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The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes

227 pointsposted 7 days ago

462 Comments

ticulatedspline

7 days ago

Curious as to where the line between “addictive feature” and "good UX" is. Is deliberate pagination actual impedance to use or merely an annoyance that's been weeded out with modern UX design?

When does a feature that simply makes your product easier to use cross into a territory that it's illegal?

What about media previews, in a platform like reddit if you can preview or expand media directly from the main list is that an “addictive feature” or just convenient design?

also interested in the larger economy, if you create a plugin that restores or adds infinite scroll to a website could you be liable for providing illegal UX?

EDIT: to clarify I'm not really griping on infinite scroll in particular, more the difficulty in regulating postitive UI/UX. Dark patterns are relatively easy to identify. If the unsubscribe button is hidden behind 3 screens and is in 3 point font that's pretty clearly a dark pattern. This seeks to regulate the opposite basically "your platform is, too easy, too good at serving your content"

This is much harder to categorize and has fuzzier boundaries. For example imagine if it applied to remembering your login for more than 24 hours. Certainly people would use your service less if they had to continuously authenticate. Are long-lived sessions good UX or encouraging "addictive" behavior?

fitzroy

7 days ago

4 days ago

No it's not stable. You also need the query/filter, and a snapshot of the state of all posts at the exact moment you want to grab the link, since posts can be created/deleted/changed. That's also assuming that your anchor still exists and wasn't deleted or changed.

The only stable way to share what you're seeing is with a screenshot.

close04

6 days ago

7 days ago

[deleted]

6 days ago

says you

bcjdjsndon

6 days ago

> now drowning in an endless morass of lazy-loaded blocks and widgets

> so there is zero accountably if the user was shown something that they need to reference

You just sound angry...

chillfox

7 days ago

Infinite scroll is bad UX design and always has been.

It makes it impossible to click on any links in the footer of the page or even really reading what's in the footer.

I remember when it was initially introduced, everyone I spoke to about it hated it.

sureMan6

7 days ago

Also creates a confusion that algorithm profiteers love, where before you could know a post you saw would be page 1 today and page 2 tomorrow now the homepage of every app is absolute chaos so you have to spend hours searching for something specific or you're just always seeing exactly what they want you to see (to increase engagement or whatever instead of any sensible order)

layman51

7 days ago

I have always hated infinite scroll because it becomes way more difficult to understand the index of a search result or piece of content. For example, if I know that each page of results contains 25 hits, then it is easy for me to see which one is the 25th hit, and then which one is the 26th one (first one on the next page).

I don't mind that the order of search results might be shifted around over time, and I understand that there is some profit motive to inserting tangentially relevant or sponsored hits, but I really wish that there were an easy way of knowing what index each result has.

This grew out of a funny little habit I sometimes have where I like to pick a random number and see what search hit that corresponds to. It becomes too tedious with infinite scroll.

nijave

6 days ago

position: fixed has been around a long time

A lot of implementations also break the back button and "page" or scroll position links (you can link to a singular item but not a spot in the list)

They usually also break psuedo binary search and force linear/sequential search (you can't skip a head to page 10 when you're trying to zero in on a date unless they've added an explicit date filter and you remember the exact date versus the relative position)

Also breaks parallel loading--can't queue up the next few pages of gigantic media in new tabs while finishing the current page

They also tend to break ctrl-f and if they don't they tend to get progressively slower as more crap stays loaded in memory

AstroJetson

7 days ago

You must have spoken to me, I hate it today has as much as I did back then.

6 days ago

I am pretty sure of that. Mostly because they always do the same impractical thing at the same time. And they discover it is bad few years later, also all at exactly the same time.

burningChrome

6 days ago

Its also horrendous for accessibility and screen reader users.

Greenpants

7 days ago

The way I see it, it's the incessant stimuli you get through these apps. There's just no point where the screen stays quiet, stimulus free. Moving elements capture our attention naturally, especially when the entire screen keeps moving. The endless scroll element just makes sure that the stimulus keeps getting renewed the moment you're done with it.

Instead, a scroll should give you a break before heading into the next video. I'm willing to bet this would help severely with addiction. People are then forced to reconsider whether they actually want to play the next video. "Done" should not always lead to "here's the next stimulus". That's what's addictive. The brain isn't made to break out of that loop easily.

TripleFFF

7 days ago

The problem with using scrolling as a metric is it assumes satisfaction with the content presented and ignores the fact that, on certain apps, many scroll miles go into skipping around articles or ads or reposts to get to the content you want, and imo a punishment for seeking more content while also diluting said content with forced ads at an alarming ratio is not indicative of addiction but scarcity of satisfaction and engaging content

Noumenon72

7 days ago

If you continue scrolling, that shows you think that the content presented is valuable enough that scrolling past some misses is worth it. A good scroll like TikTok carefully metes out the ads so that half of them you don't mind and the other half you enjoy. If you find a site whose scroll makes you feel this way, just stop scrolling and don't try to ban the concept for everyone else.

