We can all agree that the internet was great and now it is less great, but the second someone articulates a very, very simple rule, the "well ackchyually" crew comes out of the woodwork.
Infinite scroll is very obviously unnecessary. It is very obviously intended to keep people on an app longer than they would otherwise use it. You can lazy load into a finite scroll. Just make people click something every once in a while.
Should all buttons require a confirmation dialog to prevent people from making decisions too hastily? Should we ensure all interactions have at least 100ms of latency so users don’t get mesmerized by a smooth experience? Maybe we should set a max color saturation so nothing looks too enticing. We also don’t really need box shadows or gradients, they’re clearly meant to mesmerize users into making bad decisions.
Is your argument that unless we can make a law that is perfect and covers every conceivable use case of coercive design, then we shouldn't bother to make a law that covers any of them?
I'm pretty sure the point being made is that things like this are very difficult to actually encode into law in such a way that it doesn't cause significant damage downstream. Like, take the age verification/estimation laws that are going around. We see the big companies actively encouraging it because the laws will (ironically) benefit big tech rather than harming them in any substantial manner: companies like Meta have the money and resources to implement them. But everyone who isn't a super big powerful company will be harmed because they will be unable to comply (or will find it incredibly costly to do so).
Because the point applies to the subject of this thread too, that's why. People think that all of this is super easy to just ban by fiat (law) but the problem is that the "simple" solutions oftentimes have harmful downstream effects that must be considered. For example, let's hypothetically say that we ban "addictive algorithms". What even counts as an "addictive algorithm"? Does my Mastodon home timeline count as an "addictive algorithm"? How about the Bluesky feed? Does the HN home page count as one? (Someone could (reasonably!) make this argument too, given that HN does dynamically update it's home page depending on rankings of submissions to end-users, even if such an update requires a page refresh.) So what I was trying to say (and the reason I brought up age verification/estimation) is that if we take the simple path we're going to catch a bunch of entities up in the ban that we... Probably shouldn't be banning. But you are also going to suffer a lot of pain trying to (not) cause this problem too.
But we're not talking about banning addictive algorithms, we're talking about banning endless scrolling. You're trying to straw man by bringing in completely different examples.
Edit: rereading the article, they want to ban "psychologically exploitative features intended to maximize engagement that foreseeably lead to compulsive use." It seems like it's pretty straightforward to apply that logic to your hypotheticals.
No my point is that none of these are by themselves even coercive design, there’s no distinction between a smooth or pleasant UX experience and a coercive design without context.
But this isn't about banning those things, it's about banning endless scrolling.
edit: I get that you're trying to provide counterexamples to be able to say "here's something that _could_ be construed as coercive/addictive design, so the law is going to end up banning those" - but that's the whole reason we have courts to interpret these laws. If you can reasonably conclude that a 100ms delay is helpful for user input - then it's probably not addictive design! That's the whole reason courts exist, because there is always going to be ambiguity; laws are not algorithms.
Either all buttons should require a confirmation or no buttons should. There is no in-between. There is no good judgement. There is no middle ground. All or nothing. It's black or white!
Yes, buttons should only require confirmation if it’s a Required Confirmation Button as defined by Section 23554, but not if it’s an Exempt Button as defined by Section 23587. Of course, this only applies to Apps With Some Required Buttons as defined in Section 48994; Apps Always Requiring Confirmation as defined in Section 48985(b) must always request confirmation for every button. This applies only to Registered App Developers as defined in Section 15324. Unregistered App Developers should refer to Section 39406 for requirements. (Button itself is defined in Section 1144114(c), and is not to be confused with a Toggle, a Clickable Rectangle, a Clickable Text Container, or a False Button as defined in the same section.)
Don't quote me on this but I once heard that in the EU you always need to confirm purchases, ie. you cannot have the Amazon 1-click system.
But in general, yes, having a confirmation dialog on important buttons is good UX; similarly as to setting minimum/maximum saturation will increase accessibility by visually impaired people, epileptic people etc.
Talking of heavy-handed confirmation dialogs, there's a good example of this in Apple's Preview.app (PDF viewer). They made an unconfigurable change a few years ago, such that every single time you click any web link in a PDF, you have to confirm with a dialog that you want to open the link. You used to be able to just click links!
The point is that - unrestricted - digital media maximises for time and attention. Given that incentive, addictive behaviours are not only inevitable, but an ideal outcome financially.
It's easy to say that it's absurd, but what would you do?
Every business wants you to be addicted to their products, whether it’s social media, cigarettes, video games, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, supplements, fashion, electronics. Even seemingly innocuous things like reading the news or exercising are often addictions, people are running away from their fears and insecurities. It’s a systemic problem in western society, removing infinite scroll is such a ridiculous idea in the face of a core societal problem like this.
