It is a dumb analogy to be sure, but I think the point is valid. As intensely social creatures, humans are not particularly well adapted to handle the never-ending waterfall of synthetic social interactions you get from the likes of Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/etc.
In the past, getting as much social information as possible about your tribe was a huge reproductive advantage, but now that modern social network products have boosted the populations of our "tribes" into the thousands, trying to consume all that information has downsides that far outweigh the positive.
Facebook is basically the psychological equivalent of high fructose corn syrup.
He utterly mangled it, but there is an experiment which proves the underlying concept (which I'm guessing was his intent, live testimony is hard):
Bottomless Bowls: Why Visual Cues of Portion Size May Influence Intake
Objective: Using self‐refilling soup bowls, this study examined whether visual cues related to portion size can influence intake volume without altering either estimated intake or satiation.
Research Methods and Procedures: Fifty‐four participants (BMI, 17.3 to 36.0 kg/m2; 18 to 46 years of age) were recruited to participate in a study involving soup. The experiment was a between‐subject design with two visibility levels: 1) an accurate visual cue of a food portion (normal bowl) vs. 2) a biased visual cue (self‐refilling bowl). The soup apparatus was housed in a modified restaurant‐style table in which two of four bowls slowly and imperceptibly refilled as their contents were consumed. Outcomes included intake volume, intake estimation, consumption monitoring, and satiety.
Results: Participants who were unknowingly eating from self‐refilling bowls ate more soup [14.7 ± 8.4 vs. 8.5 ± 6.1 oz; F(1,52) = 8.99; p < 0.01] than those eating from normal soup bowls. However, despite consuming 73% more, they did not believe they had consumed more, nor did they perceive themselves as more sated than those eating from normal bowls. This was unaffected by BMI.
A much better analogy, however I still think the generalization of "videos" as a single body of liquid is an overstep. It's not like the plot of a YouTube video just extends forever, you are aware you're starting a new video each time.
EDIT: see caveat from K-Wall below. Can't trust anything these days :-/ </edit>
That's exactly how it works, to an extent. In a study [1], people with self-refilling soup bowls ate 73% more soup (p < 0.01) than those eating from normal soup bowls. Similar with popcorn [2]. I first read about this either in Nudge or in Mindless Eating.
[1] Wansink, B., Painter, J.E., & North, J. (2005). Bottomless Bowls: Why Visual Cues of Portion Size May Influence Intake Obesity Research, 13 (1), 93-100
The unit I'm affiliated with was tasked by the university to run replications and ultimately assist with the retractions. This was all done by my colleagues but I heard about it quite often. Past that I am going to refrain on commenting more as I'm unqualified to do so.
Two published replication studies (used for retractions) can be found here:
How replicated has the study been? Even a fully credible researcher should not be trusted when their research has not been replicated due to just how prevalent replication issues are in psychology.
People like to rag on psychology for this, but the same replicability problem affects a lot of fields. Some of it is sloppiness (or straight-out fraud, which is more likely here) but it's also just that science is hard!
At least in physics you don't see nearly the level of trust until a study have been replicated and confirmed. You might see a few news articles about someone's cold fusion reactor, but there is far more skepticism and scientists in related fields are much quicker to not trust it unless it has independent replication.
Soft sciences don't seem to have a similar culture.
You’re probably right that half-baked psych and biomedical articles show up in the media more, but I think it’s a mistake to extrapolate from that to the actual work going on in the field.
I imagined this as a glass attached to a table with a false bottom that constantly refills the glass. When you drink some of the liquid (presumably with a straw?) the glass is instantly refilled, which makes it hard to tell how much you've drank.
In other words: I agree, this really isn't a great example.
This seems like an extremely short sited, overly broad and unlikely to pass bill, and to make it all worse, based on the title, I thought that someone was attempting to ban videos that play automatically when you visit a website, which would have been a deeply noble cause.
That's like saying "Why not both?" to eating healthy and putting your balls in a vice grip. Eating healthy in this analogy is the government making laws regarding actual problems that require government intervention, while the balls in vice grip in this analogy is a pointless law concerning something that doesn't require government intervention just because people have a moral panic over technology allegedly ruining society.
No, it's more like saying "why not fix both 'big' and 'small' problems at the same time", because whataboutism is a constant defense of problematic status quos.
I don't know that this bill is a good or bad thing yet, I haven't dug deep into it yet. But the idea of making more designers eliminate dark patterns in software and make more features opt in instead of opt out is a good use of regulation in my mind.
I get it, "regulation ruins innovation" or some other libertarian nonsense. The bottom line is that the software industry has some problematic behaviors that they have refused to self-correct, and this is what happens.
This is not a "whataboutism". This is a "The government doesn't need to tell me how long I'm allowed to have an erection-ism"; i.e. micromanaging bullshit is not in the purview of the federal government.