King-Aaron

7 days ago

What I'm about to say is going to sound very 'layman', and this is coming from someone who's been building UI's for like, 20 years.

This discussion makes me both laugh and feel sad, because we all know this is bad for us and gives us zero ROI for our time... and yet there's a whole thread developing here to justify the pattern.

I don't think I have a point on that, just that observation.

iamnothere

7 days ago

Hello, what right do you have to regulate the presentation of speech? If you regulate this format because it’s now considered harmful, what stops El Presidente from moving to ban “zines” because the format is “harmful to young minds” and used by “antifa”? What stops CA from moving to ban forums because threaded formats are suddenly considered “too addicting”? Maybe we should ban VR or first person shooter video games?

There is no allowable constitutional authority for actions like this. CA is literally overstepping the 1A limits of the Constitution here.

tzs

6 days ago

I doubt that this will run into any 1A issues. It will probably pass the test for allowable time/place/manner restrictions.

• It is content neutral.

• The government can probably show a significant government interest in reducing the harms infinite scroll often leads to.

• It is narrowly tailored. It achieves the goal without burdening more speech than is substantially necessary to achieve the goal. Arguably it doesn't burden any speech since every word you can have on an infinite scroll page you can have on a paginated site.

• There are alternate channels. The speakers still can get their message across. In this case they can get it across to the exact same audience in the exact same place. They just have to stick in page breaks.

iamnothere

6 days ago

In the end I’m not really trying to convince these posters—they have obviously made up their mind—but rather to entertain and educate the nonaligned audience.

ethin

6 days ago

Honestly this is the big reason I have stopped participating in threads like this. Infinite scroll is not itself addictive. Hell, there are studies that suggest that us calling it "addictive" could itself create the very problem we're trying to "solve". There are also studies that completely refute the "social media is harmful" narrative too, and I'm talking on the order of millions of participants across more than 50 countries. Hell, even the kids don't agree with the narrative. I bring this up because all of this is so interconnected. I'll just leave this here for those curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vzbz--aPQLE

iamnothere

6 days ago

Thanks for bringing this up. “Infinite scroll is literally cancer” is a new one that I’ve only seen in this thread, and I’m not even bothering to respond to. (Is infinite scroll annoying? Absolutely. But it’s not a “public health” threat, and even if it were that doesn’t trump 1A concerns!)

stonogo

6 days ago

> There are also studies that completely refute the "social media is harmful" narrative too, and I'm talking on the order of millions of participants across more than 50 countries.

Why not link to those instead of a youtube video?

ethin

6 days ago

Because the youtube video essentially says what the studies do (and it's a developmental psychologist who's giving that talk too). I felt it would be a bit easier to digest than more than 6 separate studies that you'd have to read. But if you really want them here are at least 6 of them all essentially saying the same thing: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/18/yet-another-massive-stud...

stonogo

an hour ago

Thanks; it's much easier to examine assertions and weigh evidence when I can actually see the evidence instead of someone talking at me, regardless of their credentials. I appreciate the link.

tpdly

6 days ago

These are private websites accessible over the public internet, to be clear. Also, there are known relationships between the intelligence community and the big platforms, lets not pretend they have free reign.

Should/do we allow foreign propaganda radio stations? If we accept that the government can (and very much does) impose itself on content platforms for "national security", what exactly is the difference between deliberately insidious information warfare, and collateral damage from market incentives?

I agree that its better to find solutions that involve protections instead of restrictions though. I think it means forced decoupling of indices/curation from advertising. This would make advertising funded addiction feeds compete with paid feed applications.

iamnothere

6 days ago

> Should/do we allow foreign propaganda radio stations?

How do you define this? Is it foreign owned? Noncitizens are not guaranteed the same rights, especially citizens of hostile foreign powers.

> If we accept that the government can (and very much does) impose itself on content platforms for "national security"

Why should we accept this?

> what exactly is the difference between deliberately insidious information warfare, and collateral damage from market incentives?

None, both are concepts not found in the Constitution (if you’re talking about domestic speech by citizens) and both are protected by 1A.

I don’t care in the slightest about your fearmongering national security nonsense.

seanhunter

6 days ago

Courts already do lawfully regulate the “presentation of speech” as you’re calling it. Say facebook was to present each post surrounded by pornography for example. That’s clearly a “presentation of speech” in your framing. However courts have decided that it is possible to regulate the circumstances under which that would or would not be ok and 1A arguments have not prevailed in that case.

iamnothere

6 days ago

That’s more likely to be publication in itself, not presentation, but regardless porn is one of the very few areas where the courts still listen to speech arguments. However, the remaining decisions allowing (limited) regulation of porn rely on complicated, twisted reasoning—it’s clear that the justices don’t like touching this subject and feel that there are still constitutional issues here that may eventually need to be resolved via amendment. Usually this involves classifying porn in some other context, so it’s no longer “just” speech. Then the non-speech part can be regulated. Whenever they do this, they like to draw a very tight line biased towards favoring speech wherever possible, and they have consistently made it clear that they are not looking for more areas to do this kind of tightrope walking.

coldbrewed

7 days ago

We already do limit harmful speech, at presence it's limited to speech and will immediately cause harm (the whole "shouting fire" thing) and the demonstrable addiction properties can be reasonably shown as harmful.

