It's important to note they aren't creating laws against infinite scrolling, but are ruling against addictive design and pointing to infinite scrolling as an example of it. The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes". They point to certain features they'd like them to change, but there is no specific ruling around what you can/can't do.
My initial reaction was that this was a terrible precedent, but after thinking on it more I asked myself, "well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?". Everything I thought of would have some way or workaround that could be found, and equally would have terrible consequences on situations where this is actually quite valuable. IE if you disallow infinite scrolling, what page sizes are allowed? Can I just have a page of 10,000 elements that lazy load?
Regardless of your take around whether this is EU overreach, I'm glad they're not implementing strict laws around what you can/can't do - there are valuable situations for these UI patterns, even if in combination they can create addictive experiences. Still, I do think that overregulation here will lead to services being fractured. I was writing about this earlier this morning (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47005367), but the regulated friction of major platforms (ie discord w/ ID laws) is on a collision course with the ease of vibe coding up your own. When that happens, these comissions are going to need to think long and hard around having a few large companies to watch over is better than millions of small micro-niche ones.
>"well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?"
Hear me out: banning advertising on the Internet. It's the only way. It's the primordial domino tile. You knock that one over, every other tile follows suit. It's the mother of chain reactions. There would be no social media, no Internet as we know it. Imagine having TikTok, YouTube or X trying to survive on subscriptions alone in their current iterations. Impossible. They'd need to change their top priority from "maximizing engagement by fostering addictive behavior" to "offering a product with enough quality for someone to pay a fee in order to be able to use it".
Define "advertising". I feel this might be hard to do.
For example is my blog talking about Windows considered as Advertising? What about my blog discussing products we make? What about the web site for my local restaurant?
If I add my restaurant location to Google maps, is that advertising? Are review sites?
If I'm an aggregator (like booking.com) and I display the results for a search is that advertising?
I assume though you meant advertising as in 3rd party advertising. So no Google ad words, no YouTube ads etc. Ok, let's explore that...take say YouTube...
Can creators still embed "sponsored by" scenes? Can they do product placement?
Your suggestion is, unfortunately, not implementable. Leaving aside the merit for a moment, there's just no way that any politician can make it happen. Google and Facebook are too big, with too much cash to lobby with. And that's before you tell everyone that the free internet is no more, now you gotta pay subscriptions.
And, here's the kicker, even if you did force users to pay for Facebook and Google, it's still in their interest to maximize engagement...
>> Advertising = compensating someone to promote a product / company.
That's a definition, sure. I feel like it leaves loopholes (under this definition spam isn't advertising, and I guess affiliation programs are?)
If I pay someone to print flyers is that advertising? If I pay squarespace for my site, is that advertising?
What if I need a Google maps subscription to place pins? Is placing a pin then advertising? Even if the subscription gives me other abilities?
Under your definition I guess YouTube creators can't be sponsored. And all existing videos with sponsorship need yo be removed? And I guess no online watching of sports (lots of people paid to wear a logo there...)
Presumably no product placement in Netflix shows (not sure what to do with old content?)
Of course I'm not paid to advertise MiraclePill. My channel exists purely thanks to patreon. No, I don't know that my "executive level" patreons are all MiraclePill employees...
No, I don't pay Google for ads, the ads are free when I purchase GoogleCoin which I buy because I expect GoogleCoin to go up in value...
> Paying booking.com to allow your results to appear higher is not.
But booking takes a cut of the booking in all scenarios, so they’re already incentivized to prioritize results that result in more profit for them. This all gets very tricky unfortunately.
Promotion of anything at all is advertising, with or without compensation. The word advertising is pretty well defined, and the dictionary definitions don’t usually mention compensation, e.g. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/advertise.
An example I’m sure you would consider advertising - consider Google advertising Google Fiber in Google search results, or Facebook advertising business services on Facebook, or Apple, Netflix, Cinemark advertising their own shows & products in their own channels. You’ve seen lots of these, I’m sure you would consider them ads, but it’s not the compensation that makes them ads.
How would something like Github Sponsors work? Lots of projects use a "sponsor us for $LARGE_SUM and we'll mention you in our readme and release notes" model.
What about just banning personalized advertising? Like: you can pay Google Maps to show your result as sponsored, but Google can only show it to either everybody or randomized people.
Let's drop the charade where you pretend you don't know what advertising is. You're smarter than that, and your playing dumb act would be more persuasive if you didn't ask leading questions that clearly show you know the answers. This isn't a good faith argument.
I mean are you really asking whether creators embedding "sponsored by" scenes is an ad as if you don't know? C'mon, don't insult your readers with this nonsense.
HN commenters are not legislators, and even if random HN commenters can't draft legislation, that doesn't mean that a minimally-funded team of experts would have any difficulty with the problem.
I have said for years - Micropayents, something like the traffic settlement system for termination charges in the NANPA PSTN, and when I say micropayments I mean 1000ths of a cent. Then the content that does cost money (news, social media, whatever can be monetized and the users are paying for consumption.
I think that's revisionism. Social media existed before online advertising. Usenet was quite massive and vibrant, countless IRC servers were maintained by volunteers, web-based forums covered pretty much the same ground as Reddit does today. All supported by the goodwill of individuals, non-profits, and businesses such as ISPs that actively wanted the internet to be interesting because they were making money by selling access to it.
The thing that changed in the mid-2000s was that we found ways to not only provide these services, but extract billions of dollars while doing it. Good for Mark Zuckerberg, but I doubt the internet would be hurting without that.
The internet was absolutely better without that. I arrived after the original Eternal September, but there have been more and more until now everyone is perpetually online 24/7.
Now fucking everything about the world is a hustle to monetize every possible nook and cranny around content. There isn't even content anymore, it's nearly all AI slop as a substrate to grow ads on.
I am nostalgic for the era when I found "punch the monkey" irritating. People used to make websites as a labor of love.
I don't think we have a right to a business model. Either you figure one out for your particular site (selling access to the website, donations, etc) or you don't and stop and either is ok.
I assume you're primarily referring to freedom of expression? I take the view that it doesn't include the freedom to pay people to carry a particular message so long as the restriction on paying is neutral as to the content of the message, but I can certainly respect the view that it does.
My comment about not having a right to business models is in some ways more general. Regardless of whether this business model is protected for some other reason, business models in general aren't, and it's a common flawed argument that they are.
Of course they have. Off the top of my head examples include: Grants in the form of tax dollars (e.g. arxiv). To benefit the authors reputation (e.g. numerous scientists, developers, etc personal sites. zacklabe.com as a useful example). As a hobby (I think aiarena.net falls into this category). To collect data for research purposes (e.g. the original chatgpt release, and early recaptcha)...
Oh you mean we can reverse the eternal September? Sign me up! Gatekeeping is good, actually! The “let people enjoy things” crowd is responsibility for facilitating the mass enshittification of everything.
Catering to the lowest common denominator is how we got the Burger King guy on spirit airlines.
I disagree, most advertising is just an attempt at manipulation, not just a genuine "our products exist and you might like them." I would consider not being legally manipulated, especially by financially interested groups, more free than the reverse.
Viewing this thread, and the back and forth of it, I need to say something.
Advertising sucks in this thread too.
By that I mean, people are not speaking plainly, and it is almost ingrained into our societies now. We "sell" our position in a discussion, a debate.
For example, regulation does curtail freedom. Completely.
However, lack of regulation can harm people. Significantly.
Thus, regulation does not give people more freedom, it can however reduce harm.
In democratic nations, often judges will weigh these two things, when determining if a regulation passes the muster. In my country, we have the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and often judges will determine if a challenged regulation is of sufficient, required public good, whilst not overtly reducing freedom of the individual.
This is a mature conversation.
Advertising is not.
A primary example I've seen in the US, is people calling immigrants "undocumented" on one side, and "criminals" on the other. This is, of course, a reduction in nuance, and designed to advertise a position merely with the words used. And it is a societal sickness.
An illegal alien is just that, and using that term confers no judgement, for it is simply fact.