Another bill will mandate that websites display a banner if the user has been there for too long (to protect internet addicts from being sedentary for too long). Pretty soon only big corps will be able to make a website because there is a phonebook sized stack of regulations you have to comply with.
It always is when it comes to regulation. If you find a regulation that seems to benefit the consumer more than the incumbent firms you don't understand that market well enough.
> Another bill will mandate that websites display a banner if the user has been there for too long
Why wait? From Ars's writeup of the same bill[0]:
> As described in the text, social media companies would have to limit users to 30 minutes of use per day by default. Users would be allowed to choose their own time limits for daily and weekly use, but companies would have to reset that time limit to half an hour every single month, as well as providing "conspicuous pop-up" displays at least once every 30 minutes showing how much time you have spent using a service in the past day, across all devices.
This is just political grandstanding. (I hope) nobody would ever actually vote for this.
This is what they do on gambling websites in the UK.
Similarly if you are in a Casino you will never see a clock anywhere. Also generally food and drink is pretty cheap and there is normally table service in a Casino because they want you to be at the tables spending your cash.
If politicians could focus their efforts on actually solving problems instead of giving hand outs to their tort lawyer buddies, we might get a better system.
The lawsuits would include:
- autoplay of gifs vs web videos
- does Pinterest count as an auto scroll ad
- does an endless scroll populated with 50% real content count as non-ad?
The law will just create more headaches for the producers and less innovation thanks to having to fight lawsuits.
Example of the depths lawyers can class action: Godiva is being sued in court for putting “Godiva 1927” on the label; the lawyer is arguing that people believe that the chocolate was made in 1927.
Outlawing X doesn't mean almost-X is completely fine. That said, none of your examples make much sense (to me).
> - autoplay of gifs vs web videos
Presumably the content is what matters, not the particular compression format. Does it show animated content continuously without being triggered by active user interaction? Yes, so it's an auto-playing video.
> - does Pinterest count as an auto scroll ad
It's primarily focused on a call to action, so yes, it's an ad. Would they show an equivalent popup for ordinary user-generated content that they have no stake in?
> - does an endless scroll populated with 50% real content count as non-ad?
Is there an ad that appears when the user scrolls? I don't even see what this example was supposed to demonstrate.
> The law will just create more headaches for the producers and less innovation thanks to having to fight lawsuits.
More headaches and less innovation in how to sell bullshit sounds like a very positive outcome to me.
> Presumably the content is what matters, not the particular compression format. Does it show animated content continuously without being triggered by active user interaction? Yes, so it's an auto-playing video.
By that logic a loading spinner is an auto-playing video. Does me logging in count as "active user interaction" for showing me a loading spinner? I didn't request the spinner, I requested access to my skype chats.
The spinner fulfils a purpose (by notifying you that the content is still not quite ready) and is temporary (it goes away once the content is loaded). That said, you could always just replace it with a static "Loading.." label.
A spinner isn't a "video", it's just a moving graphic.
Our legal system has many problems, but one problem it thankfully doesn't have is catering to ridiculous pedantry like you find with software programmers. Anyone trying to argue spinners in front of a judge is going to have their case dismissed with prejudice, because clearly the intent of the law wasn't to ban spinners or other such UI elements.
Unless there are two cases, the Godiva lawsuit is actually for putting "Belgium 1926" on the label and the argument is primarily that the chocolate is not made in Belgium or of Belgian quality. I didn't find any discussion of 1926 in the filing. https://www.faruqilaw.com/case/183/hesse-et-al-v-godiva-choc...
Things like requiring accept and decline checkboxes to be the same font seem somewhat reasonable, even if I disagree with it, but banning autoplay videos and endless scrolling is insane. There are legitimate uses for autoplay videos (ex. Netflix playing next episode, YouTube playing next song when you are listening to music) which I personally use all the time and appreciate, and endless scrolling is great when you don't need to refer back to previous results, and don't want to keep clicking "next". I think people should have the freedom to consume content how they want, the government shouldn't compensate for their lack of self control.
While I agree that it's hard to support legislation that's likely to have a lot of unintended consequences, it's also important to realize what's driving folks to introduce a bill like this. It's also worth pointing out that (in particular with Netflix) your example is its own counter-argument. You can't turn off autoplay, and that's the opposite of letting me make choices for myself.
There's also plenty of other examples of government regulating or banning things which exploit human weakness. Ponzi schemes, meth, gambling, and more are all controlled. It's pretty clear that a lot of tech-company design is (intentionally or not) probably scratching a lot of the same itches. It's reasonable to expect regulation.
I think the choice is to just leave Netflix when you are done an episode. Maybe it's just me but I've never felt like the autoplay makes me much more likely to keep watching, it is just convenient so I don't have to go through all of the menus again.
If we ban autoplay on Netflix, we should also ban cable I suppose (not a big loss, really), since cable will autoplay indefinitely.