It's also telling that only corporations seem to be the ones demanding the right to infinite scroll; what's the scenario where an individual can only express themselves and their ideas through implementing infinite scroll on a social media?

We draw lines in the sand all the time for the sake of public safety, I'd like to hear a specific case of harm here.

iamnothere

7 days ago

“Shouting fire” was a bad decision denying the right to protest the draft, and it’s since been overturned. (Thankfully, as we may need that right soon!)

The First Amendment is clear: there shall be no law abridging freedom of speech. Courts have bent around that in the past, in earlier eras, but they were wrong to do so. Their mistakes have mostly been corrected although there’s still a few left.

The document that governs this country spells it out: it can’t be done. Public safety be damned. There’s no public safety exemption in the Constitution. If you want it done, pass an amendment. There’s a process for it.

I personally dislike infinite scroll, but I dislike the camel’s nose in the tent even more. No speech laws.

coldbrewed

7 days ago

Hang on, let's go back - clarify for me how we're calling an addictive feature in a product built by the wealthiest corporations on the planet a matter of individual free speech? Precisely whose free speech would be harmed here?

Seriously, this diffusion of individual liberties into corporations has no presence in the constitution, and courts have fabricated this wholesale. There is no idea, no concept, no notion that infinite scroll provides. We regulate the size, location, and brightness of billboards; is this also a matter of speech?

iamnothere

6 days ago

Oh is this law’s scope limited to only the world’s largest corporations, and not smaller competitors, new entrants, individual developers, or nonprofits? I didn’t realize that.

Oh is the presentation of text and images not “speech” because it’s “addictive”? I didn’t realize that.

Your strategy with billboards is more clever than I’ve usually seen from you lot; I’ll give you credit for that. A billboard is actually a physical structure. The message on the billboard is the speech. If I stopped here you’d have a “gotcha”; the software must be like the billboard! But no, because first of all, code is speech, and secondly, the layout of items on the screen and how they interact is also just speech. It’s just graphic and UX design! There is no physical structure here. You’re attempting to regulate the presentation of information—design.

EPWN3D

6 days ago

The 1A jurisprudence, to my understanding, basically results in the courts virtually never finding that the government has a legitimate, competing interest in limiting political speech.

But courts are willing to find that certain speech that is apolitical can be limited (the previous "fire in a crowded theatre" example). Basically the courts have recognized 1A established freedom of speech to protect political dissent and political ideas. Porn, for example, has limitations that would never apply to political ideas.

6 days ago

6 days ago

Might has always and will always make right and there's nothing you can do about it. That's why we aim to make rightful organizations mighty.

iamnothere

6 days ago

6 days ago

First they came for the infinite scroll, and I said nothing...

That was a little hyperbolic. The government already can regulate "speech" to some extent in limited, targeted ways, as this is. For example: they can (and increasingly will) require ADA accessibility standards on web and mobile sites and apps-- even private sector-- that deal with the public.

iamnothere

6 days ago

Can they? Why haven’t they enforced this yet?

It may be that this isn’t as settled as you think when speech concerns are present. The existence of alternative accessible formats, or sufficient assistive technology in the marketplace, may be just as compliant. It’s likely that these will be favored over mandating changes that affect design or presentation, given the Court’s prior decisions on balancing speech concerns in other areas.

6 days ago

How does that differ from 'when asked to load more items, simply take the entire list (which may have changed) and remove the items already shown on previous pages'?

xigoi

6 days ago

The fact that, in general, you don’t know what was on the previous pages, if anything. The user may just randomly decide to open page 3 without having visited the previous two pages. Or they clicked “next” after having page 2 open on their computer for several days and meanwhile they used your website on a different device.

inigyou

6 days ago

If implementing this idea, it wouldn't just be page 3 any more, it would be page numbered 3 excluding IDs 75833,6857362,2737,...

Reddit page links include both the number of the first item on the page (only cosmetic) and the last item on the previous page (which actually determines what is displayed).

nkrisc

5 days ago

That’s not “keeping your place” in an ordered list if the order has changed between the requests for pages 3 and 4.

afandian

7 days ago

The challenge is to retain an ordering over the result set. How would infinite scroll behave any differently in this case? The changing results seems to be an orthogonal concern to pagination/infinite scroll.

xigoi

7 days ago

Infinite scroll makes the problem much easier, even if it’s still a problem. The only action you need to support is loading more results, which you can do by loading all results and filtering out those already shown. With pagination, the user may say “give me page 3” and you have no idea what was on pages 1 and 2, if they were even loaded.

hdgvhicv

7 days ago

If page 1 and 2 were 10 each you load results 21-30

Same as if you are scrolling and have reached result 20 And want to load more.

falcor84

7 days ago

But the underlying table changed since. I'm not very familiar with these myself, but it seams to me that the best solution is to keep a session cursor for the user, and these are a lot simpler when you only ever move it forward.

