it doesn't remove any choice for users. users don't get a choice on the offending sites currently. they only get infinite scroll. so the eventual infinite scroll replacement will be just that, the replacement.
on removing possible UI design choices for social media companies -- i have a very small violin on hand.
(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.)
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
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?
Any discussion on this topic within hacker news is pretty silly. To much financial incentive to keep the status quo, and to many bots pushing narratives.
It’s like listening to the lawyers at a cigarette manufacturer, car manufacturers fight seat belts or gun manufacturers in kindergartens. The change is coming because real people are pissed.
The real people who are pissed are the same minority of novelty-haters who were pissed about Wal-Mart, fracking, and Facebook. They're outnumbered by the real people who think infinite scroll is great and use it every day.
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.
We had a choice when there were alternative clients for all major platforms. Make open APIs mandatory for large platforms and a lot of problems will disappear. UIs will be designed for the best user experience again instead of maximizing engagement. It will hurt their revenue but so be it.
That seems like cute libertarian nonsense. The key word is choice. People have less free will than you think. Every time a teen goes to insta/facebook/tiktok etc they are an individual up against a huge corporation of thousands of people and ML whose job it is to hijack their dopamine circuit. Usage of these apps decreases attention span which effectively means other activities become boring so the users experience a withdrawal symptom like a drug addict.
And it doesn't just affect them. I think most of us would rather live in a society where 50% of the population isn't brain-rotted.
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?
Infinite scroll is not necessarily a problem in and of itself. If the content is static, no biggie. At some point diminishing returns and you will want to use search for it.
It is the algorithm they attach to infinite scroll which is problematic. It is not a UI design problem.
A lot of this is states trying to figure out a way around the first amendment to regulate social media that the courts will wink and accept. That is why you see so many convoluted laws being drawn up by state legislatures about this.
What should be changed is the exemption algorithmically curated feeds still get under section 230. This has always seemed like a huge loophole. Once social media feeds are picking and choosing what to show users based on opaque criteria they are no longer neutral carriers of information but more like newspaper editors. They should be liable for what the users see.
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.
> 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.
Infinite scroll evolved alongside algorithms that incentivise addictive content. So it’s “good” UX in that it’s effective for consuming addictive content…
When I’m trying to do something constructive, like search or browse, infinite scroll is IMHO disastrously bad. You can’t keep your place in the list, or jump ahead/back.
While that's true I think that once the feed has been observed in a certain way the advantages of stability outweigh the advantages of showing a tweaked version the second time it is loaded.
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
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.
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.
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'?
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.
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).
Ah yes, let me just look at Instagram for the ideal model of infinite scroll UX. You can't even scroll up to something you've actually subscribed to that you didn't mean to scroll past without it tossing it into the memory hole and replacing it with something you don't care about.
Did you think HN has an unusable and bad interface? It seems to be a remarkably popular website despite having hard pages that change order on every refresh.
That second style will never change (unless you insert entries into the past). The first style will change. But it hardly makes it impossible to keep your place in the list; if you come back three years later, you'll find that that link goes to a random location, but if you come back next week, that link is going to go to a place that is very close to the place you left off, requiring minimal adjustment to find your place again.
Maybe re-read the thread? A real-time conversation is not infinite content, it’s chronological and it ends when there are no more new or old messages. You shouldn’t use pagination, and that’s fine.
It’s infinite scroll on infinite content that is addictive and harmful. If pagination is viable in these cases and makes it less addictive, platforms are free to use pagination or whatever other solution they can find with lawmakers to make their platforms less hostile to user autonomy.
I expect this and similar laws to evolve to be clearer as to what patterns should be banned.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
“Shouting fire” was a bad decision denying the right to protest the draft, and it’s since been overturned. (Thankfully, you 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.
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?
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.
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.
Again, the fire in a crowded theater example was actually political, and the decision was overturned. It no longer stands as precedent.
Limitations on porn still exist in a few areas, but they are gradually being rolled back—obscenity laws were once widespread and highly restrictive. Most still standing carveouts are pretzel twists that probably need to be corrected with a clarifying amendment; they are on very shaky ground.
The court has recognized speech protections outside of politics many times, including protections for authors and creators who were not explicitly aiming for political statements. For example, Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association established that video games are protected expressive speech, even if they are violent trash that aren’t attempting any political point whatsoever.