I find autoplay on Netflix highly inconvenient. Disable it and you can continue to watch the next episode with just one button press. There is no need for navigating around. Also super useful when you happen to fall asleep in front of the TV so that it doesn't keep pumping all the way through the night. Autoplay on Netflix is IMHO a dark pattern to feed on attention and FOMO.
I personally love that about it. I can watch more episodes in less time with Netflix, whereas I have to sit through the openers and credits for TV.
I also like watching shows while doing something else (e.g. folding laundry), so autoplay makes it so I don't have to worry about engaging with the service between episodes.
I strongly disagree. Autoplay does exactly what I want when binging through series. I would watch it either way, but why would I need to click buttons for each episode when it can be automatic.
This would be fine if it were opt-in (and especially, opt-in per session). It's not. It's opt-out, and the opt-out is rather hidden (IIRC you have to use a web browser, you can't even opt out from devices running Netflix).
This kind of sounds to me like "you can stop smoking by not buying anymore cigarettes". True, but glosses over the addictive aspects which led to cigarettes being regulated as they are. And this isn't an accidental property of these apps, they're intentionally engineered features to drive "engagement"/addiction.
That's fair, but personally I am much more comfortable with the government regulating things which actually have chemicals which cause people to be addicted to them (cigarettes, hard drugs, etc.) than services which people can get addicted to. The fact that their is actually a chemical in cigarettes is the critical difference, to me. Maybe psychologically there isn't much difference, but that's where I draw the line personally.
The difference is that actually addictive things, rather than just rewarding stimuli, produce increases in incentive salience regardless of actual reward outcome. In cigarettes this is mediated through nicotinic acetylcholine receptors on cells with inputs to dopaminergic systems that predict reward.
There's a vast distance between directly effecting the substrate of thinking chemically and reactions to rewarding stimuli coming in normally.
And what would that difference be when you are just describing different methods for affecting dopaminergic reward pathways?
If you scan the brain with an fMRI, the reward pathway lights up and suggest over time you will have reinforced that pleasurable activity and have created a strong affinity towards repeated activations, further strengthening those pathways.
Have there been any studies to show withdrawals from inhibiting consuming pleasurable visual media?
I mean if you were watching a series on Netflix that really resonates with you and you make a strong connection with the characters and feel as if you are a part of the scenes taking place (game of thrones etc), with characters faces activating your fusiform gyrus and dramatic scenes activating your amygdala making you emotional etc, how is autoplay facilitating the pleasurable dopamine response from imagining/anticipating/looking forward to how great the next episode will be, not as compelling of an issue as consuming exogenous substances that activate similar dopamine release?
I realize, I'm not the typical customer (I think autoplaying the next episode was the last feature Netflix introduced that didn't annoy me and made me think about canceling), but for me the only thing that matters when watching TV in the evening is if it's the penultimate episode (because those tend to end with cliffhangers and I'll want to watch the final one as well) and how tired I am/how late it is.
All autoplay does for me is saving me the click on next which I'd click 100% of those times when I don't close Netflix right at the end of the old or start of the next episode.
I can't even understand how it would make people watch more (unless they barely watch and just didn't realize a new one started)
We'll also need to ban most major highways, as they keep going and going and going. And don't forget to ban unlimited refills at McDonalds, I'm sure those get people into trouble too. How does the fast food industry get such a big free pass on all the trouble it's caused?
It does at many restaurants. The waiter comes by and refills my drink, often without asking if it has unlimited refills. It's kind of like Netflix, which says "next episode starting in 10 seconds", where inaction gets you more content.
And I don't see a problem with that. If you know you'll drink too much with unlimited refills, don't order drinks with unlimited refills.
I really don't think government has any business in this at all, but I guess I could see something where certain classes of product need to support setting limits on use from the customer side (as in, X hours of Netflix per day on this profile). That still sounds like overreach to me, but if it's a real problem for people with addictive personalities, I think it could be a workable solution while avoiding a lot of the unintended consequences.
A good analogue is how certain TV shows (I'm thinking of Househunters, because I'm an addict) run one episode into another without a commercial break. You don't even notice you're on a new episode until you're already 60 seconds into it and hooked.
It doesn't work if you're on PS4, which is where I watch. No matter what those settings are it always auto-plays the next episode and also the really annoying trailers. It's actually driven me to consume most of my content from Amazon instead.
Are you watching Netflix on your PS4 in a web browser, or a Netflix app?
Personally, I'd love to ban autoplay videos, but I'm really concerned about web pages here. A custom app, to me, doesn't fall under this purview. Netflix can do just about whatever they want in their own app AFAIC.
For websites that have a legitimate use for autoplay, but are still websites and not custom apps, I would support making it a user-controlled preference that only works for logged-in users. Usually, people view YouTube as a logged-in Google user, so that can be used to allow them to turn on autoplay for that.
