe sites would be plastered with even worse bullshit. Did you consider that GDPR also resulted in privacy policies that (if actually somewhat legal) are fairly easy to read and not just copy pasta but specific to the service(s), have proper contact information, you get some transparency about which data partners the sites work with, sites need to have full data export, right to be forgotten (removal of your data/contributions), and so on. I am certain you benefit from it often, potentially without realizing, and you wouldn't know what the world would be like without them today so it's not so straightforward to reason about.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#857

Post by fauigerzigerk »

ajam1507 wrote: post #843
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #828

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- 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…

You're right that modern video games and Netflix are a good examples of things that are non-ad-based, but are insidiously addictive. I used "insidiously addictive" to mean something which is engineered specifically to maximize addictive potential, and is not addictive purely on its own merits. An example of a game development pattern that I would consider "merely addictive" would be a game developer trying to make th…

Corporations want to sell as much as possible to make as much money as possible.

Whenever the frequency, quantity or intensity of use drives up earnings, you are bound to get the same result: More "addictive" designs are better for earnings than less "addictive" designs. The difference (if any) between addictive because fun and addictive by design is irrelevant for this outcome.

What I will grant you is that the link can be more direct with ad funding. If a newspaper publisher knows that some very loyal subscribers only ever read 5 articles every morning, making that particular group read 30 articles would not drive up earnings.

But I think on average across all readers the link between reading more and higher earnings would still exist and hence the incentive to make the product more "addictive".

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#858

Post by tt24 »

samrus wrote: post #662
andsoitis wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you think of a singe freedom you enjoy that isn’t in one way or another supported by some form of regulation? Regulations can protect freedoms, but they don’t create them. Freedom is inherent. Regulations protect.

And when freedoms are being infringed, regulations need to be brought in. Hence banning ads online

Your freedom isn't being infringed by seeing an ad lol, what a hilarious suggestion

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#860

Post by dahart »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #804
dahart wrote: post #755

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t hearing some Spanish from time to time expected in Miami, whether you speak it or not? I expect to hear Spanish and I live nowhere near a coast… And you prefer that advertisers read through your posts/emails/history/everything to make ads targeted at you? If you don’t care about the risks of targeted advertising, and don’t agree with the EU’s decision to ban manipulative behavior, then the proposal we’re discus…

I know some Spanish. But if I were an advertiser, I wouldn’t want to waste my money on ad impressions on people who couldn’t understand a word I was saying. I also as a business person who targets Spanish speaking people - like you know immigration assistance or when mask thugs think I’m here illegally when I was born in Puerto Rico (hypothetically). So what if I have a website based out of the counter and accept adv…

Obviously sites not based in the US don’t have to follow US laws. And obviously using a VPN circumvents local laws. Again, I’m not going to do any of this, but you answered your own question: one way the US could enforce this would be to require ISPs to block targeted advertising, regardless of where the originating site is located.
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