D-Machine
8 hours ago
"Today, we preliminarily found TikTok in breach of #DSA for its addictive design. This includes features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and its highly personalised recommender system."
Deranged and clumsy overreach.
Autoplay and push notifications are under user control in most cases, infinite scroll is near-ubiquitous, and personalized recommendations are desired by most, and also common.
TikTok still has a right to defend themselves, so hopefully we get more careful and specific reasoning than this nonsense.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_...
functionmouse
8 hours ago
The more these companies pay behavioral psychologists to ensure users can't escape, the more users can't escape. The better they get at doing it to people. The end goal is more people hooked than not, spending more time than not scrolling, forgetting, dulling. This is a doomsday level threat.
D-Machine
7 hours ago
I don't think it is in fact such a threat at all, but at least that claim is not completely impossible, and I agree there needs to be caution around these kinds of apps.
However, that caution and legislation needs to be properly specific. If companies are in fact paying behavioural psychologists to maximize addictiveness, this is indeed the kind of thing a ban should be based on, not incredibly generic app features.
functionmouse
6 hours ago
It's tough because they are not putting "maximize addictiveness" in the job description
D-Machine
5 hours ago
Yup, agreed. I don't trust these companies for a second, but I also don't want overreach.
Also, though this isn't super relevant, I am not actually personally too worried if they are really using behavioural psychologists. Most psychology is such junk science and most research psychologists struggle with such basic math and stats that I am extremely skeptical they'd be gaining anything from having a person like that on hand.
I think the reality is that the addictiveness is engineered with simple A/B and other kinds of testing and data, and this kind of engineering / research is better done by people with other qualifications. This would be the thing to look for and demand documentation and evidence about, if we were serious about limiting this kind of thing.
falcor84
8 hours ago
I'm not with you. I would absolutely love to be able to disable all of these antifeatures by sending a header rather than (at best) spend ages finding hidden settings or (at worst) having to use custom extensions or disable js entirely.
D-Machine
7 hours ago
Push notifications are in standard settings for all apps in iPhone, or in the same place for everything in e.g. Firefox/Chrome. Autoplay is also trivial to disable in e.g. FireFox, and in iOS it is a global setting (though hidden in Accessibility). Nothing custom required.
Being able to disable some other features via header would be fantastic. I too would prefer more fine-grained control over these things, and that they were opt-in rather than opt-out, but I am not sure the majority of people feel that way.
My main point about the clumsiness is that these are ubiquitous app features that are everywhere even on non-addictive apps, so the given reasons really need to be more specific, or the (attempted) ban is effectively just banning apps being useful.
EDIT: Heck, even if there were some concrete suggestions, like "after X minutes of infinite scrolling, require a popup reminder to the user to take a break", this could easily be so much better. As it stands, it just sounds like standard, useful features (and standard combinations of features) are being demonized with little qualification or nuance.
EDIT2: They do even mention "implementing effective ‘screen time breaks'", but it is unclear if this is forced rationing vs. a reminder, so, again, really need more clarity and nuance on these things, especially in headlines and releases.