Isn't that an indicator that something's wrong when the company says "technically you can turn this off, it's just buried in the form of the product that people use the least. But technically you can turn it off."
What do you mean "desktop Netflix"? You mean the web site? Please let me know where this setting is! I would love to turn this off but have never found a way.
This is it. You want autoplay? Make it opt in. Problem solved. Make more features opt in. I'm not sorry that this makes things harder for companies to make money.
When they keep failing at self regulating shit behaviors that consumers don't want, this is what happens.
What's driving bills like this is simple - people need things to campaign on and instead of addressing real problems they're busy trying to 'solve' easy ones.
Once the regulate everything people aggressively invited the government in, there was no going back. It's going to get extremely bad over the coming decade. Laughably bad. Politicians will regulate every possible inch of the Internet. And they rarely remove stupid regulations, so it will all pile-up deep. It will mirror the physical world, every click and every feature will involve breaking numerous laws. There is nothing that can stop this outcome now, the fox is in the hen house. The result will inevitably be stagnation, as creating anything online will be very burdensome in all possible regards. Most simply won't do it, they'll just work for a bigger corporation that can deal with the regulatory mess. Want to launch a simple service? Hire a lawyer, do a six month review before you write the first line of code, spend tens of thousands of dollars, and you're still going to be breaking some stray law if you dare to launch. Compliance requirements stacked up to your ears, placating every special interest group that wants their cause accounted for in regulations. And that's before we get deep into the big corporations buying/bribing/lobbying thousands of new regulations for their own protection.
Right. But just because something is irritating does that mean it should be illegal? This seems like something that we don't need to waste taxpayer money on IMO. I feel like there's bigger fish to fry so to speak.
It doesn't waste taxpayer money for Congresscritters to write a law and pass it. They're paid a salary anyway, so it's just a bit of their time, and something like this shouldn't take long to debate and pass.
Plus, they could make money on it by levying enormous fines on websites that break the law. I'd love to see various news websites get slapped with $100M fines for having autoplay videos.
>I feel like there's bigger fish to fry so to speak.
Like what? Fixing our utterly broken healthcare system? That isn't realistic at all because they can't get enough agreement in Congress to pass such legislation. So they need to focus on things they can get done, like banning autoplay.
I agree, irritation isn't a valid reason. Addiction, on the other hand, is valid. Endless scrolling is designed to help keep people glued to their phones, continuously triggering a dopamine response that makes them keep scrolling, liking, and following. The purpose of it is to keep you hooked.
That's not exactly a super well defined line though.
Slack has infinite scrolling and is mostly used for work, but I also use it with friends and you can't deny there's the same social media type feedback loop with Slack reactions.
LinkedIn and Yammer are "professional" social networks. People use them to get "real work" done, but they're absolutely social media too.
But isn't that done all the time? My neighbor blasting their music at 3AM isn't physically hurting anything, but it sure is irritating. And it's also illegal for that reason. Seems fine to me.
No, noise ordinances are in place to prevent people from interrupting each others sleep, which is necessary for maintaining a relative level of sanity. It is not analogous to preventing companies from forcing a specific UI pattern on a website.
But autoplay do you mean sounds and videos that autoplay when you go on a website, or sounds and videos which are automatically queued up after something you are already watching? Because I agree that the first is very irritating (there is nothing that I hate more than Netflix autoplaying previews with sound), but I find queuing up the next video very useful.
Considering other discussions in adjacent threads, it's quite clearly not uniformly self evident whether auto-play does or does not include continuing an existing "play" session with new media.
I do not think it is self evident. In the article (and bill), queuing is considered autoplay if you do not explicitly select playlist of things to play. The definition in the bill is:
AUTOPLAY — The use of a process that automatically plays music or videos (other than advertisements) without an express, separate prompt by the user (such as pushing a button or clicking an icon), unless
(A) before any content is loaded to the user’s display, that user or a different use compiled a playlist of multiple music videos or audio files that the user designated should be played without interruption, and the immediate user selected one of the videos or files in that precompiled playlist; or
(B) the predominant purpose of the social media platform is to allow users to stream music, but only if the only files the platform automatically plays are audio files or advertisements
For YouTube I don't use a playlist, I just let it pick the next recommendation, so that would still be banned.
They added an exception for advertisements, which is too bad since that is the only kind of autoplay video I would really be excited about getting rid of. The definition of autoplay in the bill is "The use of a process that automatically plays music or videos (other than advertisements) without an express, separate prompt by the user." If you are going to get rid of autoplay videos, don't have exceptions for advertisers, that just gives them more power.
Autoplaying advertisements are one of the main reason autoplay is so annoying. WhyTF would they make an exception for this? This seems like obvious corruption.
Yeah, but they kind of have to autoplay ads. Would you find it less annoying to (1) manually click to start playing an ad, and then (2) manually click after the ad is done to play the video? I hope it would be violation of the regulation to play ads ad infinitum after playing a video.