There was a time when politics were not first and fore in terms of the use of language. The current trend to be "touchy feely" over use of language, and find great offense at the use of language, does nothing other than stop debate. Reduce discussion. Cause schism instead of collaboration.
Completely fair, but I was responding to someone who doesn't think that it curtails freedom but that is the total opposite, you cannot be free if you are dead (except for a few niche philosophical definitions of the word), so human centric regulations like the asbestos ban are orthogonal to freedom, even if I admit in the strictest definition of the word yes, a regulation can curtail your freedom to harm yourself and hypothetically could curtail yourself from positive benefits as well.
But the thing is that statistically the likelihood they were discussing in good faith about this is near none, instead their way of speaking are telltales of a libertarian, where they have a almost religious believe that regulation is their biggest enemy and will never admit that the lack of it could harm or even kill them, I have wasted many many hours talking with such kind of people and don't aim to waste more arguing in good faith giving nuanced responses.
Have we come to such a low cultural point that ads are seen as some kind of basic human right?
Fuck ads. What's absurd is tolerating them and the damage they do to media, consumers, kids, lesser and/or more honest businesses, culture, products, and so on all the way to the Windows and macOS system UIs.
We're on a startup entrepreneur site. I'm not surprised it's seen as the lifeblood of the industry here. It sort of is.
At the same time, this has the same energy of "if we release all the files, the system will collapse". Maybe we need the billionaires to feel some pain sometimes (even if yes, we'll feel more overall).
Are you willing to share rough numbers? Totally understand if not, just curious. Been thinking about something like this to get away from the AI force-feeding.
People have been brainwashed and legal systems have been paid and bought for to consider them as such, just like corporations have been whitewashed to be treated as "persons".
In any case, we regulate all other kinds of speech as well: explicit content, libel, classified information, cigarette ads, and so on.
That’s not even true in the United States (they’re ‘commercial speech’, which carries a still significant but lesser set of protections), never mind in Europe.
Subscription fatigue will quickly limit that. Yes, people used to subscribe to magazines but usually just a few. And by the way, those magazines were full of ads too.
Good things get tainted over time. The internet was a good thing. Today, not so much. It's probably a net negative for most youth in terms of cognitive development. Aka a drag on the future of humanity.
Maybe it could be good again, but not on the path it's on.
What part of an endless sea of SEO spam, AI slop, malware, polarized astroturf, and addictive-by-design walled gardens strikes you as the win? Seriously, where is the win?
Honestly, some of the shit with ClawdBot^W MoltBot^W OpenClaw and molt.church and molt.book has been some quality entertainment, enabled largely by the Internet. And it's AI slop but that only seems to matter when one of them gets miffed about its PR being rejected and posts an unhinged blog post about the maintainer who rejected said PR. And in a "comedy equals tragedy plus time" way, it's pretty easy to laugh at that, too.
You know there's individuals who will unironically defend any dark pattern one cares to point to so your take here is pretty unsurprising. I feel like this is getting excited over finding a kernel of undigested corn in a random turd.
I think this would have an opposite effect. An addicted customer is a customer willing to pay. Think about gambling or tobacco. BTW OnlyFans somehow lives off subscriptions.
I think you can get most of the benefit by just banning targeted advertising.
Require that every user must be shown the exact same ads (probabilistically). Don't allow any kind of interest or demographic based targeting for paid content.
Advertisers would still be able to place Ads on pages they know there target audience goes, but wouldn't be able to make those same Ads follow that target audience around the internet.
Use 0.01% of brain power? How is it that Fox News always has the buy/sell gold ads? Hyper-segmenting society into advertising bubbles is about the same as if you hyper-segmented your body into cell clumps. You need unintentional cross-pollination, otherwise there is no more society.
Correct. The proposal is to not be able to use your posts to determine which ads to show. But showing you ads in Spanish because you’re in southern Florida or Puerto Rico would be acceptable.
Such a law will probably allow targeting based on the browser's language (browsers already send a "Accept-Language" field, doxing you with every single http request), or whatever language you have configured a website/app interface to be shown in.
But not guess a language based on the content of posts.
Paying someone for promoting your product or message. I don’t think it’s all that complicated. Talking about your own product on the internet is fine. Paying to promote your message wouldn’t be. TikTok and Reddit and Instagram aren’t trying to keep people endlessly scrolling because they are free-speech fanatics. It entirely comes down to “more time in app = more revenue”. Take away that monetization method and you take away the single incentive that has driven virtually every dark pattern that has developed in social media in the last two decades.
What counts as pornography? What counts as art? What counts as music? Please, yeah we know, we absolutely know categorization is hard, doesn't mean there is no benefit in having them and shaping them as we go.
Going too far - laws state that if you were paid for a testimonial by a firm, or if the firm provided the service or product you disclose / it counts as paid endorsements /
You don’t need to go too far down the rabbit hole. You need to introduce friction to ads.
Subscription revenues are tiny when compared ad revenue, so I expect people will resist this idea ferociously.
Thats too vague and drastic, every "show HN" is an ads, for notoriety at least. I would prefer we draw the line at "content pushed by a third party against payment must be displaid only with regard to where it is displaid and must not use information about to whom it is displaid" .
I.e displaying an ads about Sentry on a ads technica page, find . Displaying an ads about hiking equipment on ars techbica because i made a google search abd it is estimated I like that -> not fine. It would kill all the incentive to overtrack the ROI will no more justify the cost.
Show HN isn’t advertising in the sense they are addressing: paying a website for space to promote something. There’s no payment taking place with Show HN. If no payment can be made, websites have to find another revenue model besides advertising, and don’t have an incentive to keep users addicted and endlessly consuming.
Nah, advertisement in general. Just make the internet a paid sub. We don't need influencers or snake oil ads. And without ads and influencers, there is no reason for meta to try to keep people infinitely stuck to their phones. They can get their cut just from a paid sub.
Then X will become the only social media as Musk can keep it free unlike any competition and use it to push politics he likes or finds it beneficial for his other companies. In fact, according to reports X is already not making much ad money so it’s already there.
There are many Mastodon servers run by ordinary people simply because they want to. And before the shit-show the internet has become, there were many forums and IRC channels, absolutely free, and with 0 ads.
Very low traction on these. Let me know when there’s something that people actually use in tens or hundreds of millions and random people are just providing the infrastructure out of pocket and spending all their time on this without expectation.
We've come full circle to banning advertising. It seems like we have good reason to believe that people will create the infrastructure for the communities that they _want_ to exist and fund them. So just banning advertising will probably be fine. Worst case scenario, we gradually loosen the ban. The advertising hellscape will grow back immediately, nothing of value will be lost.
Moving the goalposts much? Of course there aren't any free services serving millions currently, how could they, when Facebook/X spends millions to make sure everyone stays on their platform? Which non tech savvy would want to move to a platform without all their friends? That's the gotcha with social networks, once you grow big enough, it is really hard for people to move off of it.
Still, funny how you ignored IRCs/forums that I mentioned. Those were used by MANY people, and could scale infinitely. You are literally arguing against something that has already happened.
> Still, funny how you ignored IRCs/forums that I mentioned. Those were used by MANY people, and could scale infinitely.
At its peak (late 1990s to early 2000s), IRC was estimated to have about 3–4 million concurrent users worldwide at any given moment, with tens of millions of total users over time.
Pales in comparison with the scale that’s needed today, given the number of people, variety of media, and bandwidth required.
Storage/compute/etc were orders of magnitude more expensive at the time, so the fact that it was 3-4 million is uh, pretty impressive? You could host a Matrix server for your 1,000 closest friends for basically no money.
No I am not moving the goalposts, the alternative shouldn’t just exist it should actually do the job and by doing the job, I don’t mean that if people made the effort to use it, it can do the job. I mean people should be using it. Also, no people are not stupid and its not their fault for not using it.
If these companies fail because their quality isn't good enough to support paid subscribers isn't that effectively the same thing as people choosing to not use their platform?
Those of us who dislike these practices already have a choice. We can simply not use the service. So why remove that choice from others who don't mind ads and are willing to use the free version?