Dylan16807

7 days ago

It's slightly different but I don't see why there should be a notable difference in difficulty. You need to somehow represent what you saw so far and act based on that.

xigoi

6 days ago

With infinite scroll, “what you saw so far” is in the client. With pagination, it exists only in the user’s mind.

Dylan16807

6 days ago

Is the client sending that info back to the server every time it requests more posts? You can do the same thing with pagination. Embed a list of post IDs into the next button.

There's potentially a difference if the server's sending repeat posts and you're doing client-side filtering of what to show next. But do any sites work that way?

(And of course these issues only exist when your list of results changes order. It the list merely grows then you can paginate with start=xxx)

Terr_

7 days ago

IMO "pages of search results" is one of the problems where the closer you look, the more potential problems and inconsistencies you see until you realize it's a leaky abstraction, and sometimes it gets too leaky.

We want visitors to imagine that we just plopped a binder of sorted results down in front of them for their page-by-page perusal, but the suggests permanence and invariants we don't want to provide (because it's harder.) For example, the assurance that page 2 will always have the same items on it unless they "search again", and the last item on page 2 will not not duplicate itself on the top of page 3 as they page forward.

By way of contrast, imagine a system where a result-set was not just a UI metaphor, but real domain concept. Do a search, and you get a Result which is a limited-size listing generated at time X for user Y and will be cached for Z.

svachalek

7 days ago

You can implement pagination exactly the same way. It's a UX decision that has nothing to do with underlying queries, although it typically maps.

The typical infinite scroll that I've seen implemented does not work the way you describe though, it's just pagination without controls. The reason it works is because it's pushing content you never asked for anyway and it just keeps pushing. Without any sense of pages you'll never know the difference.

iamnothere

6 days ago

Just use really long pages and require them to hit next page after viewing 100 items, then start showing the next batch of feedslop. How is that changing anything?

Users know that they are scrolling endlessly, they just don’t care. Adding a “more” button every now and then isn’t going to change that.

bigmadshoe

6 days ago

Just use cursor based pagination. How is this any different whether it’s infinite scroll or separate pages?

xigoi

6 days ago

Cursor based pagination only works if the items are sorted in strict chronological order. Otherwise, the problem remains. Consider the list

  [A B C] D E F G H …

where the brackets represent the first page. If the user clicks the next page button (asking for the next page after C), but meanwhile the order changed, they get this:

  A D C [B F E] G H …

Notice how they now see B twice and completely miss out on D. In constrast, infinite scroll will take the new infinite list and remove A B C, leaving D F E …

contextfree

6 days ago

7 days ago

mine isnt?

if i refresh the page it should be almost the same. maybe a couple new things at the very top, but i should still be able to find the thing i was just looking at.

by comparison, facebook auto-reloads while you're halfway down a page, and wont show you any of the same things. its an incredibly poor experience

dsego

5 days ago

I get frustrated by this so much, because sometimes I come across a post with a video or something I want to see, but I leave it for a few minutes to take care of something, and then when I come back it auto reloads and I can't find it anymore, the back button won't work, scrolling through the timeline is futile, it's just gone.

drdexebtjl

6 days ago

Yeah, this is terrible UX that we somehow normalized.

At the very least we should be able to scroll backwards after a page refresh to see previous posts.

alpinisme

7 days ago

Not if you’re on page 2

esafak

7 days ago

So you'd rather something like Slack was paginated? I think that would be disastrously bad.

drdexebtjl

6 days ago

6 days ago

Good UX makes you achieve your goals on a website faster. It implies that the website has a purpose apart from spending your time on it. If it has no such purpose, and yet people are spending a lot of time there, it's probably addictive

PaulRobinson

6 days ago

> If the unsubscribe button is hidden behind 3 screens and is in 3 point font that's pretty clearly a dark pattern.

According to who? US law is established as heading into this absurd notion of subjectivity, so the interpreter and viewer of the law as written is now as important as the law being written in the first place.

Gerrymandering black voters out of being able to elect a black representative? Well as long as the people doing it don't admit being racist, it's all fine! Want to take bribes from foreign governments? Well, if you're the head of the executive branch of government or a close personal friend, you can interpret that better than the bestest out there so those anti-corruption laws clearly don't apply, right?

"That's not a dark pattern, your honour!", Shady McShadeface attests in court, "we're just trying to make offers we think the customer is interested in before they confirm their final and terrible decision with awful consequences for them!". How else would the poor uninformed consumer not be aware of that special deep discount (today only, 4 hours left!), on that pillow set that they absolutely must need to consider on their way out of the door?

Infinite scroll is deemed by many a dark pattern, and by others a particularly clean way of dealing with a UX challenge. Subjective, eye of the beholder, and all that.

It reminds me a little of the "I know pornography when I see it" argument, and I think it's fair to call it a dark pattern given the evidence against it, but like pornography, consenting adults should be able to consent to exposure to it for their own "convenience", perhaps. I just personally think the button to turn it on should be hidden behind 3 screens and in a 3 point font...

thaumasiotes

7 days ago

> Curious as to where the line between “addictive feature” and "good UX" is. Is deliberate pagination actual impedance to use or merely an annoyance that's been weeded out with modern UX design?