Yes, I'd find it much less annoying to have to manually click to play an ad, because then I can just not click at all, and read the article without having to listen to some stupid video.
Ah I see. This bill seems to only deal with social media / entertainment though (Facebook, YouTube), (unfortunately) not with those super-annoying autoplaying videos on news websites.
Yeah, those are the things I really hate. An ad on YouTube I'm not worried about, because I'm already there to view a video, and at least they have a "click to skip" button that shows up after a certain amount of time.
Instead of coming up with insane laws, the government can point people towards tools that will help them. For example, the govt could simply point people towards a chrome plugin that prevents those features from working, or a plugin that removes the links of any sites that have those features.
> the government shouldn't compensate for their lack of self control.
Quite frankly, I don't believe in complete self-autonomy. I think it's a great trait to strive towards, but the rise of behavioral psychology by itself shows that we can be poked, prodded, and nudged to do things that we otherwise wouldn't do, because "what we want to do" is a muddy non-singular fuzzy idea that can be tipped in whatever way the environment happens to be arranged or designed.
It's not about regulating people's lack of self-control, it's about acknowledging there are proven techniques that influence behavior and figuring out when those techniques are being taken advantage of in a socially detrimental way.
We can discuss whether continuous scrolling really is socially detrimental, but calling it "government compensation for lack of an individual's self control" is flat-out dishonest given that half of us here are about to go evaluate our latest adwords optimization spend or look at our next A/B test results.
"REFILL.—The use of a process that automatically loads and displays additional content, other than music or video content that the user has prompted to play"
An app I worked on had a similar feature to Snapstreaks, but it was used to help people quit smoking. This bill would have killed this feature that helped many people lead healthier lives.
So true. Just like high definition video or images.
This bill should also ban: large hero images, serving more than 500 KB of JavaScript, making more than 50 HTTP calls when loading a page, causing the fans to spin up when loading the page, unnecessarily using web fonts.
Banning these things would make the web so much better.
It'd be awesome to have an extremely lightweight protocol that lets you get the size or approximate size of a resource before download. Maybe a new HTTP method like SIZEOF.
But how to make it truthful? Other than client cutting off download at the expressed limit. Would that be good enough? And how to express "fuzzy" sizes like "at least 1MB but might be a little more or less".
I believe you want HTTP HEAD. It's defined to return the same response as a GET but without a body. You can therefore look at the Content-Length response header to see what actually issuing a GET will cost you.
The server should not return fuzzy content lengths: your client should have soft limit ranges rather than a single hard limit.
Of course, the server is not required to support HEAD, nor is it required to include Content-Length, which touches on your real complaint:
Programmers get to write programs the way they want to, and most of them don't share your value of preserving bandwidth and using progressive enhancement.
That is a relational and human problem. There is no technological solution to it.
I have suspicion that these politicians know what they are doing and they are doing these stupid things with the fullest knowledge that the bill does not help the addicted people. Also probably they know these things don't even threaten the tech giants. Then why are they spending their precious time for such a meaningless bill?
This makes me think of McConnell gaining support or lobbying from tobacco industry. Maybe this is a thinly veiled threat or request to the tech giants?
Well,.. the government is taking drug addiction seriously, so on principle I don't see why tech addiction should be a-priori excluded from discussion. I'm sure good people on both sides can disagree as to the measures that need to be taken..
If this is something people want, why does it need a legislative fix? Couldn't we just implement a technical solution and let people choose whether to use it? Like a browser plugin that stops videos from automatically playing?
This could just as well be said about opiates. Human's are not very good at regulating ourselves, when we encounter artificial signals that would have meant success in an earlier time. Not to mention minors, who do not yet have the physical capacity to regulate themselves. Not to say I support this regulation, but there is something to be said for protecting us from our primal selves.
I know you're not saying the government should fully regulate everything, but I see drugs used to demonstrate need for government intervention in people's choices despite drug policy being perhaps the most visible and painful failure of such paternalistic policymaking. Namely because it hasn't protected people from themselves, it hasn't treated anybody's addiction, it mainly just creates violent black markets and saddles nonviolent offenders with a permanent criminal record.
Cynically, I think the real purpose of these laws always looks more like protecting entrenched interests rather than helping people who would get better if only they had some legislator making their life choices from a thousand miles away.
Want to host your own website? Be sure to hire a specialized lawyer to audit and sign off on the user interface choices you made (and be sure to retain them indefinitely as your dependencies and the law evolve).
Because it is nonsense. A lawyer isn't some sort of rocket or satellite, fundamentally they are accessible to anyone who is even remotely in the middle class.
It seems like a lot of the bill could run up against first amendment challenges. The only parts that seem "safe" are checkbox parts that deal with contracts; agreeing and disagreeing to terms. I am not a lawyer.
