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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

#891

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There's literally a name for using this on purpose: stochastic terrorism. There's also a very good TED talk on this topic from 8 years ago : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFTWM7HV2UI

I've always found the notion of "stochastic terrorism" to be elastic, effectively transforming "speech a given person dislikes" into "danger" so censorship looks like virtue. Not to mention - you have to account for what happens if someone you hate may be in power and could wield any sort of system to stop "stochastic terrorism" against you. This is often dismissed as an abstract what-if, but....given what's been hap…

You are worried about the “what if” fallout over the multiple world leaders actually engaging in it. Their followers enact violence on their behalf while the leader maintains plausible deniability/enough perceived distance from the act they can never be explicitly blamed.

You can be worried about more than one thing but clearly one is a bigger issue than the other right now.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#892

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Individual action means absolutely nothing. This person shouldn’t be disparaged for making money for themselves and their family. Every single big corp that pays well is creating the torment nexus. You have to pick your poison. I personally draw the line at missiles and mass surveillance.

> Individual action means absolutely nothing. You may want to view action and sphere of influence. Does an individual have international or national influence? Probably not. How about within their community, home, or person? Probably, yes. I want a good society and I think that’s will be made up of good individuals making individual action. So to me, this all starts at home with the individual’s sphere of influence.

I largely agree with you. I should have clarified that I don’t personally believe individual action matters in this specific scenario.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#893

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How will you ban that without infringing on free speech. That is a thing in the US and a lot of countries outside the EU.

>How will you ban that without infringing on free speech You don't, but the EU doesn't need to care about American ideas of free speech. This is actually in some sense the biggest hurdle to all of this, the psychologically defensive posture that somehow assumes that on European territory this should even be a concern. Also as a sidenote this is even within America a kind of revisionist history, the 20th century had p…

>Also as a sidenote this is even within America a kind of revisionist history, the 20th century had plenty of broadcasting and licensing rules.

The FCC regulates airwaves (and thus broadcast stations/networks), because the broadcast spectrum is a shared resource with bandwidth limits. The FCC similarly regulates cable television systems. The FCC does not regulate cable-only television networks.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#894
post #837

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The Economist (ironically a subscription based publication) reported that subscriptions for news media results in greater political polarisation. When the news outlets says something subscribers don't like, they run the risk of losing those subscribers. This incentivises appealing to a specific set of political beliefs and coddling the customer.

Did that actually have hard data to back that up? Because publications that don't use subscriptions still need people to show up and look at ads. So they are motivated to publish the clickbaitiest things possible. Maybe the difference in that case is that they will publish content that attracts people from various political extremes? That certainly wouldn't make them less polarized though.

I can't locate the article unfortunately.

Ad based revenue comes with its own problems. But I doubt there's that many readers who so ferociously disagree with an article that they then refuse to consume any more free content from that outlet any more, which is what happens when someone cancels their subscription. So, to me it makes sense that ad supported news outlets don't suffer as much from having a wider range of views.

>Maybe the difference in that case is that they will publish content that attracts people from various political extremes? That certainly wouldn't make them less polarized though

Replace "extremes" with "views". Most people aren't extremists. I don't understand why being exposed to various views would not make them less polarised?

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#895

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Infrastructure costs money. There's no way around it. I'm all up for banning ads. But there should be another viable business model to replace it.

I think that's revisionism. Social media existed before online advertising. Usenet was quite massive and vibrant, countless IRC servers were maintained by volunteers, web-based forums covered pretty much the same ground as Reddit does today. All supported by the goodwill of individuals, non-profits, and businesses such as ISPs that actively wanted the internet to be interesting because they were making money by selli…

>countless IRC servers were maintained by volunteers

Most of those IRC servers ran on university networks. (So did most IRC clients, until the late 1990s.)

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#896

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Case law, also known as common law, is a British legal tradition. Most of the EU does not follow the common law tradition. There may be supreme courts, but the notion of binding precedent, or stare decisis as in the US legal system does not exist. Appeal and Supreme court decisions may be referenced in future cases, but don't establish precedent. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precedent > The equivalent doctrine under…

Yeah I'm really glad we don't have common law where I live. It makes the law way too complicated by having all these precedents play a role. If the law is not specific enough we just fix it. Also it breaks the trias politica in my opinion. Case in point: the way the Supreme Court plays politics in the US. It shouldn't really matter what judge you pick, their job is to apply the law. But it matters one hell of a lot i…

>Case in point: the way the Supreme Court plays politics in the US.

Ah yes, since controversy over how judges decide only exists in the US.

In any case, you're confusing cause and effect.

The US system of having legislators approve/reject nominated judges is not the norm elsewhere. The only restrictions on choices for the Canadian Supreme Court are a) being a member of the bar for 10 years, and b) having three judges being from Quebec; otherwise, whoever the PM chooses becomes one of the nine sitting judges on the court. End of story.

If the Canadian Parliament had to give an up/down vote for a nominee, there would absolutely be far more attention paid to each nominee's opinions and qualifications ... and far more attention paid to that nominee's subsequent decisions.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#897

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[flagged]

Why write like this? This is what sick internet communities look like. Mocking people for their account age, advocating for hating people for the sin of being addicted to social media. This is antisocial behavior, and we should do everything in our power to eject it from the small remaining pockets of sanity on the internet.

Someone hurt this person, I suspect. And it has left them bitter, resentful, and angry at anything that gets in their path.

They probably don't like that someone is challenging their ability to be neighborly, follow the golden rule, etc. because it conflicts with their mental model of themself.

I hope someday they will introspect and realize that we are all humans, and all humans deserve wellbeing, even those whose choices, opinions, or situation we disagree with or find unpleasant.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#898

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Oooooof. Can I recommend you spend some time developing some empathy? The world is complicated. People's lives are complicated (and often meditated by their phones). People's emotional and social wellbeing is complicated, and simply ghosting all your social groups on a random Tuesday is likely to cause significant problems.

> People's emotional and social wellbeing is complicated, and simply ghosting all your social groups on a random Tuesday is likely to cause significant problems. You are in a great place in your life, if your most significant problem is caused by not liking a stupid meme and a breakfast photo your friends posted on a random Tuesday...

Can you point to where I said "most"?

If not, please don't put words in my mouth.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#899
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…

I’m sympathetic, but I think this idea seems pretty clearly a political non-starter.

“Good news voters! You now have to pay for your email, search engines, and social media accounts.” Privacy and healthy digital habits are issues dear to my heart and issues that I think are gaining some modest traction, but they just can’t compete with a core pocketbook issues like making everything cost more. In the US, we just elected a guy that campaigned on, among other things, ending democracy, because (at least according to some political pundits) egg prices went up under Biden.

“But you pay that cost now, it’s just hidden!” I know, I know. But that doesn’t strike me as a politically winning argument. It’s like trying to explain to people that inflation is ok as long as if in adjusted terms wages outpace it; technically correct, but a political loser.

I would be happy to be wrong of course.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#900
post #883

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So now we are going to put up the “Great Firewall of America” to protect Americans from those evil foreign advertisers? You really like where this is going?

No, that’s a straw man. For the fifth(?) time, whether it’s foreign or not is irrelevant, and only you suggested they’re evil. The criteria proposed was whether it’s targeted based on personal content or not, and I’m not alone in not liking where we already are in terms of privacy. Are you suggesting that we need to protect foreign advertiser’s rights to your personal content so they can target ads personalized for y…

No I’m saying that how do you stop American companies from buying ads from foreign companies that Americans can get to?

Again I gave you an example of what happens when you try to regulate the Internet - porn companies completely ignoring Florida law?

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