Neither? Pagination is good UX; infinite scroll is a way to make your usable page unusable instead.

friendzis

6 days ago

> Curious as to where the line between “addictive feature” and "good UX" is. Is deliberate pagination actual impedance to use or merely an annoyance that's been weeded out with modern UX design? When does a feature that simply makes your product easier to use cross into a territory that it's illegal?

These feeds couple two features together: infinite scroll and automatic refresh. Without "pages" there is no technical way to refer to (and link) to a specific view, it's always generated. The best you have is a link to a particular item. Automatic refresh adds FOMO that you will not see the post again if you stop engagement right now.

Coupled together there is nothing about "product easier to use" and all about addictiion-inducing dark patterns.

Some apps do not tack on the auto refresh, meaning you can close the app at any time, reopen it and keep scrolling from the point you left, eliminating the addictive fomo.

reformd

6 days ago

> When does a feature that simply makes your product easier to use cross into a territory that it's illegal?

Good question! Maybe when that which makes the application/product easier has more negative side effects than positive or useful intended effects?

There must be ample examples/collections on the net about convenience and/or ease of use doing ugly stuff to body and brain short-, mid-, long-term.

KaiserPro

6 days ago

Your edit is actually the nub of the matter.

Its all very well saying "we will ban x" but unless you can define "x" reliably in a way that stands up to court arguing, you're not banning it, you're putting a lawyer tax on it.

The issue is, the vauger the terms, or harder it is to prove, the more money can warp the outcome.

There will always been cornercases to all laws, so you need to choose what you are going to hit and why.

Dark UX patterns can be hard to prove, you need to show that a normal person is not reasonably able to understand. That changes with time. (ie in the 90s asking someone to login and press a link would have been onerous, when a phone service/postal/fax was the done thing.)

So you either build in a proof, which can be gamed, or you target a specific action or thing, which will need updating.

the Law is hard, and, increasingly made by people who are not experts.

petra

7 days ago

We know there's a big problem with addictive ux in general.

6 days ago

> This seeks to regulate the opposite basically "your platform is, too easy, too good at serving your content"

No, it's seeking to ban presenting content at a faster rate than a person can meaningfully digest.

There's a limit to that rate over which the platform doesn't become "too good", it just becomes worse, as it's showing too much too fast and breaking attention.

xg15

6 days ago

First, I believe the companies would have a very easy time to distinguish those features, as they know which feature was developed with the intent of keeping users in the app.

So if they acted by the spirit of the law, this would be very easy.

Of course they won't as that goes against their core interests, so we will likely have a cat-and-mouse game of definitions and malicious compliance. I'm looking forward to a whole new era of "UI innovation" where companies scramble to think of patterns that are technically not autoscroll or autoplay, but practically have an even worse effect.

(Interestingly, the "have the user opt-in" loophole we had with cookies doesn't seem to exist here, so at least we hopefully won't see any more "consent popups" or deliberately bad alternatives)

As for the law, apparently it has this line:

> ...or “any other feature defined” by the attorney general “as an addictive feature.”

So essentially the attorney general has to guess the intent of a company behind a feature. It's strange that this power lies with the attorney general and not a judge or jury (not an expert on US law though), but in general, "guessing intents" is something the legal system does all the time for obvious reasons.

croes

6 days ago

Infinite scroll makes it only easier to use when your consumption only has one way.

A soon as you want to revisit a previous post you are lost.

You may remember it‘s ten pages back but with infinite scroll that information is missing

eviks

6 days ago

> where the line between “addictive feature” and "good UX" is.

At addiction?

asdfsa32

7 days ago

6 days ago

> What should be changed is the exemption algorithmically curated feeds still get under section 230.

Uh... Have you actually ever read section 230? There is no "exemption" that algorithms get. Like literally none. The section is probably one of the simplest forms of legalese in the entire US code. Please read it before making claims about it.

inigyou

7 days ago

In theory they are already exempt. YouTube is not liable for hosting a Nazi video but section 230 doesn't prevent it being liable for the choice to algorithmically show that video.

cloudie78

6 days ago

Good UX for what? Maximising engagement time?

gnoll_of_gozag

6 days ago

infinite scroll/algorithms don't need to be completely gone - just no longer the default setting

grayhatter

6 days ago

coke cola used to have cocaine in it, it doesn't anymore, people in taste tests prefer the taste of Pepsi... Coke is still the leader in sales.

Infinite scroll doesn't have a positive UX. If it takes an infinite amount of time to use your product, your product is shit.

Unless your product is content, in which case endless scroll encourages thoughtless consumption behavior. That's not a good thing.

We as engineers shouldn't be building stuff that degrades the experience of existence (which is already shit enough), just because you can make money doing so doesn't mean it's not antisocial behavior, and because you can make money by being a really shitty human, it does require some external force to curtail that negative sum behavior.