This seems silly of course, but you can't have companies such as Google and Facebook claim they are a carrier while they promote and curate content, even if they are only curating via AI (which turns out at to be really smart at connecting people to extreme content). It's like the phone company putting up an ad to suggest your child call a pedophile and then saying we're not responsible for the call, we're just the phone company.
I hate web 3.0 features like this, more so for CPU than psychological reasons, but this is textbook useless government overreach; it's the web equivalent of those firearm bills than ban some auxiliary features that looks scary but are functionally irrelevant
Endless scroll has lots of legitimate uses, and there are a million more dark patterns where the dark use of endless scroll came from. Bills like this are not the answer.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 242 ms ] threadThat's not how drinking works. That's not how anything works.
In the past, getting as much social information as possible about your tribe was a huge reproductive advantage, but now that modern social network products have boosted the populations of our "tribes" into the thousands, trying to consume all that information has downsides that far outweigh the positive.
Facebook is basically the psychological equivalent of high fructose corn syrup.
Bottomless Bowls: Why Visual Cues of Portion Size May Influence Intake
Objective: Using self‐refilling soup bowls, this study examined whether visual cues related to portion size can influence intake volume without altering either estimated intake or satiation.
Research Methods and Procedures: Fifty‐four participants (BMI, 17.3 to 36.0 kg/m2; 18 to 46 years of age) were recruited to participate in a study involving soup. The experiment was a between‐subject design with two visibility levels: 1) an accurate visual cue of a food portion (normal bowl) vs. 2) a biased visual cue (self‐refilling bowl). The soup apparatus was housed in a modified restaurant‐style table in which two of four bowls slowly and imperceptibly refilled as their contents were consumed. Outcomes included intake volume, intake estimation, consumption monitoring, and satiety.
Results: Participants who were unknowingly eating from self‐refilling bowls ate more soup [14.7 ± 8.4 vs. 8.5 ± 6.1 oz; F(1,52) = 8.99; p < 0.01] than those eating from normal soup bowls. However, despite consuming 73% more, they did not believe they had consumed more, nor did they perceive themselves as more sated than those eating from normal bowls. This was unaffected by BMI.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1038/oby.2005.12
https://www.theguardian.com/science/head-quarters/2018/feb/1...
That's exactly how it works, to an extent. In a study [1], people with self-refilling soup bowls ate 73% more soup (p < 0.01) than those eating from normal soup bowls. Similar with popcorn [2]. I first read about this either in Nudge or in Mindless Eating.
[1] Wansink, B., Painter, J.E., & North, J. (2005). Bottomless Bowls: Why Visual Cues of Portion Size May Influence Intake Obesity Research, 13 (1), 93-100
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1038/oby.2005.12
[2] http://projectputthatcookiedownnow.com/2011/bottomless-bowls...
Two published replication studies (used for retractions) can be found here:
https://cisermgmt.cornell.edu/go/PHPs/catalogSingleStudy.php...
https://cisermgmt.cornell.edu/go/PHPs/catalogSingleStudy.php...
People like to rag on psychology for this, but the same replicability problem affects a lot of fields. Some of it is sloppiness (or straight-out fraud, which is more likely here) but it's also just that science is hard!
Soft sciences don't seem to have a similar culture.
(They remain legal, though.)
In other words: I agree, this really isn't a great example.
I don't know that this bill is a good or bad thing yet, I haven't dug deep into it yet. But the idea of making more designers eliminate dark patterns in software and make more features opt in instead of opt out is a good use of regulation in my mind.
I get it, "regulation ruins innovation" or some other libertarian nonsense. The bottom line is that the software industry has some problematic behaviors that they have refused to self-correct, and this is what happens.
Why wait? From Ars's writeup of the same bill[0]:
> As described in the text, social media companies would have to limit users to 30 minutes of use per day by default. Users would be allowed to choose their own time limits for daily and weekly use, but companies would have to reset that time limit to half an hour every single month, as well as providing "conspicuous pop-up" displays at least once every 30 minutes showing how much time you have spent using a service in the past day, across all devices.
This is just political grandstanding. (I hope) nobody would ever actually vote for this.
[0]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/07/proposed-us-law-...
Similarly if you are in a Casino you will never see a clock anywhere. Also generally food and drink is pretty cheap and there is normally table service in a Casino because they want you to be at the tables spending your cash.
The lawsuits would include:
- autoplay of gifs vs web videos
- does Pinterest count as an auto scroll ad
- does an endless scroll populated with 50% real content count as non-ad?
The law will just create more headaches for the producers and less innovation thanks to having to fight lawsuits.
Example of the depths lawyers can class action: Godiva is being sued in court for putting “Godiva 1927” on the label; the lawyer is arguing that people believe that the chocolate was made in 1927.
*edited the content away from ideas.