Also, forcing a paid only model raises the barrier to entry. Most of the world lives on less than $10 a day, so a subscription would effectively limit access to relatively wealthy people by global standards.
You don’t even have to move towards a full ban. Instead, simply tax companies that offer ads in proportion to how long users spend on their site. This will naturally encourage websites to get users in, experience whatever content it is that they’re offering ads against, and then GTFO.
So for the people who couldn’t afford it? Let them eat cake?
Are you going to put up a “Great Firewall of America” to keep non US sites advertising sites from being seen by US citizens? Are you going to stop podcasts from advertising?
"Commercial speech" being protected by free speech laws anywhere is abhorrent. The advertising industry, in and of itself, seems abhorrent to me. It's one of the worst things humans have come up with, ever.
Could one not categorize material published in a book, magazine, or on television as 'commercial speech', liable to restrictive licensing and censorship? This seems like a slippery slope which the USA is on the correct side of.
I agree that commercial speech is not the same as advertising, but the comment I replied to was talking about restricting commercial speech, not advertising.
99.9% of businesses in the US are considered small businesses. If we look at all the businesses in the world small businesses make up an even larger percentage. In most parts of the world these are people with 0-5 employees; meaning they're just families and individuals trying to make ends meet.
If you remove the ability for these people to advertise there goes their livelihood. I understand the desire to want to punish big evil corporations but all this will do is strengthen them because they're the ones who have enough capital to survive something like this and scoop up the marketshare left behind by the millions of small businesses that will fail when this is implemented.
99.9% of small businesses do little to no advertising. I can’t recall seeing an ad for a single one of the small businesses I am a customer of. 99.9% of ads I get are for megacorporations and national brands.
And not a single one of these is tenable, even when combined. How do the people that post reviews, or spread something over word-of-mouth, discover the thing in the first place? Try your hand at starting a business and trying to sell goods or services using these methods and see how well it works.
Banning advertising would have the opposite effect; entrenched players would have a massive moat. The biggest gains from advertising by far accrue to newer entrants, not the big companies.
>How do the people that post reviews, or spread something over word-of-mouth, discover the thing in the first place?
The follow industry conventions, visit registries of industry websites, have professional lists where companies submit their announcements (and not to the general public) and so on.
>Try your hand at starting a business and trying to sell goods or services using these methods and see how well it works.
If advertising is banned, it will work just as good as for any competitor.
It only assumes they are aware that the category of products exists, and ordinary word-of-mouth communication is sufficient to propagate that knowledge.
How does word-of-mouth communication propagate knowledge that is currently in the possession of zero existing customers? Or operate for products that people have little reason to discuss with other people?
Suppose you sell insulation and replacing the insulation in an existing house could save $2 in heating and cooling for each $1 the insulation costs. Most people know that insulation exists, but what causes them to realize that they should be in the market for it when they "already have it"?
People don't need to discuss specific products, they only need to be aware of the existence of product categories. If it's genuinely the case that whole product categories are unknown to many people who could realistically benefit from them, as determined by a disinterested third party, an exception could be made for advertising that does not mention specific products or brands.
The insulation example can be solved by publication of data on average heating costs. When people learn that their neighbors are paying less they will be naturally incentivized to investigate why. Equivalent problems can be solved with the same general technique.
> If it's genuinely the case that whole product categories are unknown to many people who could realistically benefit from them, as determined by a disinterested third party, an exception could be made for advertising that does not mention specific products or brands.
Now all of the "brought to you by America's <industry group>" ads are back in. So is every pharma ad and every other patented product because they don't have to tell you a brand when there is only one producer.
> The insulation example can be solved by publication of data on average heating costs.
Publication where? In the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard"? Also, who decides to publish it, decides what it will say or pays the costs of writing and distributing it?
An industry group is not a disinterested party. Minimum competition requirements can be imposed. As I said elsewhere in the thread, a solution being imperfect is not a good reason to leave the problem unaddressed.
No, but they can convince a disinterested party that people aren't aware of <fact about industry that industry wants people to know> because that's actually true.
> Minimum competition requirements can be imposed.
But that brings back the original problem. Company invents new patented invention, how does anybody find out about it?
> a solution being imperfect is not a good reason to leave the problem unaddressed.
This is the legislator's fallacy. Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do this.
If a proposal is full of problems and holes, the alternative isn't necessarily to do nothing, but rather to find a different approach to the problem.
Proposals that are full of holes are often worse than nothing, because the costs are evaluated in comparison to the ostensible benefit, but then in practice you get only a fraction of the benefit because of the holes. And then people say "well a little is better than nothing" while not accounting for the fact that weighing all of the costs against only a fraction of the benefit has left you underwater.
Advertising causes great harm. Banning advertising, or better yet, making it economically nonviable without restricting freedom of speech, solves this problem. As already pointed out by several other posts in this thread, the purported benefits of advertising are already available through non-harmful means.
But I acknowledge that there may be edge cases. My point is that the existence of edge cases does not mean we should permit the harm to continue. Those specific edge cases can be identified and patched. My suggestion is a hypothetical example of a potential such patch, one that might possibly be a net benefit. Maybe it would actually be a net harm, and the restriction should be absolute. The specifics don't matter, it's merely an example to illustrate how edge cases might be patched.
Your objections to this hypothetical example are nit-picking the edge cases of an edge case. They're so insignificant in comparison to the potential harm reduction of preventing advertising that they can be safely ignored.
No, the problem is that the "edge cases" will swallow the rule if you make an exception for every instance where advertising is actually serving a purpose, but if you don't make those exceptions then you would have created so many new problems or require so many patches that each carry its own overhead and opportunity for cheating or corruption that the costs would vastly exceed the benefits.
> The specifics don't matter, it's merely an example to illustrate how edge cases might be patched.
Only it turned out to be an example to illustrate how patching the edge cases might be a quagmire.
>Suppose you sell insulation and replacing the insulation in an existing house could save $2 in heating and cooling for each $1 the insulation costs. Most people know that insulation exists, but what causes them to realize that they should be in the market for it when they "already have it"?
The same legit things that can cause them to realize it today. Word of mouth, a product review, a personal search that landed them on a new company website, a curated catalog (as long as those things are not selling their placements).
An ad is the worse thing to find such things out - the huge majority ranges from misleading to criminally misleading to bullshit.
True, you can't separate ads vs sponsored content quite easily.
but you can help this by banning all forms of active tracking.
Static ads only, no click tracking, and complete ban on profiling clients and especially on adjusting prices based on client/possible client behavior patterns.
It's amusing that after all this time and (hundreds of?) billions of dollars invested in adtech I still find the adverts in old magazines far more relevant and compelling than any of the "personalised" adverts of today. The industry as a whole has missed the forest for the trees by over-fitting their systems; I might be interested in the broader category, or a tangentially related one, but at no point do I want to see the exact same product I was looking at a day ago on every ad. I didn't buy it then for a reason, so I'm not buying it now.
Pervasive surveillance to make a system that's practically worse than the alternative that doesn't require mass surveillance, and is much simpler and cheaper. Did I say amusing before? Depressing is probably a better fit.
To become a member of the EU, you have to first join the Council of Europe and its European Convention on Human Rights – article 10 of which guarantees the right to free expression. The EU also has its own Charter of Fundamental Rights which says the same thing. And the plan is for the EU to become a party to the Convention in its own right, although that's got bogged down in technical legal disputes and still hasn't happened, despite the 2009 Lisbon Treaty mandating it.
The US First Amendment has no exceptions as worded, but the US Supreme Court has read some into it. The Convention has exceptions listed in the text, although they are vaguely defined – but like the US, the European Court of Human Rights has developed extensive case law on the scope of those exceptions.
The big difference in practice is the US exceptions end up being significantly more narrow than those in Europe. However, given in both, the details of the exceptions are in case law – courts can and do change their mind, so this difference could potentially change (either by narrowing or broadening) in the decades to come.
> "Article 10 of the Human Rights Act: Freedom of expression
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary."