Isn't it fascinating that the people making the most extensive use of infinite feeds and A/B testing for maximum user engagement are also the massive platforms with dominating network effects and captive audiences? It's like _specifically regulating large social media conglomerates with outsized impact, capacity for harm, and demonstrated propensity to maximize user addiction might provide an ideal balance of societal improvement without harming smaller actors_.
Re, source code: you can print out an implementation of your infinite feed and put it on GitHub. Go nuts. That's your freedom of speech. Likewise, I can write DDoS control software and clients. However I can't run said software as a service because that specific act is illegal. Same thing applies to the application feeds we're discussing; hosting content and offering software as a service has different semantics.
If you think that UX is a matter of free speech then I have an illuminated freeway sign running at 3000 nits to sell you.
We can have nice things. We can push corporations to act in pro-social manners. We can put individuals at a better footing with respect to large corporations while ensuring the liberty of individuals and small businesses. This libertarian idea that we cannot constrain obviously harmful behavior from massive corporations without immediately turning into an authoritarian both flies in the face of historical precedent and basic reason.
Sophistry. It’s not about whether or not regulation is authoritarian. It’s about whether or not it’s constitutional.
A law doesn’t just get a constitutional bypass because it’s addressing known harms or “anti-social” behavior or whatever. This is not the UK.
Illuminated signs exist in the real, physical world. They can beam bright light into your home, involuntarily. Design and presentation exists in the realm of a printed page, or on the display of your device. Can we regulate how a book lays out its type?
The First Amendment is quite possibly the most uniquely American thing about our Constitution, and its most defining feature. It’s worth defending.
> A law doesn’t just get a constitutional bypass because it’s addressing known harms or “anti-social” behavior or whatever. This is not the UK.
First, the harm arguments are regularly made in front of the supreme court. And sometimes, when it suits them, justices make their own harm or sociality arguments. No, USA is worst. It gets to be constitutional if it advances conservative right wing agenda and unconstitutional otherwise.
> The First Amendment is quite possibly the most uniquely American thing about our Constitution, and its most defining feature.
You dont defend it by redefining its meaning to unrecognizable to encompass things non-speech of corporations. All the while making it so that in practice, poorer people have no defense anyway.
Not that I think this significantly alters the point, but it's pretty common in the US to regulate or ban signage. e.g. billboards are illegal in my city and there are specific regulations about what kind of elements can be present on buildings to signal business names. I'm pretty certain illuminated signs beaming into people's homes would be illegal here. Actually I don't think light-up signs are allowed at all; I believe they have to be lit via projected light pointed at the building the're on.
A website like mygeotechnicalblog.example.com is like a book that you have to seek out. But websites like Facebook and Twitter may be so ubiquitous that they are more akin to a street that you walk down for many purposes and shouldn't be bombarded by obnoxious advertisements on the way.
While we’re just stretching metaphors to fit our preferences, comments like yours are so odious that they are akin to an open sewer, and should be regulated for public health reasons. Am I doing this right?
Can I buy a 40mm grenade launcher without a FFL? No, I can't. Can I legally manufacture and install an auto sear on my AR? Also no. Would it be sick if I could? Hell yes. Do I own a delightful selection of firearms, including AR pattern rifles? Yes, and the cardinality of that set is only going up.
Does society benefit from mass ownership and unlimited access to fully automatic rifles and grenade launchers? If it does, what country allows it?
We put upper bounds on the rights and freedoms of individuals and corporations because we all must live within proximity to each other. These bounds may be authoritarian at times, and of course that's bad. But we collectively can limit freedoms because the alternative is actively and disproportionally harmful to society.
When it comes to the rights and the freedoms of the largest and wealthiest corporations, we already live in an era where these entities are shaping major aspects of our lives. Infinite scroll is one small mechanism by which they're hacking our biology; this is more than just pixels on a screen but a component in a system that was A/B tested to maximize behavior modification.
Help me understand - do you believe that it is possible to regulate these entities in any form?
There's the constitution (basically a piece of toilet paper with scribbles on it) and then there's the actual reality of how the country operates, and the actual reality is that speech is restricted in many ways.
I must also mention that courts are not Congress and states are not Congress.
Well just throw it all out the window then, if we’re not going to pay attention to the constitution. First things first, let’s make a law to ban you.
If you’re just going to pick and choose what rights you apply, then it’s not much of a governing document, is it? Is this just “Parliament is Sovereign” with extra fluff? Might makes right?
Too bad all the old “rightful” standbys have gone rogue, while rapidly losing their capacity to effect change.
It’s almost like we need a robust system of checks and balances, governed some kind of rigid framework to ensure that everyone plays by the rules. Or we could just continue to ignore that and see what happens.