> - autoplay of gifs vs web videos
Presumably the content is what matters, not the particular compression format. Does it show animated content continuously without being triggered by active user interaction? Yes, so it's an auto-playing video.
> - does Pinterest count as an auto scroll ad
It's primarily focused on a call to action, so yes, it's an ad. Would they show an equivalent popup for ordinary user-generated content that they have no stake in?
> - does an endless scroll populated with 50% real content count as non-ad?
Is there an ad that appears when the user scrolls? I don't even see what this example was supposed to demonstrate.
> The law will just create more headaches for the producers and less innovation thanks to having to fight lawsuits.
More headaches and less innovation in how to sell bullshit sounds like a very positive outcome to me.
By that logic a loading spinner is an auto-playing video. Does me logging in count as "active user interaction" for showing me a loading spinner? I didn't request the spinner, I requested access to my skype chats.
Our legal system has many problems, but one problem it thankfully doesn't have is catering to ridiculous pedantry like you find with software programmers. Anyone trying to argue spinners in front of a judge is going to have their case dismissed with prejudice, because clearly the intent of the law wasn't to ban spinners or other such UI elements.
There's also plenty of other examples of government regulating or banning things which exploit human weakness. Ponzi schemes, meth, gambling, and more are all controlled. It's pretty clear that a lot of tech-company design is (intentionally or not) probably scratching a lot of the same itches. It's reasonable to expect regulation.
If we ban autoplay on Netflix, we should also ban cable I suppose (not a big loss, really), since cable will autoplay indefinitely.
I also like watching shows while doing something else (e.g. folding laundry), so autoplay makes it so I don't have to worry about engaging with the service between episodes.
Afaik, you can disable it in the settings.
I support automation, not manual labor.
There's a vast distance between directly effecting the substrate of thinking chemically and reactions to rewarding stimuli coming in normally.
If you scan the brain with an fMRI, the reward pathway lights up and suggest over time you will have reinforced that pleasurable activity and have created a strong affinity towards repeated activations, further strengthening those pathways.
Have there been any studies to show withdrawals from inhibiting consuming pleasurable visual media?
I mean if you were watching a series on Netflix that really resonates with you and you make a strong connection with the characters and feel as if you are a part of the scenes taking place (game of thrones etc), with characters faces activating your fusiform gyrus and dramatic scenes activating your amygdala making you emotional etc, how is autoplay facilitating the pleasurable dopamine response from imagining/anticipating/looking forward to how great the next episode will be, not as compelling of an issue as consuming exogenous substances that activate similar dopamine release?
All autoplay does for me is saving me the click on next which I'd click 100% of those times when I don't close Netflix right at the end of the old or start of the next episode.
I can't even understand how it would make people watch more (unless they barely watch and just didn't realize a new one started)
We'll also need to ban most major highways, as they keep going and going and going. And don't forget to ban unlimited refills at McDonalds, I'm sure those get people into trouble too. How does the fast food industry get such a big free pass on all the trouble it's caused?
And I don't see a problem with that. If you know you'll drink too much with unlimited refills, don't order drinks with unlimited refills.
I really don't think government has any business in this at all, but I guess I could see something where certain classes of product need to support setting limits on use from the customer side (as in, X hours of Netflix per day on this profile). That still sounds like overreach to me, but if it's a real problem for people with addictive personalities, I think it could be a workable solution while avoiding a lot of the unintended consequences.
Here you go chief.
I'm pretty sure you can turn it off for all devices from desktop Netflix's settings.
I somehow don't have autoplay enabled when I watch any series.
Personally, I'd love to ban autoplay videos, but I'm really concerned about web pages here. A custom app, to me, doesn't fall under this purview. Netflix can do just about whatever they want in their own app AFAIC.
For websites that have a legitimate use for autoplay, but are still websites and not custom apps, I would support making it a user-controlled preference that only works for logged-in users. Usually, people view YouTube as a logged-in Google user, so that can be used to allow them to turn on autoplay for that.
Isn't that an indicator that something's wrong when the company says "technically you can turn this off, it's just buried in the form of the product that people use the least. But technically you can turn it off."
go to: https://www.netflix.com/HdToggle#bxid_autoplay_true so you can move straight to step 7, or...
1. Select your profile
2. Hover mouse pointer over your avatar in upper right corner
3. Click "Account"
4. Scroll to "MY PROFILE" section
5. Click "Playback settings"
6. Scroll to "Auto-Play" section
7. Uncheck "Play next episode automatically"
8. Click "Save"
When they keep failing at self regulating shit behaviors that consumers don't want, this is what happens.
https://i.imgur.com/gctaiHK.png
https://www.netflix.com/HdToggle
also saving bandwidth on gifs
It’s rather anti-human, experience wise.
Right. But just because something is irritating does that mean it should be illegal? This seems like something that we don't need to waste taxpayer money on IMO. I feel like there's bigger fish to fry so to speak.
