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The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

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Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#921

Post by Eisenstein »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #875
Eisenstein wrote: post #872

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But everyone has been listening to your argument and doing what you are advocating for since Reagan and yet here we are. Have you every thought about the fact that power doesn't just disappear? Someone is going to have control over the jackbooted thugs. Claiming democratic norms and public control over them is bad just ensures that they become the tools of a few people without any way to constrain them. I'm sorry you…

You know it’s literally in the constitution - the idea of a free press. If the money to keep the press in business, who keeps the government accountable? And to pretend like the US is a democracy where the popular vote matters completely ignores reality. Every state gets two Senators so South Dakota has the same voting power in the Senate as California. The house districts are so gerrymandered that the sum total of D…

> You know it’s literally in the constitution - the idea of a free press. If the money to keep the press in business, who keeps the government accountable?

The constitution doesn't say anything about whether the government can fund media.

> And to pretend like the US is a democracy where the popular vote matters completely ignores reality.

No one made that claim. In fact, no one claimed that popular vote was even a good standard for a democracy. Is your assertion that the solution to an imperfect system is not to try and reform it, but to rely on a worse one?

> So if you want to push for a more (small d) democratic government, you’re going to first have to overall the entire constitution so the largest states population’s aren’t diluted.

I don't know if that's the answer to the nation's problems, but it is worthy of consideration.

> And I posted a link earlier that the government has literally been trying to defund PBS since the 1960a and Mr. Rogers himself had to beg Congress not to defund it.

The government is not a unified monolith. The whole point of democracy is that everything is being debated all the time and sometimes people don't agree and try to stop or changes things that others did. That's a good thing.

> Right now today the federal government is erasing any signs of anything in museums and national parks that doesn’t make the US look good or admit that gay people exist. This is the government you want controlling the press?

I think that's bad, and hopefully enough other people do so that we can vote out the people who are doing that and restore things to how they were.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#922

Post by direwolf20 »

MBCook wrote: post #360
kuschku wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany has regulated it, (though states have slightly different regulations, some states even allowing online gambling, some banning all except the government run lottery). So it should be possible to regulate it.

Thanks. I’m not an EU citizen so I don’t know when EU level laws override member states or not.

They never do, the EU isn't sovereign and has no police force

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#923

Post by direwolf20 »

tt24 wrote: post #859
direwolf20 wrote: post #768

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? It seems like you can't name a single one.

[flagged]

You already engaged with this discussion but your only engagement was to proudly proclaim that you don't engage. How do you square that circle?

Meanwhile you can't name a single right that isn't supported by regulation.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#924

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

Eisenstein wrote: post #921
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #875

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know it’s literally in the constitution - the idea of a free press. If the money to keep the press in business, who keeps the government accountable? And to pretend like the US is a democracy where the popular vote matters completely ignores reality. Every state gets two Senators so South Dakota has the same voting power in the Senate as California. The house districts are so gerrymandered that the sum total of D…

> You know it’s literally in the constitution - the idea of a free press. If the money to keep the press in business, who keeps the government accountable? The constitution doesn't say anything about whether the government can fund media. > And to pretend like the US is a democracy where the popular vote matters completely ignores reality. No one made that claim. In fact, no one claimed that popular vote was even a g…

> The constitution doesn't say anything about whether the government can fund media.

How can the press be free of government power and funded by the government?

> your assertion that the solution to an imperfect system is not to try and reform it, but to rely on a worse one?

So as both a student of the history of the Civil Rights movement, whose still living parents grew up in the Jim Crow South and who himself has been harassed by the police for thinking he doesn’t belong in his own neighborhood where he made twice the household income alone as the median household income in the county (which itself was the most wealthy county in the state), you’ll have to excuse me for not trusting the government.

I have never once been harassed by a private company and I’ve never had a problem getting a job in 30 years across 10 jobs because of discrimination - everything from startups to the second largest employer in the US (working remotely for that one was why I did make twice the income of the richest county in GA).

> No one made that claim. In fact, no one claimed that popular vote was even a good standard for a democracy. Is your assertion that the solution to an imperfect system is not to try and reform it, but to rely on a worse one?