I agree it's difficult to categorize, the solution is rapid iteration, not allowing the asshattery until the entirety of society figures out it's bad for your brain. Someone should probably fix the political system in the US so we can have rapid iteration on problems again.

iamnothere

6 days ago

Rapid iteration on political issues is how you end up with oppression and legal terrorism. The brakes are there for a reason. But so is the valid process for changing the fundamental system (amendments).

grayhatter

6 days ago

I don't think rapid iteration causes legal terrorism. Do you have an example, or just vibes?

I meant rapid as in rapid for the legislative context too. I don't mind slow (expected) speed, or laws that have a delay before they take effect. I do have a problem with how political points can and are won not by finding solutions, but exclusively by obstructing the process. I don't mind an imperfect solution that moves the needle into a new better local maximum.

iamnothere

6 days ago

Perhaps I should clarify, I am using “legal terrorism” as a term of art for legislative terror, such as that inflicted during the French Revolution or the reign of Oliver Cromwell, or Germany’s Enabling Act. Without strong checks, which slow down the process, legislative bodies can get caught up in a frenzy of passing laws in order to address “urgent” problems.

Our problem is that a majority of legislators want to pass laws that they aren’t allowed to pass, although at cross purposes from each other, but they don’t want to go through the process for changing what they’re allowed to do. (Which may simply be evidence that the system is working as expected.)

We also have a problem with general legislative gridlock, entirely due to self-imposed rules that Congress isn’t willing to change. (Interestingly enough, however, the people could force a change through an amendment here too.)

inigyou

6 days ago

Another alternative to avoid legal terrorism is low penalties. If the law would rapidly shift to say infinite scroll is illegal, but the only penalty is being ordered to remove it (and then penalised more if you fail to do so after being notified) I don't think that's really that bad?

iamnothere

6 days ago

You’d need a Constitution that allows laws regarding speech. And probably a mechanism to prevent legislators from assigning excessive penalties.

It’s not about whether the law meets some abstract notion of good or bad, it’s about whether it is even possible to enact under the framework that governs us. Under the Constitution as it stands, it wouldn’t be possible.

tpdly

6 days ago

Not true. Speech and reach are obviously different.

It is entirely conceivable that Americans wake up to the absurd power and manipulation behind algorithmic feeds, and decide to intervene in the hypno-addictive horror-show.

Also, I've been thinking about how curation at the scale of the modern internet is much more analogous to speech than it ever was before. Whatever you want to say, just find someone else who's said it-- or just astroturf via 3rd party and beam it into the skinner boxes. In this frame, freedom of speech actually demands open access to indeces and content. Is it acceptable that network-effect-fueled cartels are the only ones that get to speak through algorithms?

iamnothere

6 days ago

7 days ago

an0malous

6 days ago

an0malous

6 days ago

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.

halestock

6 days ago

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.

kelseyfrog

6 days ago

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!

xg15

6 days ago

Obviously, the buttons in the confirmation dialog also need their own confirmations...

iamnothere

gghackernewsgg

5 days ago

Completely agree.

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."?

pjc50

6 days ago

This is basically the Californian Prop 65 compromise: put up a sign saying the building contains carcinogens, but not actually do anything about them.

bcjdjsndon

6 days ago

So log off? If you think it's really that bad why are you anywhere near a screen at all?

pjc50

6 days ago

Do you know what a negative externality is?

telchior

6 days ago

Your position is absurd, I’m sorry.

bigmadshoe

6 days ago

Interesting. I guess I don’t see corporations as people, and thus I don’t see this as a violation of free speech.

slopinthebag

6 days ago

Hm, even if a corporation wasn’t simply a group of people, it seems like cig ads are banned even if it’s a single person wanting to air one.

zeroonetwothree

6 days ago

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.

ahnick

6 days ago

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.

xg15

6 days ago

> You can just not use things you don't like.

The entire point of talking about addiction (or even harmless things like FOMO, network effect, etc) is that this is not true.

ahnick

6 days ago

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.

carljungslabtek

6 days ago

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.

gghackernewsgg

5 days ago

> 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.

carljungslabtek

4 days ago

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11594359/#sec3

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.

inigyou

6 days ago

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.

tt24

6 days ago

> only acted when the problems it was causing were serious and undeniable.

I wish we lived in the word you think we live in :(

In reality regulatory capture has infested nearly everything.

crubier

7 days ago

> Just make people click something every once in a while

But why? This is EU Cookies Banner level of state interference making UX worse for everyone just because some lawmaker doesn't like something.

scoofy

7 days ago

"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.

iamnothere

6 days ago

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.)

dudefeliciano

6 days ago

the EU doesn't have a constitution

7 days ago

As many have said before:

  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]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29529148

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38299135

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46552795

ahnick

6 days ago

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.

tqi

6 days ago

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?