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.
Time/place/manner restrictions typically apply to public property. These are private websites.
While the court has once or twice extended protections to people using private property as a public forum, to my knowledge they have never done so with time/place/manner restrictions.
"No loud music between 10pm and 7am." That's on private property when it can be heard by others. Laws have all kind of restrictions on the time/place/manner of self-expression when what is being expressed has a negative effect on others. What you can't do is have laws that would say loud opera after 10pm is OK but loud Country & Western isn't.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That specific case is why I brought this up, no they aren’t illegal, this is Making Shit Up and exaggerating beyond what actually happened. But if people like you got your way, they could be made illegal.
While I would agree, I think many are missing the even more fundamental issue. Even if you get rid of every single predatory thing imaginable, social media itself is full of incessant stimuli, FOMO and other features that make it destructive for everybody, but especially young people. For instance image crafting is going to harmful for everybody, because many adults have a tendency to engage in keeping up with the Joneses, but for children it's especially harmful because of much greater personal insecurities and proclivities towards envy.
And things like image crafting are not even necessarily intentional or malicious. Somebody who posts a pic of their filet mignon dinner probably isn't posting much in the way of their microwaved leftovers mashed up in a bowl. And adults already get mistaken perceptions of others because of this bias, let alone children.
What I like about Hacker News is each day I open it up, scan the first three pages, open 2-5 links to read, then close it again. Those pages make it easy to monitor my usage and set limits. I used to do the same with Reddit before that changed
I'd fully support removing infinite scroll or even just banning it from under 18 year olds
Yeah I hate infinite scroll. I have no idea what actual common sentiment is because you’d have to do broad polling to find that out. I always wonder if UI designers fall into the “everyone i talked loved it” where everyone consists of “other designers and developers who have a stake in making this a common feature” or “user surveys that are heavily loaded to arrive at the conclusion I want “
Could be I’m just an old man yelling at clouds though.
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.
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
This is the sort of thing that should / will be decided by courts, I think. We have many fuzzy laws where evaluating on a case-by-case basis makes more sense than deciding an arbitrary hard line. In this case, apps and platforms as a whole would be taken into account; infinite scroll alone might not be against this law, but if an app has a consistent pattern of addictive behavior and is harming its users because of it, something like infinite scroll might be forbidden for that app in a lawsuit.
> 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.
Exactly correct - there is no way to disable the infinite scrolling reel nonsense in Snapchat while still allowing messaging. So, my son is either cut off from his friends or gets crap shovelled into his eyes. This is a business decision: to leverage their having insinuated themselves between him and his friends against his mental health. Ban it all immediiately
I think it's about user agency. When we say that infinite scroll is addictive, we mean that the user keeps on scrolling even when they wish they could stop. It's also about harm. Trapping users on their phones is harmful to their well-being.
Reading the bill I see carve-outs for things like "commercial transactions", perhaps allowing Amazon and Temu to use infinite scroll, but not Facebook and TikTok.
It’s the wrong fix to the problem. The correct fix is enforcing an infinite scroll limit (time), after which the app tells you to take a break (for some amount of time).
> a feature that simply makes your product easier to use
Except it doesn't. You lose context and are now drowning in an endless morass of lazy-loaded blocks and widgets, all hiding under invisible elements. Nothing has a permanent URL, so there is zero accountably if the user was shown something that they need to reference - unless it benefits the platform. And of course, it will eventually all force reload when the page complexity exhausts the available memory, or at least when it becomes too exhausted to reliably serve ads.
I think they meant how you can’t get a permalink to your feed/timeline view-state[1], so other people can see exactly what you see (not just what’s in the viewport but also the surrounding/offscreen content and broader context).
[1]: something like a link specifying the contents of my feed at a specific date+time and scroll-position.
…whereas with old-school SSR paging it’s right there in the querystring paging params (anchor and offset, or page-size and page-index).
I’ll concede that a well-designed infinite-scrolling (or “click to load more inline” button) feature could use history.pushState to dynamically update the browser’s address with new query params but I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen anyone do that - which is a shame.
Google search or a traditional paginated forum doesn't provide that either. No guarantee that page 15 of thread X will contain the same posts as it does now when the moderators wake up and delete the flame war.
They do, but if you scroll past a post in your feed, and then try to scroll back to find it, there is very little guarantee that it will still be there.
