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The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

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Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#931

Post by jason_oster »

yallpendantools wrote: post #909
jason_oster wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads are mostly evil. No one said that ads were inherently evil. It's bad enough that ads are mostly evil. Let's be clear what we mean by "evil". My time is valuable. I have a finite number of heartbeats before I die. If I have to spend 30 seconds watching a damn soap commercial before I get to watch a Twitch stream, that's 36 heartbeats I will never get back. Sure, I could press mute and do something else for 30 seco…

The parent post I was replying to: > 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. You, jason_oster, a clown: > Ads are mostly evil. No one said that ads were inherently evil. It's bad enough that ads are mostly evil. Also you in the same clown breath: > sponsored segments in videos a…

Crass and futility irate. What an unusual way to engage. It wouldn’t hurt to moderate your tone.

The thing about sponsored segments is that they pay publishers much less than what they would make with microtransactions. A 1 cent tip per viewer would be 100 times more lucrative than any ad placement.

But it sounds like you want to do some more explaining.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#932

Post by rockskon »

ben_w wrote: post #927
rockskon wrote: post #851

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Humans are not machines. If your goal is to control rather than educate and guide, then we do not have shared values upon which to debate the contours of.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#933

Post by arter45 »

0dayz wrote: post #660
xg15 wrote: post #654

The first part sounded good, the "every platform is different, we have to decide everything case-by-case" and the specific focus on TikTok less so IMO. Keep in mind that in Europe, TikTok is still run by the original owners with China connections - unlike the new "American TikTok" after the owner change in the US. The US legislature only seemed to discover its concern about addictive behavior when foreign actors or p…

Why wouldn't you? The DSA for instance has only been used against to western companies so far (doesn't mean Chinese companies are immune).

The DSA list includes Chinese companies like Alibaba and TikTok Technology Limited (Bytedance's European subsidiary). Proceedings have been opened against both US and Chinese companies.

You can check all of this here: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/list-desig...

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#934

Post by Forgeties79 »

rockskon wrote: post #910
Forgeties79 wrote: post #891

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I never said "multiple". Just the leader in the jurisdiction you live in. And I'm genuinely not sure how to interpret your last sentence. In the US we have a President that is increasingly going after people for their speech, in quite a few cases by using the laws and policies put in place to go after dissent. He is going after colleges and businesses who have "bias against whites" using policies put in place to puni…

I agree with that all that. That is why I am surprised you’re downplaying the idea of “stochastic terrorism” and discouraging the term’s usage. I don’t really get it.

It’s also important to note that the MAGA movement doesn’t care what restraint is shown when they’re out of power, they simply use every tool in their toolbox and bury the sword to the hilt every time.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#935

Post by Eisenstein »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #924
Eisenstein wrote: post #921

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? 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 b…

You haven't addressed the argument at all; all you are doing is mentioning specific qualms you have with how this country is being run. Nothing about the structural problems with the US system or the situation we are in right now, or racism, has anything to do with whether or not the public good is better served by public servants rather than for profit interests. Did you forget that slavery was a for profit system which took government intervention to abolish?

And there are many places in the middle between 'government always bad' and 'private always bad'. Extreme positions never get you a good version of the thing you want.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#936

Post by fauigerzigerk »

xg15 wrote: post #928
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #919

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

This sort of "addiction" has caused moral panics for centuries starting with reading addiction in the 18th century. During my own lifetime we had this sort of hysteria about comic books, video games, TV and now social media.

I don't deny that it can cause problems. I remember a time as a kid when I was reading so much all day every day that I actually got depressed and lonely when I was forced to interact with the real world. I wanted to live in the story I was reading.

I also used to procrastinate a lot here on Hacker News. There's even a setting you can enable called "noprocrast" to stop your addiction if you want.

My wife told me she had trouble staying awake at school for years because she was reading novels into the early morning.

Some people believe that what we are currently seeing is something new that wouldn't exist without ad funded media companies deliberately causing it. My experience tells me that this is not true.

But to answer your question. I have no solution. If anything, the solutions may exist on an individual level - lifestyle, social connections, etc. Banning this or that medium or various kinds of advertising tricks will have no effect whatsoever.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#937

Post by fauigerzigerk »

xg15 wrote: post #930
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #857

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mechanism…

I don't get it. Why do you think that it doesn't make sense for subscription based services to be as addictive as possible so that users don't churn?

Second, I don't believe that forms of "addiction" that have existed for centuries can be beaten by small changes to business models. See my other comment for more detail on this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47023484

Also, what would you do about the fact that ad funded services for lower earners are effectively subsidised by higher earners? If you ban the subsidised services, you are causing a massive regressive change to the availability of information and entertainment.

It's the exact opposite of "democratization".