> Seems to be about as strong as the Soviet Constitution's protections:
In the 2015 case Perinçek v. Switzerland, the European Court of Human Rights applied Article 10 to find against a Swiss law making it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide. Can you imagine a Soviet court ever striking down a genocide denial law?
The decision is controversial because it introduces a double standard into the Court's case law – it had previously upheld laws criminalising Holocaust denial, now it sought to distinguish the Holocaust from the Armenian genocide in a way many find arbitrary and distasteful – the consistent thing would be to either allow denying both or disallow denying both.
But still, it just shows how mistaken your Soviet comparison is.
The central party and state organs in Moscow would sometimes overrule decisions by the governments of the SSRs and other subordinate entities. But they didn't do this by having the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union declare laws unconstitutional. They did it by administrative fiat.
Suppose a company wants to write some product documentation so customers and prospective customers know what features their product has and how to use them. They hire someone to write the documentation and then someone else to distribute it. Is there a good way to distinguish this from advertising?
The most plausible way would be if the one you're paying to distribute it has some kind of exclusive control or market power over the distribution channel so that you're paying them a premium over competing distributors. But then wouldn't the best way to prevent them from extracting that premium to be to make it so nobody has exclusive control over distribution channels, e.g. by breaking up concentrated markets or requiring federated protocols?
>Suppose a company wants to write some product documentation so customers and prospective customers know what features their product has and how to use them. They hire someone to write the documentation and then someone else to distribute it. Is there a good way to distinguish this from advertising?
Yes. You self host it as a company, and it can only be reproduced (if they wish) in outlets (say review sites) when there's no payment or compensation of any kind involved for that.
It's a corporation though. It can't do anything without paying someone to do it, unless someone volunteers to do it for free, which isn't very likely. And how do you self-host distribution? You would have to run your own fiber to every customer's house or spin up your own postal service or you're paying someone to do that.
You have your own website and your copy on it. Don't start that "but if you pay some hosting provider to host that website that would be advertising", or the
"And how do you self-host distribution? You would have to run your own fiber to every customer's house or spin up your own postal service or you're paying someone to do that."
If you pay some hosting provider then you're obviously paying someone, and now you have the caravan of trucks going through the loophole because Facebook et al get into the hosting business and then their "spam filter" trusts the things on their own hosting service so using it becomes the way to get seen.
>If you pay some hosting provider then you're obviously paying someone
Yes. You're still allowed to pay someone - for YOUR OWN corporate website. Still your copy is not on my fucking social media, news websites, forums, tv programming, and so on.
>and now you have the caravan of trucks going through the loophole because Facebook et al get into the hosting business and then their "spam filter" trusts the things on their own hosting service so using it becomes the way to get seen.
They can go into the hosting business all they want. If they show what they host (i.e. ads) on my social media feed, or links to it there, they're breaking the law. What they host should only be accessible when somebody consciously navigates to it in some hierarchical scheme or directly enters the address/handle.
> If they show what they host (i.e. ads) on my social media feed, or links to it there, they're breaking the law.
They're already hosting everything in your feed, and if there were actually no ads then everyone on the site would be paying them to do it, at which point what do you expect to be in your feed?
Advertising is a monetary transaction between an advertiser and a publisher. The customer (or product) is not involved in the transaction; it is their attention that is being bought and sold.
That's a different model than paying a technical writer to do technical writing.
You're contrasting authorship with distribution. The advertising equivalent to paying a technical writer is paying an ad agency to create the ad. The customer isn't a party to that transaction either.
I am not making such an error. Paying a technical writer for labor is not the same as paying a publisher for conversions. The scenario you posed was "hire someone to write the documentation and then someone else to distribute it." Those are two parties, each of which is paid independently for services rendered. The customer is not selling their attention, here. The customer is (presumably) purchasing a product and is reading the documentation to understand how to operate it.
Advertising is not distribution. Publishing is distribution, and advertising sometimes comes along for the ride.
The proposal was to "outlaw compensation for advertising". That would presumably include paying people to create ads and not just to publish them, hence the first example. What you're arguing is that the first example is different from the second one, but they were intended to be, because they map to two different parts of the process.
> The customer is (presumably) purchasing a product and is reading the documentation to understand how to operate it.
Product documentation is also available to prospective customers so they can review it to decide whether they want to purchase the product.
And then the question is, how do they get it? There are many ways to distribute. They could pay to print it out on paper and put it in the lobby in their corporate offices, but then customers would have to come to their corporate headquarters to get it, which most won't do, so obviously some methods of distribution have a higher likelihood of being seen. Then companies will prefer the ones that allow them to be seen more.
But they're paying someone for any of them, so "is paying for it" isn't a useful way to distinguish them.
And then we're back to, suppose you pay Facebook to host your documents on your company's Facebook page. Furthermore suppose that they, like most hosting companies, charge you more money if you get more traffic. Meanwhile their "hosting customers" on the "free tier" (i.e. ordinary Facebook users) have a very small quota which is really only enough for their posts to be seen by their own friends. So paying them for distribution -- like paying for any other form of distribution -- causes your documents to have better visibility. Now you can show up in the feed of more people before you run out of quota, just like paying more for hosting means more people could visit your website before you exceed your transfer allowance.
How do you tell if someone is paying for computing resources or eyeballs when the same company provides both? Notice that "don't let them do both" is a bit of a problem if you also don't let them sell advertising, because if they can't sell ads or charge for using the service then what are they doing for revenue?
Indeed, advertisers would layoff or displace their marketing teams, as the role would have no value to the company if advertising was outlawed (meanwhile, technical writers would be just fine). I'm not disputing that. I'm disputing the framing you put forth that equates advertising with technical writing.
> Product documentation is also available to prospective customers so they can review it to decide whether they want to purchase the product.
I agree with this statement, but it is irrelevant. The primary purpose of documentation is what I said: for understanding how to operate the product. The only purpose of advertising is to make a sale. Advertising has no secondary purpose. These are not the same thing.
The test is quite simple: Is the sole purpose of the payment to make a sale? If so, it is advertising.
We don't really need to discuss documents any longer. Documentation is not an advertisement.
The "legal definition of advertising" is the thing you have to write into the law you want to enact. If you can't answer the question as the proponent of the proposal then how is a judge expected to do it?
What the parent is getting at is it's not a mystery, such definitions already exist in all kinds of jurisdictions.
In any case it's trivial to come up with such a definition that covers most cases. Doesn't matter if it doesn't cover some gray areas or 100% of it. Laws can be supplemented and ammended.
We don't have an all-encompassing definition of porn either, but we have legal definitions, and we have legal frameworks regarding it.
>That's exactly the thing that matters when you're dealing with something where every loophole is going to have a caravan of trucks driving through it.
Everything with profit "is going to have a caravan of trucks driving through it". He have laws anyway for those things, and for the most part, they're effective. I'd take a relative improvement even if it's not 100% over free reign.
>You're picking the thing which is a hopeless disaster as your exemplar?
I don't consider it a "hopeless disaster" (except in it's effects on society). As a business it's regulated, and for the most part, stays and follows within those regulations. The existence of dark illegal versions of it, or exploitation in the industry, doesn't negate this.
> Everything with profit "is going to have a caravan of trucks driving through it". He have laws anyway for those things, and for the most part, they're effective.
For the most part they're trash. There is a narrow range of effectiveness where the cost of compliance is low and thereby can be exceeded by the expected cost of reasonable penalties imposed at something significantly less than 100% effective enforcement, e.g. essentially all gas stations stopped selling leaded gasoline because unleaded gasoline isn't that much more expensive.
The cost of complying with a ban on advertising is high, so the amount of effort that will be put into bypassing it will be high, which is the situation where that doesn't work.
> As a business it's regulated, and for the most part, stays and follows within those regulations.
It essentially bifurcated content creation and distribution into "this is 100% porn" and "this company will not produce or carry anything that would cause it to have to comply with those rules" which inhibits quality for anything that has to go in the "porn" box and pressures anything in the "not porn" box to be sufficiently nerfed that they don't have to hire more lawyers.