When I worked at Meta there was a lot of employee pressure to implement a "deterministic feed", where scrolling back-and-forth would produce the same set of posts, but leadership constantly sandbagged the idea (nobody actually wants determinism, people prefer to be surprised/delighted, etc)
you can't jump to the specific place on the website, you can't remember where something has been to have a map in mind, you can't go to "about" section or some sort of site settings
agree. pressing a button to go to next page is like a chore. The scrolling in itself is kind of addictive, you swipe with your finger and everything moves like you're moving a parchment or something.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.)
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?
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.
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?
In times long ago, those who owned a very expensive printing press and distribution networks had a significant advantage in reach. As did those with the money to pay writers and staff.
Regardless, this doesn’t change anything about the first amendment, because changes in technology and their consequences don’t alter the Constitution. If you think free speech needs a separate concept of “reach” then you need to pass an amendment.
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.
> 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.
> 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...
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
Seems like one of those situations where the outcomes should be measured, not the implementation. If you've created a product that is leading to hundreds of hours of wasted time (and the users themselves are sick of the amount of time they spend) maybe its time to investigate?
I guess I'm agreeing with your point that its hard to pre-emptively define what "bad UI" is when it's often so close to "efficient UX", so just go downstream.
One of my favorite UX stories is about my first Mac, a 12" g4 mbp. One of the best things about it was that I could open the lid and it would immediately be awake and ready to use. I would use it, do what I needed to do, then close it and put it away. It was great because it consumed so little of my time.
So to your question about the line between good UX and addictive features, at least in some cases, there is an ocean between them, though to your point, it's hard to find that line in the ocean. "Fallacy of the beard" and whatnot.
It should just be universally required to give an option to disable addictive features. Should prevent age verification, and giving users optionality is always a good thing (for them).
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.
I’m not sure that suffices. If a site has a very “good” (at keeping people glued to the screen) content ranking algorithm, they can still make money, albeit less, serving non-targeted ads. Longer engagement time by viewers = more ad impressions, targeted or not.
In fact, it would almost certainly encourage them to keep you engaged even longer in an attempt to make up some of the money lost with the end of targeted advertising.
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.
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).
Facebook really didn't like that apple made device IDs optional, it's strange that they quieted down about that. They must have found an alternative fingerprinting method.
I believe it's why they went all-in on Metaverse/VR. They want to own the next platform so that could never happen to them again. IIRC, Zuck has stated the latter openly.
Reminds me this is the same reason Valve went half-in on Linux. I guess this force can be used for good or evil.
Valve started supporting Linux and making their own Linux gaming hardware because Microsoft briefly tried to lock down Windows so that games could only be installed from the Microsoft Store.
There is no way to enforce any of these types of laws without an iron curtain that clearly violates the first amendment. If you have free speech infront of children in public I don't see how having infinite scroll on your website or app is any different. Parents should parent their children instead of the state. Its crazy how avoident California is of solving actually important problems like homelessness, mental health resources, housing crisis, yet infinite scrolling somehow is a priority.
Pretty sure most parents care about their kids more than nearly any other issue you mention. Social media excess has pushed to far and become less well liked than lawyers at this point. Thats only going to end one way.
Parents certainly care about all the things I mentioned, it even impacts their kids. This approach to safeguard kids online is completely impractical and utterly unenforceable and seems like a total waste of time.
> 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.
I honestly think that this may have some benefit as the infinite scroll has made our attention spans incredibly short. Although, I'm sure people will find there way around it.
note that this is going after "psychologically exploitative features intended to maximize engagement" of all kinds, not just infinite feeds. it also poses an ultimatum banning people under 16 from websites that provide such addictive features to anyone.
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.
Adults are supposed to have acquired enough life experience to make more reasonable decisions than children.
Having said that, we also expect adults to make all kinds of bad decisions so they too are prohibited from many things, like shooting smack or freebasing meth.
I think there's a good case to be made not for banning kids from social media, but for banning everyone. In that case, it'd be easier to do it from the supply side than the demand side.
The problem with infinity scroll is the lack of "pagination", which essentialy make most of content to get hidden away. For instance. Let assume you have 3000 comments on a YouTube video, your browser will crash way before it "infinite scroll" to the end (I know that that are tools to bypass this, but I'm talking about the default experience).
> The investigation focuses on features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and the platforms' highly personalised recommender systems.
I think the most frustrating thing for me is when a website has infinite scroll, but also a footer with links that you want to access. I end up going to the dev tools to look at the code.