Plus, they could make money on it by levying enormous fines on websites that break the law. I'd love to see various news websites get slapped with $100M fines for having autoplay videos.
>I feel like there's bigger fish to fry so to speak.
Like what? Fixing our utterly broken healthcare system? That isn't realistic at all because they can't get enough agreement in Congress to pass such legislation. So they need to focus on things they can get done, like banning autoplay.
Do we categorize and label what would or would not be 'intentionally addictive' content and then ban that specifically?
Slack has infinite scrolling and is mostly used for work, but I also use it with friends and you can't deny there's the same social media type feedback loop with Slack reactions.
LinkedIn and Yammer are "professional" social networks. People use them to get "real work" done, but they're absolutely social media too.
AUTOPLAY — The use of a process that automatically plays music or videos (other than advertisements) without an express, separate prompt by the user (such as pushing a button or clicking an icon), unless
(A) before any content is loaded to the user’s display, that user or a different use compiled a playlist of multiple music videos or audio files that the user designated should be played without interruption, and the immediate user selected one of the videos or files in that precompiled playlist; or
(B) the predominant purpose of the social media platform is to allow users to stream music, but only if the only files the platform automatically plays are audio files or advertisements
It's not because of irritation but rather to protect easy preys from getting stuck.
[0]https://www.hawley.senate.gov/sites/default/files/2019-07/So...
They added an exception for advertisements, which is too bad since that is the only kind of autoplay video I would really be excited about getting rid of. The definition of autoplay in the bill is "The use of a process that automatically plays music or videos (other than advertisements) without an express, separate prompt by the user." If you are going to get rid of autoplay videos, don't have exceptions for advertisers, that just gives them more power.
Absolutely! That doesn't mean corporations should have a right to decide for people how they should consume their content.
Instead of coming up with insane laws, the government can point people towards tools that will help them. For example, the govt could simply point people towards a chrome plugin that prevents those features from working, or a plugin that removes the links of any sites that have those features.
> the government shouldn't compensate for their lack of self control.
Quite frankly, I don't believe in complete self-autonomy. I think it's a great trait to strive towards, but the rise of behavioral psychology by itself shows that we can be poked, prodded, and nudged to do things that we otherwise wouldn't do, because "what we want to do" is a muddy non-singular fuzzy idea that can be tipped in whatever way the environment happens to be arranged or designed.
It's not about regulating people's lack of self-control, it's about acknowledging there are proven techniques that influence behavior and figuring out when those techniques are being taken advantage of in a socially detrimental way.
We can discuss whether continuous scrolling really is socially detrimental, but calling it "government compensation for lack of an individual's self control" is flat-out dishonest given that half of us here are about to go evaluate our latest adwords optimization spend or look at our next A/B test results.
"REFILL.—The use of a process that automatically loads and displays additional content, other than music or video content that the user has prompted to play"
https://www.hawley.senate.gov/sites/default/files/2019-07/So... (pp. 3-4)
I guess endless scrolling doesn't have to be bad. But I've yet to experience an implementation that isn't awful.
I don't think legislation is a good way to make developers behave. But I also don't know how to break the mess we are in.
This bill should also ban: large hero images, serving more than 500 KB of JavaScript, making more than 50 HTTP calls when loading a page, causing the fans to spin up when loading the page, unnecessarily using web fonts.
Banning these things would make the web so much better.
But how to make it truthful? Other than client cutting off download at the expressed limit. Would that be good enough? And how to express "fuzzy" sizes like "at least 1MB but might be a little more or less".
The server should not return fuzzy content lengths: your client should have soft limit ranges rather than a single hard limit.
Of course, the server is not required to support HEAD, nor is it required to include Content-Length, which touches on your real complaint:
Programmers get to write programs the way they want to, and most of them don't share your value of preserving bandwidth and using progressive enhancement.
That is a relational and human problem. There is no technological solution to it.
This makes me think of McConnell gaining support or lobbying from tobacco industry. Maybe this is a thinly veiled threat or request to the tech giants?
https://gizmodo.com/this-is-how-youre-being-manipulated-1835...
Cynically, I think the real purpose of these laws always looks more like protecting entrenched interests rather than helping people who would get better if only they had some legislator making their life choices from a thousand miles away.
Want to host your own website? Be sure to hire a specialized lawyer to audit and sign off on the user interface choices you made (and be sure to retain them indefinitely as your dependencies and the law evolve).
I do not think it means what you think it means. (Or maybe I don't! :-)
I don't buy that.
I disabled Netflix autoplay for the reasons mentioned in this article.
Can we also ban scroll-jacking?
Do you have any examples of google or facebook claiming to be a "carrier"?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jul/02/facebook-...
If you want to extract some specific sections of the article that you believe support your position I'm happy to discuss them, but I'm not seeing it.