The combination of "most human communication now happens via social media" and "expressing your own sexuality is effectively banned on most major social media platforms" is probably a significant contributor to the fact that people are having less sex now and the fertility rate is continuing to decline. "All the boobs you could ever possibly look at but only on the sites where there is no one you will ever marry" is not a super great way to split up the internet.
The ambiguity in the definition frequently causes people to be harassed or subject to legal risk when doing sex education, anatomy, etc. when they're trying to operate openly with a physical presence in a relevant jurisdiction. Conversely, it's the internet and it's global so every terrible thing you'd want to protect anyone from is all still out there and most of the rules are imposing useless costs for no benefits, or worse, causing things to end up in places where there are no rules, not even the ones that have nothing to do with sex.
It's now being used as an guise to extract ID from everyone for surveillance purposes.
It's a solid example of bad regulations setting fire to the omnishambles.
I’m saying that these definitions already exist, and are being appllied by courts. It’s not a novel concept. I’m also not interested in arguing about exact definitions. We all know well enough what an ad is, in particular the kind we don’t want to see when browsing the web. My main point was to illustrate how I don’t consider this to be a free speech issue.
Outside of US free speech isn't the carte blanche it is stateside. There are guardrails, there are limitations pretty much everywhere else. Even in the US This militant application is fairly recent, post 1980s.
You don't need to ban advertising, you just need to ban paying for advertising. That doesn't harm free speech. When there's no money to be made the problem will sort itself out.
This by the way is my understanding of why the EU writes laws the way they do.
If they just banned infinite scrolling someone would come up with something equivalent that works slightly differently. Now they need a whole new law. It’s just constant whack-a-mole.
So instead they seem to ban goals. Your thing accomplishes that goal? It’s banned.
It’s a pretty different way than how we seem to do things in the US. But I can see upsides.
I'm not following the relationship - because you'd have to pay, thus it's not "free" speech? It's hard to argue that having to pay a minimal fee (of let's say $1 per month) would be something against free speech. But the payment shall remain anonymous obviously.
>How will you ban that without infringing on free speech
You don't, but the EU doesn't need to care about American ideas of free speech. This is actually in some sense the biggest hurdle to all of this, the psychologically defensive posture that somehow assumes that on European territory this should even be a concern. Also as a sidenote this is even within America a kind of revisionist history, the 20th century had plenty of broadcasting and licensing rules. This unfettered, deregulated commercial environment is even in the US a creature of the last ~40-50 years, and those unchained companies, not unironically, then went on to convince everyone to defend that state of affairs given each opportunity.
What are you on about? Who’s speech? The speech of a massive multinational corporation? No thanks. I want the freedom to browse without getting pointless products shoved down my throat.
Obvious examples of negative consequences of the first amendment include the profusion of false and misleading advertising, the scourge of political campaign spending, and the disastrous firehouse of misinformation being pushed out in various online forums. The idea that an abstract carte blanche for free speech outweighs those real and present ills is misguided. At the same time, we see that the limitation to only protection from government action enables effective quelling of speech by private actors.
At the core of the first amendment is the idea that people should not be punished for criticizing their government. I think that idea is worth preserving. But the idea that people are free to say anything they choose, in any context, regardless of its factual status, and also that their permission to do so is limited only by the resources they can muster to promulgate their speech, is an unwarranted extension of that concept.
I think you would find that the cure is far, far worse than the disease. We speak of rights, and those are important, but there's also a very important practical reason why we have freedom of speech: because you cannot trust that future government officials will stick to banning speech that is justly banned. Once you open that door, sooner or later someone is going to start abusing the power. How would you like it if the Trump administration was able to (with complete legality) declare that claims Biden fairly won the 2020 election are "misinformation", and punish people who make those claims? Or if you're a Trump guy, how would you like it if the next Democrat administration declared it to be "misinformation" to claim that Trump fairly won the same election, and punish people for it?
The cold hard reality is that no matter how much you trust the people in the government today, eventually they will be replaced by people you consider to be the scum of the earth. And when that day comes, you will curse the day you allowed the government to punish speech, because you'll see speech you consider perfectly justified become illegal.
Maybe this would be the nudge people need, but there are a handful of well-researched, reputable newspapers out there that you can subscribe to and support quality journalism. For the most part, people don't. They'd rather have entertainment news for free with ads than quality journalism they pay for.
How would you ban advertising? Would astroturfing be banned? Would LLM-assisted astroturfing be banned?
Using an ad-blocker gets rid of most visible ads online, but there's still paid content in various forms which may be more effective than straight adverts anyway.
If you want to ban something, then ban free social media. There has to be a minimum charge like 100$ or something a month (keep it tax free for all I care), to access any social media service with more than a 1000 members.
How does one start a new social media network in that world? Cover the $100 fee, essentially making it free to use? It would kill any competitors from being created, at least until inflation makes $100 worthless.
Today, on June 1st 2030, I'd like to announce the launch of the fediverse cooperative, the first cooperative social media platform.
We pay out all our membership fees (minus hosting costs) to our entire cooperative.
To use our servers, you'll obviously have to become member of our cooperative, paying $100 a month in membership fees, and earning $99.50 a month in dividends.
Don't you realize that those with money are the ones who have the means to build a culture? How do you propose we compete with Jeffrey Epsteins who have a shit-ton of money to spend on pushing whatever narrative they want to? Just look around and see the "culture" we're in.
Perfect idea, the internet should only be for rich people. After all, who cares about the 50% of the planet that can barely afford a coffee? Or the millions of small businesses that are only able to survive because of targeted ads? Fuck 'em all, because people can't be trusted to use their own devices properly!
Poor people pay more for ads (as part of product price), and suffer more because of ads (from misleading advertising for shit products like junk food and drugs, to having certain out of reach lifestyles based on purchasing crap they don't need hammered on them and getting in debt). They also pay with having a worse media landscape, worse social media, and many more (not to mention the influece big companies with big spending budgets get).
People would also be better of without 90% of the ad-driven internet.
So much so that one wonders whether that was the point.
Make a lot of noise about privacy, force massive spend in the general direction of the EU, fund a new layer of bureaucracy, and actually do nothing to harm the toxic business models that were nominally the impetus for all this. Because someone’s gotta pay for all this new “privacy” infrastructure…
Ads per se are not evil. The motherfucker we'd want to shoot, however, is targeted advertising and especially those that rely on harvested user data.
In a sense, I'm just agreeing with a fellow comment in the vicinity of this thread that said GDPR is already the EU's shot at banning (targeted) ads---it's just implemented piss-poorly. Personally formulated, my sentiment is that GDPR as it stands today is a step in the right direction towards scaling back advertisement overreach but we have a long way to go still.
Ofc it's impossible to blanket ban targeted ads because at best you end up in a philosophical argument about what counts as "targeting", at worse you either (a) indiscriminately kill a whole industry with a lot of collateral casualties or (b) just make internet advertising even worse for all of us.
My position here is that ads can be fine if they
1. are even somewhat relevant to me.
2. didn't harvest user data to target me.
3. are not annoyingly placed.
4. are not malware vectors/do not hijack your experience with dark patterns when you do click them.
To be super clear on the kind of guy talking from his soapbox here: I only browse YT on a browser with ad blockers but I don't mind sponsor segments in the videos I watch. They're a small annoyance but IMO trying to skip them is already a bigger annoyance hence why I don't even bother at all. That said, I've never converted from eyeball to even customer from sponsor segments.
I'd call this the "pre-algorithmic" advertising approach. It's how your eyeballs crossed ads in the 90s and IMO if we can impose this approach/model in the internet, then we can strike a good balance of having corporations make money off the internet and keeping the internet healthy.
Ads are mostly evil. No one said that ads were inherently evil. It's bad enough that ads are mostly evil.