My suggestion would be to look at something like the rat park studies. When mice lived in a nice communal space with other mice, they preferred regular ware over drug laced addictive water. I suspect people are similar, they’re not intrinsically prone to addiction, they’re just trying to treat psychological problems like fear, loneliness, insecurity. We need to attack this root of the problem, but there’s so much money in ensuring that people feel empty so they’ll buy shit to fulfill themselves that there’s no actual motivation from anyone with power to do anything. That’s why you get these dumb ideas for laws, they’re not enough to impact the businesses (who are the real constituents) but politicians can still say they’re doing something and something is better than nothing.
> Every business wants you to be addicted to their products
It simply isn't true a) that businesses are all as unscrupulous as digital media platforms and b) that most products even have potential to be addictive.
It's certainly true that most companies would like you to be a loyal repeat customer, but that falls a long way short of addiction.
What's very obviously unnecessary is the need for a law to police this. You can just not use things you don't like. This need to project one's own morality upon others will be the source of endless conflict.
What are your thoughts on introducing a law that requires social media sites with infinite scroll to feature an addiction warning, something like: "Using this platform may cause addiction in some users."?
There's good reason for a lot of the inaction around asbestos. If it's not moving, not being touched and not accessible to kids / pets etc then it's fine to leave alone. The alternative being extremely costly remediation, and there are still millions of structures with asbestos in them.
... Prop 65 is dumb though. Kind of a trend in California law.
This isn't useful advice for addictive things that have high short term reward and high long term regret though. Especially so when the other party has a strong incentive to keep you trapped in that loop of regret.
Exactly. Also, for responders, let's skip past the "if addicts didn't want to use them they wouldn't," and go straight to framing it as a moral failing implying that they deserve it.
I don't consider addiction a moral failing. But I do think it's wrong to place all the blame on social media if you also play an active role in sustaining your addiction.
That statement leans very hard on the word “like”. Do addicts “like” their addictive behaviors? In a way it doesn’t matter, they’re going to keep doing it anyway.
Conversely it isn't very cool seeing the person who grew up as a McLaren fan dying prematurely due to being influenced to start a deadly habit from a young age. And I say this as someone who enjoys smoking.
What is the cost-benefit analysis that led you to that conclusion? I ask as someone who enjoys smoking but struggles to see any good argument for the return of tobacco advertising.
The law being discussed is for minors. As a society we don't think minors have sufficient executive function to make those decisions, so we find it acceptable to ban them in those context.
Alternatively: As a society we don't think ALL minors have sufficient executive function to make those decisions, so we let parents who do make that decision.
This societal view that you are a powerless NPC slave to ones desires/addictions is highly toxic. It is not in fact binary for most people and people do have free will to make different choices. To absolve the individual of accountability is to undermine the very fabric of society. The way individuals typically overcome addiction is through reliance on close family & friends. Those family & friends can "take the phone away" or "uninstall the app" if there is really an issue. Laws are a blunt instrument and should be used sparingly.
I’m a Buddhist, so I really do see what you’re saying about personal responsibility and agency, but the other problem I see is that the companies at the forefront of these ultra-addictive industries (including mass social media) get busted eventually every single time for working overtime to hide what they knew about how damaging their products can be, and in fact to convince the public that their products do the opposite of what they actually do.
Does nicotine have some beneficial health effects? Yeah, it actually does. But do they outweigh the downsides (and societal costs)? Absolutely not.
I do believe strongly in individual freedom of choice, but only under a paradigm of informed consent, and companies like Meta have never allowed that to happen and they never will, because the truth getting out could destroy their bottom line.
> Does nicotine have some beneficial health effects? Yeah, it actually does. But do they outweigh the downsides (and societal costs)? Absolutely not.
What are the downsides and societal costs of social media addiction? We have decades of strong evidence on the harms of nicotine and cigarettes, but the evidence regarding social media addiction is nowhere near as clear-cut, at least from what I've read. Likewise, the causal relationship between cigarettes and their harms is well established, whereas the relationship between social media use and addiction-related harms is much harder to disentangle from other contributing factors.
Not to mention, nicotine is highly addictive for almost any user, while most people who use social media do not become addicted.
I understand the broader point you're making. I'm just not convinced there's enough evidence to justify treating social media addiction as comparable to cigarette addiction.
That article gives a superficial overview of some of the research, which for obvious reasons is still in its infancy.
I didn’t mean to compare the harms to tobacco, but to how these companies tend to operate.
That said, the fallout of social media addiction and overuse is far weirder than the fallout from tobacco (which mostly just gives people cancer). Social media appears to be tearing the fabric of society apart.
I don’t have studies to cite but it seems like half of americans are one type of conspiracy theorist or another now, and that’s directly attributable to these new media channels.