Well for me, the worse thing that can happen is give a government where the states who are predominantly made up and vote for people who are hostile toward people who look like me have outsized power. Who is going to speak truth to power if the power funds the press?

> The government is not a unified monolith. The whole point of democracy is that everything is being debated all the time and sometimes people don't agree and try to stop or changes things that others did. That's a good thing.

Have you not been paying attention for the last two years?

> I think that's bad, and hopefully enough other people do so that we can vote out the people who are doing that and restore things to how they were.

You know that whole thing about what people think don’t matter between 2 senators per state and gerrymandering and to a lesser extent the electoral college? This country knew exactly what they were getting when they voted in 2024 and 40% of the people still support it.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#925

Post by justacrow »

samrus wrote: post #912
justacrow wrote: post #783

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engaging in bad and immoral behaviour for capital is still bad and immoral behaviour, particularly when one has other choices.

The point of capitalism is that it incentivizes behavior at a large scale through the allocation of capital. That behavior could be bad or good. The way to make sure that behavior isnt bad is to regulate the economy to ban it. Not to scold people who follow those incentives but then do nothing about the actual incentive structure

I'm all for banning social media as well as tracking in general, and will also happily work to those effects.

It's also prudent to shame those who allocate and greedily take that capital.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#926

Post by bigfudge »

nkmnz wrote: post #882
bigfudge wrote: post #808

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that doesn’t make the streams more or less addictive, or directly pay the platform which has control of that. So it’s basically irrelevant

So you really think ads during a video make them more addictive?

No. The point here is that Google is not paid for the ads, so are not incentivised to make the service more addictive. This seems obvious: it’s not the ads we have a problem with per se—- it’s the distortion of they attention economy they entail.

Clearly any scheme will not be perfect but these sort of objections either seem to misunderstand the core issue, or to be willfully confusing by raising irrelevant details.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#927

Post by ben_w »

rockskon wrote: post #851
ben_w wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

"Not thrilled with that" is also something they exploit to manipulate you.

Seeing this in black-and-white terms like "robs people of any notion" makes it easier to turn your dislike into a false choice, like any half-decent stage magician, between comfort and "not thrilled".

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#928

Post by xg15 »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #919
ajam1507 wrote: post #864

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I think it's hard to say if that's true. A consumer might be willing to pay more for a service they use a lot rather than a little. What I do know is that I can see plainly that advertising-driven services are among the worse offenders fo…

>What I do know is that I can see plainly that advertising-driven services are among the worse offenders for creating addictive products and other revenue models generally provide healthier incentives to direct development. I can see plainly that this is not the case and I have given you a number of examples. But I guess we will have to agree to disagree on this one. >The EU's general approach here is probably better…

> I also prefer this to a ban because a ban would be incredibly destructive and regressive while this regulation will be merely ineffective.

So what would be your solution to the addiction problem then?

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#929

Post by NekkoDroid »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #836
tcfhgj wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Works quite well in germany

So let’s hypothetically say that some autocrat decided to take over Germany and decide a certain minority should be - I don’t know extinguished - wouldn’t a free non government run press be useful? Nahh that would never happen.

I think your main issue in your argument is that you think that only government funded press is allowed to exist, which isn't what anyone was talking about.

Also, what would stop the autocrat from outlawing any non-government news source?? A piece of paper written by people 250 years ago certainly won't.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#930

Post by xg15 »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #857
ajam1507 wrote: post #843

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The "problem" (for corporations) is that the process of signing up for a subscription is itself a major obstacle in user flow and can serve as a point where users "wake up" and realize what they are doing.

Sure, you can design your pages after the sign up to be addictive, but that wouldn't actually help you to get more subscribers - so there is not a lot of economic rationale to do so (unless you have other mechanisms to "monetize" already signed up users, such as lootboxes or in-app purchases)

In contrast, if you can use advertising to monetize non-subscribed users, you can sidestep that entire obstacle altogether. That's why there is a lot of economic incentive to design the free part of services to be addictive, as long as there is advertising.

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