Let's be clear what we mean by "evil". My time is valuable. I have a finite number of heartbeats before I die. If I have to spend 30 seconds watching a damn soap commercial before I get to watch a Twitch stream, that's 36 heartbeats I will never get back. Sure, I could press mute and do something else for 30 seconds that seems more valuable, but that doesn't fit my schedule. Stealing heartbeats is evil.
I have so far optimized against wasting my heartbeats by paying subscriptions to remove ads. Spotify, Twitch, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, and a bunch of others I'm forgetting. Because it's worth $150/month or whatever to not waste my time with the most boring, uninteresting, irrelevant, nauseating crap that advertisers come up with.
And thank science for SponsorBlock, because sponsored segments in videos are the devil. Sponsored segments use the old non-tracking advertisement model. They pay publishers practically nothing because they aren't paying for conversions, but for an estimate based on impressions and track record woo. Bad for publishers, bad for advertisers, and bad for content consumers. Everybody loses. I'm well over my lifetime quota of BS from VPNs, MOBAs, and plots of land scams. So many heartbeats lost.
I’ve never figured out what I think advertising should be. I currently do basically everything I can to get rid of it in my life.
I’m totally fine with outlining targeted advertising. But even classic broadcast stuff poses the dilemma for me.
I have absolutely noticed I miss out some. As an easy example I don’t tend to know about new TV shows or movies that I might like the way I used to. There’s never that serendipity where you were watching the show and all of a sudden a trailer from a movie comes on and you say “What is THAT? I’ve got to see that.”
Maybe some restaurant I like is moving into the area. Maybe some product I used to like is now back on the market. It really can be useful.
Sure the information is still out there and I could seek it out, but I don’t.
On the other hand I do not miss being assaulted with pharmaceutical ads, scam products, junk food ads, whatever the latest McDonald’s toy is, my local car dealerships yelling at me, and so much other trash.
I’ve never figured out how someone could draw a line to allow the useful parts of advertising without the bad parts.
“You’re only allowed to show a picture of your product, say its name, and a five word description of what it’s for”.
Yeah I want my cake and to eat it too. I get annoyed when ads are irrelevant to me, and I get creeped out when they are too relevant.
I want to be able to browse the internet for free, where the sites have a sustainable business model and can therefore make high-quality content, but I don't want to have to sign up to a subscription for everything.
I want to be able to host websites that get lots of views, but I don't want that popularity to cost me.
Can someone please come up with something that solves all of these dilemmas for me?
>The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes"
This is not such an unusual thing in law, as much as us stem-brained people want legal systems to work like code. The most famous example is determining art vs pornography - "I know it when I see it" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it)
> The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes". They point to certain features they'd like them to change, but there is no specific ruling around what you can/can't do.
The issue is: If you do a precise wording of what you don't want a lawyer will go through it wird by word and the company finds a way to build something which violated the spirit, but not the exact wording. By being more generic in the wording they can reach such cases and future development with very little oversight for later corrections and courts can interpret the intention and current state of art.
There are areas where law has to be precise (calculation of tax, criteria for criminal offenses, permissions for authorities, ...), but in many cases good laws are just as precise as needed and as flexible as possible.
In the US we often use a "reasonable person" standard to get around trying to write super precise descriptions of things. "don't do X where a reasonable person would think Y."
We should just let people with overwhelming amounts of money research and fund new ways to trick people's lizard brains into giving them even more money.
If you’re going to organize your society around the theory that humans don’t actually possess free will, you’re going to produce a fair number of outcomes that a classical liberal would find abhorrent.
It's only assuming that free will requires effort to exert. They shouldn't be required to waste that effort on defending themselves from attempts to trick them into buying things they don't need.
People aren't lizards, however. You demonstrate that by engaging in the distinctly unlizardlike behavior of employing a false dichotomy to imply the opposite.
Laws should protect what's beautiful about life. And life is less beautiful when trillion dollar companies abuse the human nature to extract value, damaging society and individuals for the benefit of the very few.
No, that's what case law is for. Modelling the zillion little details. One party claims something breaks a law another claims it doesn't, and then we decide which is true. The only alternative is an infinitely detailed law.
Case law, also known as common law, is a British legal tradition. Most of the EU does not follow the common law tradition. There may be supreme courts, but the notion of binding precedent, or stare decisis as in the US legal system does not exist. Appeal and Supreme court decisions may be referenced in future cases, but don't establish precedent.
The equivalent doctrine under a civil legal system (most of mainland Europe) is jurisprudence constante, in which "if a court has adjudicated a consistent line of cases that arrive at the same holdings using sound reasoning, then the previous decisions are highly persuasive but not controlling on issues of law" (from above Wikipedia link). See:
Interestingly, neither the principle of Judicial Review (in which laws may be voided by US courts) or stare decisis are grounded in either the US Constitution or specific legislation. The first emerged from Marbury v. Madison (1803), heard by the US Supreme Court (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison>), and the second is simply grounded in legal tradition, though dating to the British legal system. Both could be voided, possibly through legislation, definitely by Constitutional amendment. Or through further legal decisions by the courts themselves.
Yeah I'm really glad we don't have common law where I live. It makes the law way too complicated by having all these precedents play a role. If the law is not specific enough we just fix it.
Also it breaks the trias politica in my opinion. Case in point: the way the Supreme Court plays politics in the US. It shouldn't really matter what judge you pick, their job is to apply the law. But it matters one hell of a lot in the US and they've basically become legislators.
>I'm not saying legislation is a good solution but you seem to be making a poetic plea that benefits the abusers.
Only if you believe everyone else has no agency of their own. I think most people outgrow these things once they have something more interesting in their lives. Or once they're just bored.
Back when this thing was new, everyone was posting pictures of every food item they try, every place they've been to etc.. that seems to slowly change to now where there are a lot more passive consumers compared to a few polished producers.
If you're calling people delivering the content "abusers", what would you call people creating the content for the same machine?
But I do believe we overestimate our own agency. Or more importantly society is often structured on the assumption that we have more agency then we actually do.
where does it stop though? I suffer from cant-stop-eating-nutella but should we shut down ferrero? it is simply not possible to protect the vulnerable in a free society. any protection only gives power into
the wrong hands and will eventually get weaponized to protect “vulnerable” (e.g. our kids from learning math cause some ruling party likes their future voters dumb)
Dumb argument. They don’t intentionally make Nutella addictive and then test out recipes on the public to make it even more addictive. Other people can’t stop eating ice cream or oranges or salami.
I would say the core problem is that we lack a goal as society. If you only care about making money stuff like this happens regardless how many regulations you do.
> The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes". They point to certain features they'd like them to change, but there is no specific ruling around what you can/can't do.
I thought about it for only a few seconds, but here is one way to do it. Have users self-report an "addiction factor", then fine the company based on the aggregate score using a progressive scale.
There is obviously a lot of detail to work out here-- which specific question do you ask users, who administers the survey, what function do you use scale the fines, etc. But this would force the companies to pay for the addiction externality without prescribing any specific feature changes they'd need to make.
3 hrs a day on your phone is equivalent to 15 years of your life (accounting for a 16 hour waking day). I know people that do a solid 6... That's 30 years of their life scrolling, getting their brains completely fried by social media, and soon the infinite jest machine that is generative AI.
Sorry, we don't let people fry their brains with drugs, well we at least try to introduce some societal friction in between users and the act of obtaining said drug.
If a company chooses a design and it can be proved through a subpoena of their communications that the design was intended and chosen for its addictive traits, even if there has been no evidence collected for the addictiveness, then the company (or person) can be deemed to have created a design in bad faith to society and penalized for it.
(Well that's my attempt. I tried to apply "innocent until proven guilty" here.)
> My initial reaction was that this was a terrible precedent, but after thinking on it more I asked myself, "well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?". Everything I thought of would have some way or workaround that could be found...
This doesn't solve the problem though - the enforcers still have to come up with a standard that they will enforce. A line has to be drawn, letting people move the line around based on how they feel today doesn't help. Making the standard uncertain just creates opportunities for corruption and unfairness. I haven't read the actual EU stance on the matter but what you are describing is a reliable way to end up in a soup of bad policy. There needs to be specific rulings on what people can and can't do.