I think the negative effects have been most pronounced on young women (body image issues and bulemia) and people with low media literacy (the misinformation plague).
There’s also the algorithmic “extremism” pipeline, where anything you show a little interest in gets turned into more and more extreme iterations to keep you engaged.
So maybe “addiction” isn’t even the right word to use here. But just look around outside in any major city or event in America and see how compulsively almost everyone uses their phones during downtime. It’s reflexive at this point, not really a conscious decision.
Some of the scariest stuff is coming from primary school teachers. Most of them act like late gen z and gen alpha are genuinely illiterate. It makes sense, you have little kids trying to swipe on physical photos in picture frames and stuff. That says something big about their lifestyles and then imagine the downstream effects of that…
I think it really tells you something when the CEOs and people who work for social media companies don’t let their own kids use the product, or drastically limit access to it.
This is sparingly. The government basically let the tech industry run amok for 20 years and only acted when the problems it was causing were serious and undeniable.
"Some lawmaker" is democracy. The point is that people are pissed off about the addictive UX, same as cigarettes, and candy. If you want to make a serious argument, just argue that you should be able to opt out, which is an entirely reasonable position.
Democracy is bound by the limits of the Constitution, outside of an amendment or a revolution. (Note that the latter is usually considered a Bad Thing; occasionally it works out for the better, but just as often for the worse.)
it's basically malicious compliance. They're supposed to be super annoying ... Instead of complying, they choose this obnoxious practice so they could continue ... monitoring every action a visitor does.
You don't need a cookie banner to be allowed to create Cookies. You only need them if you're using them for something like tracking. [1]
Regulators didn't enforce cookie banners. Cookie banners are a form of malicious compliance. When you complain about them, you are doing the lobbying work of ad companies for free. The correct solution is to just not spy on people, and the problem is that the EU didn't go far enough and just ban the behavior altogether. [2]
Cookie pops are malicious compliance to regulations that legitimately protect consumers. You’ve cherry picked one bad side effect to throw out all the ways the EU is way ahead of anyone else in protecting consumers [3]
The EU Council are some of the worst offenders when it comes to annoying cookie banners. All regulation and compliance do is make things more burdensome for new entrants, which inevitably allows big companies to build moats that don't have competition. The side effect of passing such legislation was easily foreseeable and yet the EU did it anyway. There are legitimate reasons for companies to track and if you felt that the tracking was malicious, then don't do business with the company. The regulation was never needed.
For one, compliance is compliance. For another, "You only need them if you're using them for something like tracking." yeah, sites want to track user behavior and the eu said if you want to do that you gotta have a banner. How is that "malicious"? Seems like the eu got exactly what they wanted?
> and the eu said if you want to do that you gotta have a banner.
No they did absolutely not say that! They said I need informed consent before I collect your personal identifiable information. Nothing prevents me from instead of using a banner, for example having a small widget in the footer or elsewhere on my site if I were to want to collect it (I have no analytics or cookies on my site at all).
> for example having a small widget in the footer or elsewhere on my site
And next thing you know, there'd be people complaining about "dark patterns" where the small widget is designed to be very easy to overlook and (more importantly) someone may inadvertently use the site briefly before noticing that they can turn off tracking. Whoops, you just got tracked.
A modal makes it obvious what's happening on the site and gives you a chance to opt-out before proceeding. There really is no better way to do it that's going keep everyone happy. People just don't want to admit that the only way to properly implement this feature is to annoy people.
I can’t emphasise enough how much you are missing the point of the law! The law requires me to NOT track you unless I get specific, informed, consent.
The fundamental and default part of the law is to NOT track. Tracking by default (opt-out) is illegal. A modal is just a way to annoy you until you consent against your will.
It’s simple, informing implies taking screen space, expressing consent implies user action. So overall it HAS to be similarly annoying to a cookie banner.
Of course if your answer is “people should just stop using cookies” then I have bad news for you.
I want to decline a websites ability to track my behavior and/or decline that they pass the data to another company. Most websites allow me to decline it. I prefer to have to opt in which is a minor inconvenience - then not having the option at all. Also the banners we got are deliberately bad and cumbersome so people just click on allow.
When it came time for website owners to decide whether they (1) would remove unnecessary cookies, (2) receive consent from their users for extra cookies via reasonable banners, or (3) circumvent consent from their users for extra cookies via dark-patterned banners...
... virtually no website owners opted for (1), a minority opted for (2), and most opted for (3). Yet every technolibertarian thinks (3) is the law's doing and not the consequence of other technolibertarians.
Not only it's unnecessary, it also bad GUI. In apps with infinite scrolling your position doesn't get its own state, so if you eg. go view a post & return to Instagram timeline it opens at the beginning. If you use media more thoughtfully as opposed to mindless scrolling, it just doesn't work.