6 days ago

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.

breuleux

6 days ago

I mean, unironically, yeah. If you want flavor, just mix jam in your plain yogurt.

dghlsakjg

6 days ago

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.

tqi

6 days ago

Yeah there were no shootings before the internet

dghlsakjg

6 days ago

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.

ben_w

6 days ago

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?

ckosidows

6 days ago

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.

iamnothere

6 days ago

Fortunately social media contains neither heroin nor nicotine. All clear!

dudefeliciano

6 days ago

6 days ago

> 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.

iamnothere

6 days ago

Tell me you’ve never done serious graphic design work without telling me

inigyou

6 days ago

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?

peder

6 days ago

should we check with you every time we want to do anything or...?

xg15

6 days ago

> but the second someone articulates a very, very simple rule, the "well ackchyually" crew comes out of the woodwork.

On HN definitely, if half of the people here are really invested in that stuff themselves.

6 days ago

"Exert some willpower!"

People exert willpower through the democratically elected legislature

"No not like that!"

dsego

5 days ago

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.

bcjdjsndon

6 days ago

"Please politician, I'm a helpless carbon blob who cannot tear themselves away from the bad screen, pwease help me"*

iamnothere

7 days ago

[flagged]

johnea

6 days ago

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.

6 days ago

6 days ago

Wouldn’t it lead to the opposite? You spending time on the platform earns them money because they’re gathering data for targeted ads, and showing you those ads. Non-targeted ads barely pay anything.

Addictive content feeds are expensive with the live HD video playing everywhere and the constant tweaks needed from teams working to further refine targeting based on behavior.

hatthew

6 days ago

For typical social media sites, engagement will pretty much always be proportional to both revenue and cost per user. Either revenue > cost, and the site is incentivized to increase engagement, or revenue < cost and the site dies. There is no middle ground where a site gets a healthy revenue that's greater than its costs, but increasing engagement won't increase revenue. The exceptions are niche sites that do things like fixed subscriptions, or cost money to create content but not to consume it (but even in these cases, increasing engagement probably still increases the chance users start/continue to be paid customers).

iamnothere

6 days ago

It won't, become some parties are proposing a narrative of "shielding the innocent from harmful content" (such as themselves).

keir starmer seems to suppose nudity would be indecent, against an implicitly stated decent itself and british politics.

senorcrab

7 days ago

Yeah I meant it would avoid the necessity of age verification to solve this problem.

Age verification and how enthusiastic gov'ts are about it is concerning.

seydor

6 days ago

I find the reply button to be pretty addictive

petterroea

6 days ago

I've heard a lot of negative talk about Californian politicians, but compared to how the discussion is going on in Norway about the same issue, this is great. It's very refreshing to see politicians actually understand the problem at hand instead of just throwing age checks at it.

For reference, in Norway, you basically have 3 camps:

* Age verification is a detriment to democracy if implemented at a large scale as a requirement to speak in public. Well documented (activists and subject matter experts generally agree on this)

* We will solve the problem of kids online and we will solve it now. The solution must be age verification. Experts loud protest, and even committee findings that warn against are completely ignored (usually people who want a quick and easy solution, politicians who want the bragging rights of having saved the kids)

* We want to solve the problem, but the only obvious solution is age verification so I guess it can't be helped (not really educated on the topic. Just like most of us when it comes to a random political question. Not really a matter of intelligence)

Absolute circus.

I think most people here used the internet as a kid to learn about things and talk to adults in the field there were interested in. For today's kids this happens mostly on the few big sites like twitter and discord.

I'm more than happy to sacrifice endless scroll and recommendation algorithms (at least the type that is thrown at you without consent) to not have to verify my age to speak online.

inigyou

6 days ago

The California solution to age verification was a really good alternative. Instead of actually verifying anything, it just asks you when you buy the device. Presumably adults buy devices for their kids, and by the time you're old enough to buy your own, you're old enough to be in the grey area where it doesn't really matter if you lie.

Symbiote

6 days ago

7 days ago

[flagged]

Noumenon72

7 days ago

[flagged]

ckosidows

6 days ago

Who are you people glazing this functionality? The term doom scrolling came about, in large part, because of infinite scrolling. I have never, in nearly two decades of smart phones being everywhere, met someone who liked infinite scrolling enough to say so. People _use_ these things, sure, but that's because they're addictive and ubiquitous and not because they materially improve someone's life.

mdp2021

7 days ago

> they only get infinite scroll

(Actually, sometimes the "paged" interface in "infinite scrolling" systems is available, only hidden. There for the benefit of people like us, those who would find it and exploit it.)

oenton

6 days ago

Come on now you can't leave us hanging. What is this sorcery you speak of? Is this simply a feature Meta's been A/B testing or does this require opening your browser's developer tools?

dijksterhuis

7 days ago

i originally wrote users from the wider public or something but then decided to edit the comment down. fair point i suppose for the ~1% of users of these sites that are super tech nerds

mdp2021

6 days ago

personally I am against internet identification, and I think teenagers should be allowed on social media, so I have to ask: why only children? if these features are so bad, ban them outright.

asadotzler

7 days ago

Adults are supposed to have acquired enough life experience to make more reasonable decisions than children.