If you can't identify the problem, then you aren't in a position to solve it. Applies to most things. Regulation by vibe-checks is a great way to kill off growth and change - which the EU might think is clever, but the experience over the last few centuries has been that growth and change generally make things better.
And what they actually seem to be doing here is demanding that sites spy on their users and understand their browsing habits which does seem like a terrible approach. I don't see how their demands in that statement align with the idea of the EU promoting digital privacy.
> It's important to note they aren't creating laws against infinite scrolling, but are ruling against addictive design and pointing to infinite scrolling as an example of it.
If the EU passes a law that seems general but start giving out specific examples ahead of time, they’re outlawing those specific examples. That’s how they work, even if you read the law closely and comply with the letter of the law. And they’ll take a percentage of your global revenue while people shout “malicious compliance” in the virtual streets if they don’t get their way.
I'm also trying to think of what use I'd make of sugar that would specifically not be for addictive purposes. Maybe keeping down medicine?
Point being, the internet is the clutchable pearl de jour for easy political points. There's far more proven addictions and harm elsewhere, but those problems are boring and trodden and don't give a dopamine hit to regulate quite like the rancor that proposals like this drum up. Hey, aren't dopamine hits what they're trying to mediate in the first place?
In the USA at least, we need a nation specific intranet where everyone on it is verified citizens and businesses where the government cant buy your data but instead is tasked with protecting it, first and foremost, from itself.
No more for profit nets. Time for civil digital infrastructure.
> I asked myself, "well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?".
Only allowing algorithmic feeds/recommendations on dedicated subpages to which the user has to navigate, and which are not allowed to integrate viewing the content would be an excellent start IMO.
to me it isn't about addictive design, it is about infinite scrolling jerking/straining my eyes (and thanks to that strain, it brings me back to reality, and i immediately disconnect from the content thus avoiding whatever addiction it could have sucked me in).
That actually makes me think that any page containing addictive design elements should, similar to cigarette warning, carry a blinking, geocities style, header or footer with "WARNING: Ophthalmologist General and Narcologist General warn about dangers of addictive elements on this page".
Assuming it was "just" about banning infinite scrolling. Not saying it is a good idea, but right now I cannot think of a legitimate use case where you would need it, unless your goal is engagement.
I've seen it used in non-addictive ways for search results (both specialized[1] and generic global search engines) and portfolios (for showcasing work progressively not merely constantly appending content to the end of singularly viewed work like say news sites do now), off the top of my head.
[1] Eg: printables.com (for open source, 3D print files)
But they ain't infinite (I assume). Maybe long, but finite. That is a big difference as it still gives meaning to the scrollbar. Infinite scroll is endlessly adding new content so you simply cannot scroll to the bottom.
Technically, infinite scroll is of course finite, too. Unless it adds newly created content, but if you count that as infinite then logs can be infinite too.
That's exactly why you don't write legislation to ban infinite scroll but 'addictive' design. Then it's ultimately up to the courts to decide, and they have the necessary leeway to judge that journalctl -f isn't addictive but TikTok is, even if they both use a version of infinite scroll.
No, this is far worse. This is just a license for bureaucrats to selectively choose winners or losers in social media. Once regulatory capture happens it merely turns into a special privilehe for pre-established businesses or a vehicle for one business to destroy another without outcompeting it
>My initial reaction was that this was a terrible precedent, but after thinking on it more I asked myself, "well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?".
I'd make the algorithms transparent, then attack clearly unethical methods on a case by case basis. The big thing about facebook in the 2010's was how we weren't aware of how deep its tracking was. When revealed and delved into, it lead to GDRP.
I feel that's the only precision method of keeping thins ethical.
Laws are supposed to be just that — predictable, enforceable, and obeyable rules, like the laws of physics or biology.
Bad laws are vague and subjective. It may be impossible to remove all ambiguity, but lawmakers should strive to create clear and consistent laws for their citizens.
Else it is not a nation of laws, but a domain of dictators.
I wouldn't worry about that. You're ignoring politics, and what this actually is. If the EU had a real problem with addictive designs and social media the time to move against it was of course 10+ years ago. They do not intend, not even remotely, to sabotage the profit machines that those companies are, they just want political weapons against the companies. The intention here is not to cure addiction, destroy profits, the intention is to use economic power to achieve political ends. The EU is built on this, it just didn't use to involve that many private companies.
Like most famous EU laws, this is not a law for people. Like the Banking regulations, the DMA, the GPDR, the AI act, this law cannot be used by individuals to achieve their rights against companies and certainly not against EU states, who have repeatedly shown willingness to use AI against individuals, including face recognition (which gets a lot of negative attention and strict rules in the AI act, and EU member states get to ignore both directly, and they get to allow companies to ignore the rules), violate GPDR against their own citizens (e.g. use medical data in divorce cases, or even tax debt collection, and they let private companies ignore the rules for government purposes (e.g. hospitals can be forced report if you paid for treatment rather than pay alimony, rather than pay your back taxes)). The first application of the GPDR was to remove links about Barrosso's personal history from Google.
These laws can only be used by the EU commission against specific companies. Here's how the process works: someone "files a complaint", which is an email to the EU commission (not a complaint in the legal sense, no involvement of prosecutors, or judges, or any part of the justice system of any member state at all). Then an EU commissioner starts a negotiation process and rules on the case, usually imposing billions of euros in fines or providing publicly-backed loans (in the case of banks). The vast, vast, vast majority of these complaints are ignored or "settled in love" (French legal term: the idea is that some commission bureaucrat contacts the company and "arranges things", never involving any kind of enforcement mechanism). Then they become chairman of Goldman Sachs (oops, that just happened once, giving Goldman Sachs it's first communist chairman, yes really. In case you're wondering: Barrosso), or join Uber's and Salesforce's executive teams, paid through Panama paper companies.
In other words: these laws are not at all about addictive design, and saving you from it, they're about going after specific companies for political means. Google, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, ...
Ironically the EU is doing exactly what Trump did with tariffs. It's just that Trump is using a sawed-off shotgun where the EU commission is using a scalpel.
> If the EU had a real problem with addictive designs and social media the time to move against it was of course 10+ years ago.
Addictive designs and social media have changed a lot in the last 10 years, for one. But more importantly, there's no statute of limitation on making laws.
You are in all likelihood correct, it's the more realpolitik reading of it. One other more charitable interpretation would be that the EU was under the US's thumb so they never took action, but now that there is some more separation, they are willing to act against these design patterns. It's probably some combination of both elements, weighting each according to how cynical you are, and high cynicism is justified.
The GDPR is a joke. Such a law should have prevented companies from collecting data in the first place. All we got are annoying pop-ups that do nothing for our privacy.
Is it really so hard for you people to imagine that MAYBE, there's politicians that see what social media look like these days and think they might want to do something against that?
The fact that all of these companies aren't European certainly doesn't help, but if you think this and GDPR, DMA etc. are purely schemes to milk foreign companies then you've been drinking way too much cynicism juice.
> These laws can only be used by the EU commission against specific companies.
In the UK at least, the GDPR was incorporated into UK law (where it remains, essentially unmodified, even after Brexit). So it is certainly not necessary to get the EU commission involved to enforce the law. In the UK, the ICO is the relevant regulator. There are other national regulators that enforce the GDPR, such as the French CNIL.
One of the best replies on hackernews in years. Hear. Hear.
The EU realized they can extort the US big tech. The EU will now just focus on laws and taxing (the war in Ukraine isn't their problem). And frankly, we should just ignore EU laws in the US.
Companies that exist in the US don't have to obey EU laws. For instance the UK tried to tell 4chan that it needs to obey the UK Online Safety Act, and 4chan replied with, essentially, "fuck off".
Companies that try to do business in the EU have to follow EU laws because the EU has something that can be used as leverage to make them comply. But if a US company doesn't have any EU presence, there's no need to obey EU laws.