With pagination you could say return to IG after a week, go through 5 pages of whoever you're following, check out a post, go back knowing you stopped at 5th, and continue from there. You can also set a limit (I'll check 10 pages tops and then go to sleep), which is helpful even with algorithmic feed.
I'm sure they can screw up pagination too if they wanted, but typical implementations don't have this issue
Stateless infinite scroll is just lazy/incomplete implementation though - there’s no reason you can’t keep your place via permalink. Just pop the state into history using the uuid of each card as it shows in the viewport, then when the user returns using that url, drop them in at that point in the feed with some reasonable before/after preloaded.
They can randomize (with bias for hot/recent content) entries on each page, but paginate them. FOMO will keep people clicking next even once they recognize some entries.
Nobody has ever been guided down an extremist rabbit hole ending in a misogynist shooting because of yogurt. At least, not to my knowledge.
There is a very real harm to allowing an engagement optimizing algorithm (which, if programmed effectively, almost always ends up a negative emotion firehose).
I don't know if this is the right solution, but I don't see that an extensive yogurt selection is the same thing as whatever the fuck is going on with Facebook feeding an endless stream of corrosive bullshit to users.
Just because we can’t eliminate all harms doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to minimize them.
Online radicalization is a documented issue. Engagement optimizing algorithms pushing extreme and polarizing content is also well documented. Even the excess screen time on algorithmic feeds is well documented as harmful in young populations even if the radical content issues are ignored.
So while we did have shootings before, we did not have incels, groypers, ISIS sleepers and other weird people encouraging and glorifying them. If we can stop one at the cost of eliminating endless scrolling on Facebook, I think it’s a fair trade.
Meta claims itself to be beneficial because of all the ads it sells in support of small businesses. We had ads and small businesses before the internet, too. The question that both Meta and anyone opposed to infinite scroll has to answer is: did this change anything?
Well, one thing that definitely changed everywhere in a way well-correlated with local access to smartphones, is reduced fertility, so something definitely happened, but was that something infinite scroll, or something else?
This is a false equivalence. I don't use a product _because_ it's got an endless scroll. I use a product and then they add that "feature" without giving me an option. I would, and have, turned it off when possible. But it's not currently possible to do so on apps like Reddit.
In no way is this like yogurt. If I don't like that one yogurt has trace amounts of heroin in it, I can buy a different yogurt. If I don't like that reddit has an infinite scroll, I have to miss out on conversations in communities I like. There simply aren't similar communities I've ever been able to find for certain topics. And anything similar also has an infinite scroll (Facebook, twitter, etc.).
If, in your example, all yogurts had trace amounts of heroin in them, I would agree with the comparison.
You seem incredibly sure about the health safety of a technology we've had for ~20 years and of which the daily usage has been steadily rising in that time. US kids average 5 hours/day on social media.
By the way heroin use was widespread in the early 1900s, it took decades to regulate it even though the addictive and detrimental effects were very obvious to everyone. And let's not get started on nicotine. See the similarities?
> How does choosing your book’s font and margins apply to freedom of speech?
The fonts and margins dont communicate anything by themselves. There is a book that communicates ideas/opinions and that is what's protected by the first amendment. If someone found a font that exploits the brains reward mechanism and causes all sorts of mental health problems perhaps that should be regulated too.
Infinite scroll doesn't communicate anything by itself, it is purely a revenue maximizing feature that, as it turns out, has negative effects for people. There is no underlying idea or opinion here that Meta is communicating that should be protected by free speech.
Fonts are protected, you say? Then what if someone makes a font where every character is a different scene of child pornography? Would it be protected?
Is it? It appears consumers prefer it. Are they all wrong? Should we ignore the preferences of other people because you are the all-knowing lord of the internet?
Yes exactly, a democracy should be above markets. Not sure why such a strong reaction about people agreeing that certain things cause harm and should be legislated.
As a leftist, I'd be really happy to see most CA legislators banned. Let's start with Gavin, and his pro-utility, anti-consumer CPUC.
Now that that problems solved, let's just ban meta, the twit-verse, and twerk-tik completely. The whole asocial media industry is just a giant waste of time and space.
One has to winder if the whole thing wasn't bootstrapped as a feed industry for the mental illness industry...
I have similar contempt for these politicians and for the affected companies. But as a leftist, surely you must understand that these centrist wonks want this creeping regulation as a tool against you just as much as anyone. Being the idiots that they are, they blame their lack of control over social media for their continued losses, and not their absolute failure at governance. But they hate you just as much as (maybe more than) those on the right, as is clear any time a left-leaning candidate starts to gain ground politically.
Infinite scroll is very obviously unnecessary. It is very obviously intended to keep people on an app longer than they would otherwise use it. You can lazy load into a finite scroll. Just make people click something every once in a while.