If you don't have an agent swarm that's already trained to re-scroll all the unscrolled feeds and translate them to binaural beats during your micronaps you're ngmi
I’m going to be honest, this kind of regulation would make me disable the site(s) for the state (if there are fines, etc). I don’t have the time to play these games for my tiny projects
352 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadon removing possible UI design choices for social media companies -- i have a very small violin on hand.
(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.)
"Resourceful"?
It’s like listening to the lawyers at a cigarette manufacturer, car manufacturers fight seat belts or gun manufacturers in kindergartens. The change is coming because real people are pissed.
And it doesn't just affect them. I think most of us would rather live in a society where 50% of the population isn't brain-rotted.
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?
It is the algorithm they attach to infinite scroll which is problematic. It is not a UI design problem.
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.
When I’m trying to do something constructive, like search or browse, infinite scroll is IMHO disastrously bad. You can’t keep your place in the list, or jump ahead/back.
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
At the very least we should be able to scroll backwards after a page refresh to see previous posts.
If the order changes, all bets are off regardless of pagination or infinite scroll.
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).
In thems of pagination, yes, which is why I prefer to use https://hckrnews.com/.
Well, that's obviously false. There are two styles of pagination:
That second style will never change (unless you insert entries into the past). The first style will change. But it hardly makes it impossible to keep your place in the list; if you come back three years later, you'll find that that link goes to a random location, but if you come back next week, that link is going to go to a place that is very close to the place you left off, requiring minimal adjustment to find your place again.The problem is infinite content.
It’s infinite scroll on infinite content that is addictive and harmful. If pagination is viable in these cases and makes it less addictive, platforms are free to use pagination or whatever other solution they can find with lawmakers to make their platforms less hostile to user autonomy.
I expect this and similar laws to evolve to be clearer as to what patterns should be banned.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Limitations on porn still exist in a few areas, but they are gradually being rolled back—obscenity laws were once widespread and highly restrictive. Most still standing carveouts are pretzel twists that probably need to be corrected with a clarifying amendment; they are on very shaky ground.
The court has recognized speech protections outside of politics many times, including protections for authors and creators who were not explicitly aiming for political statements. For example, Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association established that video games are protected expressive speech, even if they are violent trash that aren’t attempting any political point whatsoever.
Re, source code: you can print out an implementation of your infinite feed and put it on GitHub. Go nuts. That's your freedom of speech. Likewise, I can write DDoS control software and clients. However I can't run said software as a service because that specific act is illegal. Same thing applies to the application feeds we're discussing; hosting content and offering software as a service has different semantics.
If you think that UX is a matter of free speech then I have an illuminated freeway sign running at 3000 nits to sell you.
We can have nice things. We can push corporations to act in pro-social manners. We can put individuals at a better footing with respect to large corporations while ensuring the liberty of individuals and small businesses. This libertarian idea that we cannot constrain obviously harmful behavior from massive corporations without immediately turning into an authoritarian both flies in the face of historical precedent and basic reason.
A law doesn’t just get a constitutional bypass because it’s addressing known harms or “anti-social” behavior or whatever. This is not the UK.
Illuminated signs exist in the real, physical world. They can beam bright light into your home, involuntarily. Design and presentation exists in the realm of a printed page, or on the display of your device. Can we regulate how a book lays out its type?
The First Amendment is quite possibly the most uniquely American thing about our Constitution, and its most defining feature. It’s worth defending.
> A law doesn’t just get a constitutional bypass because it’s addressing known harms or “anti-social” behavior or whatever. This is not the UK.
First, the harm arguments are regularly made in front of the supreme court. And sometimes, when it suits them, justices make their own harm or sociality arguments. No, USA is worst. It gets to be constitutional if it advances conservative right wing agenda and unconstitutional otherwise.
> The First Amendment is quite possibly the most uniquely American thing about our Constitution, and its most defining feature.
You dont defend it by redefining its meaning to unrecognizable to encompass things non-speech of corporations. All the while making it so that in practice, poorer people have no defense anyway.
Does society benefit from mass ownership and unlimited access to fully automatic rifles and grenade launchers? If it does, what country allows it?
We put upper bounds on the rights and freedoms of individuals and corporations because we all must live within proximity to each other. These bounds may be authoritarian at times, and of course that's bad. But we collectively can limit freedoms because the alternative is actively and disproportionally harmful to society.
When it comes to the rights and the freedoms of the largest and wealthiest corporations, we already live in an era where these entities are shaping major aspects of our lives. Infinite scroll is one small mechanism by which they're hacking our biology; this is more than just pixels on a screen but a component in a system that was A/B tested to maximize behavior modification.