6 days ago

Its the combination of infinite scroll and algorithmic curation of audiovisual media, that is addictive. Its equivalent to a TV channel tailored just for your interests, and TV was considered very addictive in the past.

I wrote an infinite-scroll implementation for my blog. Infinite scrolling through a static bank of content (even with some randomized elements) is not engaging. You eventually make it to the bottom and think "that's it?"

There are other types of Internet communities where people can connect with each other, that do not involve infinite scrolling, algorithmic curation, and using your collected interests for targeted advertising. I would love to see regulation, just to see the value of Meta's user-profiling-data-assets shrink.

dinfinity

6 days ago

Brainstorming here, hear me out: after 2 pages or 3 minutes of infinite scrolling the only content that shows up is various forms of goatse. We could make a browser extension for this.

pwdisswordfishq

5 days ago

If you ever make it to the bottom, it was never infinite in the first place.

ChrisArchitect

7 days ago

EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48858292)

> The investigation focuses on features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and the platforms' highly personalised recommender systems.

sdh

7 days ago

Whack-a-mole lawmaking solves nothing. All this law does is ask social media companies to find another way for their platform to be addictive to children.

Here's how to solve this ...

Social media companies measure engagement. Decide what the safe metric is, pass laws that hold social media companies to that metric for whatever age or demographic. Apply fines proportional to revenue when they are found to exceed the metric. Fines can't be reasonable to the cost of doing business.

That stops any social media company from incentivizing employees to increase engagement for that demographic.

elictronic

7 days ago

Or just stop social media below a certain age and enact that policy for older adults.

The tech giants have flown to close to the sun, real people are pissed.

user

7 days ago

[deleted]

chupchap

7 days ago

It was a good UX in FriendFeed as it was still a chronological feed. However once it was mixed with algorithmic feed it shifted from better UX to keep em' hooked.

moritzwarhier

6 days ago

I know this is about addictive social media feeds as a whole, but I'd like to think a law is being passed to "endanger", no, better outright ban infinite scrolling.

Call it the "pagination law" and combine it with banning personalized feeds as a whole, apart from fully transparent choices made by the user (e.g. follows).

One can dream...

Calvin02

7 days ago

I (personally) think this is the wrong kind of solution.

I think a better solution would to mandate that platforms offer a ranked feed and a chronological feed and make the setting sticky for users.

I think giving users the agency over how much they consume is good but mandating a “UX” pattern feels too specific.

etdznots

6 days ago

This seems like an arms race that will be very hard for the state to win, meta is prepared to spend billions throwing engineers phds and compute at making the most addicting platform possible within the bounds set by the law, while this kind of law would make it hard for small entrants into the market, I’m not against trying to do things that are reasonable to prevent addictive behavior, but I hope these rules are gated on size somehow so that indie developers and random websites don’t get caught in the dragnet of needing to comply, like what happened with the UK moderation bill.

iamnothere

6 days ago

6 days ago

Times Square is a physical place with limited space. It has multiple uses and the road or sidewalk you’re standing on is a publicly owned thoroughfare. Your megaphone might damage the hearing of non-audience passerby if you have it turned up really loud.

6 days ago

6 days ago

> If you have free speech in front of children in public I don't see how having infinite scroll on your website or app is any different.

Have you seen many people mindlessly watching people talk in public for hours on end? When a plane lands, people aren't zombified listening to another passenger talk, they're zombified doom scrolling on tic-tok etc.

momentmaker

7 days ago

I think Tristan from The Social Dilemma documentary - his co-founder's dad - was the one who invented the infinite scroll and he deeply regretted it.

tancop

6 days ago

its the same wrong answer again and again. how long will it take for lawmakers to realize that the best way to fight big tech is give people choice. infinite scroll, recommender systems, targeted ads, all the other "toxic" features should be optional with massive fines for anyone who tries to force people into using them (that includes making them inconvenient to turn off or charging for it).

the most enforceable way to do this is making open apis mandatory. any user should be able to get api keys that let them do all the basic operations like view posts for a user, consume the firehose, read their own likes and follows, you get the idea. your api is incomplete? you get fined. needs a paid subscription or signing a contract? all views go through the recommender system? straight to jail.

we need to play hard with platforms but let users do what they want, at least if its not disruptive to other users.

beanjuiceII

7 days ago

why are we making laws about how scrolling works this is crazy

inigyou

6 days ago

6 days ago

Sindisil

6 days ago

That would be amazing.

Ubiquitous infinite scroll is one of the things I hate most about "modern" UI design.

grapeorangesoda

6 days ago

Guitar Hero is an infinite scroll of notes coming at you. Will that game be allowed in the dystopia?

opan

6 days ago

The notes end when the song does, then you can start another song or stop playing. Do you ever run out of posts when scrolling?

user

6 days ago

[deleted]

ChoGGi

invalidusernam3

6 days ago

Why only focus on youngsters? Many of the older generations that I see online seem to have been impacted massively by social media in a negative way. Yes in theory adults should have freedom to choose, but when your app is the digital version of crack cocaine I think there should be some rules.