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#938

Post by ben_w »

rockskon wrote: post #932
ben_w wrote: post #927

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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".

Humans are not machines. If your goal is to control rather than educate and guide, then we do not have shared values upon which to debate the contours of.

> Humans are not machines.

Were this the case, we could survive any poison or injuries, and discern truth from falsehood, simply by willing it so. We would never fall to drugs, nothing would get fetishised (in any sense of the word), political parties would be evaluated on merit alone rather than which name they proclaim.

And a lot of stage magic just wouldn't work. Special offers wouldn't be in exciting colours, gambling done with the same methods wouldn't ruin people; get-rich-quick schemes would fool nobody; photosensitive epilepsy wouldn't be a thing, and neither would the so-called "god helmet" (which, ironically, had one attempt to replicate the god helmet correlated only with suggestibility): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_helmet

> If your goal is to control rather than educate and guide, then we do not have shared values upon which to debate the contours of.

The guidance I offer is only these:

1) you cannot escape a box whose existence you refuse to acknowledge.

2) The socratic answer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#939

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

Eisenstein wrote: post #935
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #924

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 b…

You haven't addressed the argument at all; all you are doing is mentioning specific qualms you have with how this country is being run. Nothing about the structural problems with the US system or the situation we are in right now, or racism, has anything to do with whether or not the public good is better served by public servants rather than for profit interests. Did you forget that slavery was a for profit system w…

How do you have a free press that is funded by the government and can report on government corruption and overreach? You keep failing to address that in the last six months the government did take funding from NPR and PBS because they were “too woke”. The government has been threatening to take funding from PBS since the 1960s.

The structural problem is the government. The structure of the government as stated in the Constitution is that the rural Bible thumping, racist part of America structurally has more power because of 2 Senators per state and to a lesser extent the electoral college. Until that’s not the case, the government will always be statistically more likely to be antagonistic to people who look like me.

I’ve worked for 30 years and the last decade+ in roles that put me in the rooms of decision makers. First as a tech lead at product companies and then as a customer facing consultant.

I never wondered whether I was going to be treated differently by corporate America - and I never have either as interviewee or dealing with CxO, directors, etc. The tools of the government on the other hand …

The public servants - the people with the legal right to take my property, liberty and life - those are the problem. You see what the full force of a corrupt government can do to its enemies with the meritless prosecution of Trump’s enemies and that almost half of the people still support. The trigger happy cop that can pull me over because I suspiciously look like I’m going to my own house worries me much more than Jeff Bezos owning the Washington Post. The alternative would be the government owning and controlling the press? This government. Even today if I want to learn about anything related to my health, I trust the Washington Post owned by Jeff Bezos more than I trust the DHS run by RFK jr? You think that if the government funded newspapers you would get the truth about vaccines? The masked jack booted thugs in MN?

You realize slavery was built into the constitution right? That whole 3/5ths of a person thing. Also the same government endorsed “separate but equal” in a Supreme Court case that had my again still living parents growing up in less well funded schools and drinking from separates water fountains.

I mentioned that until a couple of years ago, I lived in what was the most affluent county in the state. That county was Forsyth County GA and just so you don’t think I’m making this up just to argue.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46954232

While the outskirts of this county have diversified as far as not being rural. It’s still mostly White and conservative (my step son was one of only four Black students in his entire public high school). More of the Bush/Romney type of classic conservative than populist. What I didn’t mention was this was Forsyth County only 25-35 years ago.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dlzwh2Wh1fw

It was a “sundown town”.

Those people haven’t gone anywhere - we had White friends that lived in the older parts of Forsyth County and even they told us to make sure we call if we get lost coming to their house and don’t walk up to the wrong house by mistake.

FWIW: we didn’t move because we had any problems living there. We sold the house for twice what we had it built for eight years earlier and downsized after my younger (step)son graduated and moved to state tax free, warmer Florida once I pivoted into consulting where it’s relatively easy to find companies that allow remote work.

Re: The EU moves to kill infinite scrolling

#940

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

NekkoDroid wrote: post #929
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #836

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What’s the use of any press that’s funded by the government? Would you trust them to do accurate reporting on vaccines when the government is run by RFK? Would you trust them to tell the truth about what was going on in Minnesota? Venezuela?

Any government funded press would either be a tool of propaganda or be constantly worried about getting defunded - like what just happened to NPR and PBS.

The government just required the press to get pre approval before they could publish anything - even non classified info.

https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-news/2025/09/pentagon...

This idea was so abhorrent that not even Fox News would sign on.

https://apnews.com/article/pentagon-reporting-rules-hegseth-...

Now the part of the press corps that has direct access to talk to Pentagon officials is literally made up of right wing social media influencers.

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