Help me understand - do you believe that it is possible to regulate these entities in any form?
I must also mention that courts are not Congress and states are not Congress.
If you’re just going to pick and choose what rights you apply, then it’s not much of a governing document, is it? Is this just “Parliament is Sovereign” with extra fluff? Might makes right?
It’s almost like we need a robust system of checks and balances, governed some kind of rigid framework to ensure that everyone plays by the rules. Or we could just continue to ignore that and see what happens.
• 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.
While the court has once or twice extended protections to people using private property as a public forum, to my knowledge they have never done so with time/place/manner restrictions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And things like image crafting are not even necessarily intentional or malicious. Somebody who posts a pic of their filet mignon dinner probably isn't posting much in the way of their microwaved leftovers mashed up in a bowl. And adults already get mistaken perceptions of others because of this bias, let alone children.
I'd fully support removing infinite scroll or even just banning it from under 18 year olds
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.
That's a UI bug. Real infinite scroll does not have a footer.
Could be I’m just an old man yelling at clouds though.
But you can see the links! Maybe if your reflexes were just a little faster, if the mouse didn't lag!!!
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
Neither? Pagination is good UX; infinite scroll is a way to make your usable page unusable instead.
And of course we know that small changes increase engagement/addictiveness.
Html interfaces are easily configurable, technically.
The fact companies at least don't offer easy ways to configure websites to be less addicting, and some even block those, does tell us something.
Reading the bill I see carve-outs for things like "commercial transactions", perhaps allowing Amazon and Temu to use infinite scroll, but not Facebook and TikTok.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
Except it doesn't. You lose context and are now drowning in an endless morass of lazy-loaded blocks and widgets, all hiding under invisible elements. Nothing has a permanent URL, so there is zero accountably if the user was shown something that they need to reference - unless it benefits the platform. And of course, it will eventually all force reload when the page complexity exhausts the available memory, or at least when it becomes too exhausted to reliably serve ads.
[1]: something like a link specifying the contents of my feed at a specific date+time and scroll-position.
…whereas with old-school SSR paging it’s right there in the querystring paging params (anchor and offset, or page-size and page-index).
I’ll concede that a well-designed infinite-scrolling (or “click to load more inline” button) feature could use history.pushState to dynamically update the browser’s address with new query params but I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen anyone do that - which is a shame.
An algorithmically "curated" TL, yes that's harder
Google search or a traditional paginated forum doesn't provide that either. No guarantee that page 15 of thread X will contain the same posts as it does now when the moderators wake up and delete the flame war.
When I worked at Meta there was a lot of employee pressure to implement a "deterministic feed", where scrolling back-and-forth would produce the same set of posts, but leadership constantly sandbagged the idea (nobody actually wants determinism, people prefer to be surprised/delighted, etc)
> so there is zero accountably if the user was shown something that they need to reference
You just sound angry...
you can't jump to the specific place on the website, you can't remember where something has been to have a map in mind, you can't go to "about" section or some sort of site settings
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
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.
At addiction?
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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?
Regardless, this doesn’t change anything about the first amendment, because changes in technology and their consequences don’t alter the Constitution. If you think free speech needs a separate concept of “reach” then you need to pass an amendment.
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.
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.
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...
I guess I'm agreeing with your point that its hard to pre-emptively define what "bad UI" is when it's often so close to "efficient UX", so just go downstream.
So to your question about the line between good UX and addictive features, at least in some cases, there is an ocean between them, though to your point, it's hard to find that line in the ocean. "Fallacy of the beard" and whatnot.
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.
Age verification and how enthusiastic gov'ts are about it is concerning.
That said, I like the idea of an option. Options are good!
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.
The tech giants have flown to close to the sun, real people are pissed.
- would they be able to make as much as they do now? I think it would be significantly less.
From Meta's official Financial Report for 2025 [0]:
Total Revenue: $200,966 Million
-Advertising: $196,175 million (97.6%)
-Other rev: $ 4,791 Million ( 2.4%)
[0] https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...
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.
Valve started supporting Linux and making their own Linux gaming hardware because Microsoft briefly tried to lock down Windows so that games could only be installed from the Microsoft Store.
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.
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.
Having said that, we also expect adults to make all kinds of bad decisions so they too are prohibited from many things, like shooting smack or freebasing meth.
I think there's a good case to be made not for banning kids from social media, but for banning everyone. In that case, it'd be easier to do it from the supply side than the demand side.
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.
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.