> They do not intend, not even remotely, to sabotage the profit machines that those companies are
I think you are projecting values on entities that don't share those values. I don't think they'd have any problem destroying a pile of companies and not enabling replacements; they are not pro-business, and they have not shown a history of regulating in a fashion that's particularly designed to enable home-grown EU businesses. Predictability and consistency of enforcement are not their values, either. They don't seem to have any problem saying "act in what we think the spirit of the law is, and if you think you can just understand and follow the letter of it we'll hurt you until you stop".
"The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes"."
Wikitionary (2026)
Noun
vibe (plural vibes)
1. (informal, originally New Age jargon, often in the plural) An atmosphere or aura felt to belong to a person, place or thing. [c. 1960s]
I hope this goes through. Trillion dollar companies are waging a war on our attention, using everything at their disposal to make these apps addictive. It isn't a fair fight and the existence of infinite feeds is bad both for people and democracy. Regulating consumer products that cause harm to millions is nothing new.
As a person working at social media I support this as well. I'm a hypocrite. I admit, but the pay is too good to find alternative.
Terms like "DAU" or "engagement" is common in our field and the primary objective is how to make users spend more time on our platform. We don't take safety or mental health seriously internally but only externally for PR reasons.
CEOs won't change that because the more time user spends on the platform, the more ad revenue it brings.
> Trillion dollar companies are waging a war on our attention, using everything at their disposal to make these apps addictive.
Or you could just shut the phone off and/or not install the app. It's a simple solution, really, and one that is available at your disposal today at no cost.
It's a phone. Put it in the trash. You will not go through physiological withdrawal symptoms.
The amount of people in here right now clamoring for legislation to keep them away from electronics which they themselves purchased is mind-bogglingly insane.
Oooooof. Can I recommend you spend some time developing some empathy?
The world is complicated. People's lives are complicated (and often meditated by their phones). People's emotional and social wellbeing is complicated, and simply ghosting all your social groups on a random Tuesday is likely to cause significant problems.
I think it's really bigger than that. I'm hooked myself scrolling reels, but I go to the pub after work and see retired or 50-70 year old men (barely know how to work a phone) scrolling through them as well. That's when you know they're addicting as anything. Can't go anywhere nowadays in public without hearing someone scrolling through reels who don't know how to behave themselves in public by turning down the volume or wearing earphones.
If it's so easy to do this, then it should also be easy to not make addictive apps right? Why are multi billion dollar companies unable to make a compliant app? They clearly have no issues paying for labor and since this is software, the labor is the true cost for compliance. Are they unable to hire devs that are unethical or what?
Shesh, maybe we should start fining individual developers too if companies aren't able to do it themselves.
Laws are not created to be malleable about the population's trivial mental illnesses.
We don't need new laws on the books because some people are incapable of turning their phones off. They have addictive personalities and will fulfill this by other means, while everyone high-fives claiming success.
For many people, it is unrealistic to uninstall Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Instagram, Bluesky, whatever the fuck else all at the same time.
I'm proud of you that you are as disconnected as you are. I'm the same -- ditched my addictive social media accounts back in like 2011 -- but not everyone is like us.
There will never be anything close to uniformity, so we must decide if we cripple freedom to protect the weak while increasing bureaucracy and authoritarianism, or allow natural selection to take its course while improving treatment of symptoms.
I'm empathetic to the struggle of addiction, which is a real and terrible thing, but I don't think we should create vague nanny laws as a solution. Even if you're an addict, personal responsibility is still a thing.
> allow natural selection to take its course while improving treatment of symptoms.
I have a feeling natural selection will take its course at the level of nations, with nations that do protect their weak surviving and the ones that let profit extractors exploit and abuse theirs dying off.
No, I consider adding laws that ban a simple navigation technique as overreach and a reduction in freedom. To me it feels like banning candy bars because some people eat way too many candy bars. My intention wasn't to provoke, and you shouldn't make statements based off assumptions of someone else's thoughts. My intention is to point out that there's no one-size-fits-all solution, and that there are negatives associated with the top-down legal approach. I want to promote personal and societal responsibility instead of banning every harmful thing.
> This is hideous.
Yes, humans and life in general are filled with terrible things. Doom scrolling was created by us. We allow irresponsible and uncoordinated people to drive cars.
> You are very strongly implying that this is untrue.
So I'm lying because I don't think banning scrolling is the best solution? And you say I'm the one provoking... Have a nice day.
> we must decide if we cripple freedom to protect the weak
Well, we do want to protect the weak (that's a function of society, after all), and I'm totally okay with removing infinite scrolling from social media apps (or "crippling freedom" as you put it). I don't see any significant benefit it provides to individuals or society. Indeed, it has a negative impact on both. So it sounds like a win/win.
It's not that infinite scrolling is good, I'm just not a fan of the legal solution because it sets precedent and is yet another law. I'm not an anarchist, I think some laws are needed, but I want society to be more engaged and responsible for our collective future, not helpless and dependent on laws and government to save us from ourselves.
A few years ago, I accidentally left my phone at home when I went to work, and when I arrived I found that because I no longer had my 2FA device, I couldn't do any work until I went home again and picked it up.
I'm fine without doomscrolling. I've gone from the minimum possible service with internet, to pure PAYG with no internet, and I'm fine with that. But society has moved on, and for a lot of people, phones are no longer an option.
And for a meaningful fraction of people, somehow, I don't get it either, TikTok is the news. Not metaphorically, it's actually where they get news from.
> A few years ago, I accidentally left my phone at home when I went to work, and when I arrived I found that because I no longer had my 2FA device, I couldn't do any work until I went home again and picked it up.
Sounds like a personal problem. There are many other 2FA authenticators available. Yubikey, TOTP tokens, smart cards, etc. Using a smartphone (which can lose power at any time) for critical authentication was a silly idea to begin with. I would refuse anything work-related on my personal phone.
> There are many other 2FA authenticators available.
Specified by job, so no choice in this matter.
> I would refuse anything work-related on my personal phone.
Quite reasonable as a general rule, though my then-employer only required the 2FA app and nothing else, and in this case it would've just meant "get an additional phone".
We were literally not given the choice in the matter, in the case of $JOB. Plenty of people complained about having to use their phones to access the buildings, but that was the policy.
I suspect the next thing you're going to say is along the lines of "then just switch jobs", though.
> I suspect the next thing you're going to say is along the lines of "then just switch jobs", though.
I mean even that might not work out. We just switched to MS Teams last year and Microsoft uses a push-based app, not TOTP or other offline keys like we'd used before. And Teams just seems to be getting more popular...
Microsoft can actually use TOTP, Push, or offline keys.
Which of them are available depends on what your company has configured.
If the push version is configured, it's possible it has also installed an MDM profile on your device. Avoid that, or your phone will get wiped when you leave the company in the future.
> I would refuse anything work-related on my personal phone.
What a wonderful privileged position you hold. If only everyone could afford to tell their employer to pound sand in the same heroic manner you have undertaken.
The brain is part of your physiology. And people do go through withdrawal symptoms when they stop using social media that’s been designed for addiction.
You could say that about literally every single type of addictive behavior present on the face of the planet. You could just stop smoking and/or not buying cigarettes. You could just stop drinking and/or stop buying alcohol. It's a completely pointless observation. There's a reason why these are addictions.
People start using these apps and sites to stay in touch with friends and with current events — and those things are real needs. People should not be exploited for them.
The whole point is that these companies are spending a lot of cash making sure that their products are as addicting as possible to as many people as possible, so "just" shutting the phone off isn't a viable strategy.
It's as idiotic a statement as saying "Just stop smoking" around the time when big tobacco was lobbying politicians and bribing scientists and doctors to straight up lie about the deleterious effects of tobacco. It's engineered in such a way as to make it basically impossible for a large swathe of the population to "just not use" the apps.
Honestly, at this point, just ** OFF to all the useful idiots that just relentlessly block any possible solution to the overbearing power of social media companies with this crooked vision of individual responsibility.
They are trying to block a harmless mechanism, that has proven to be addictive, and that companies have willfully exploited for this very reason, proceeding to wreak havoc to various facets of society while concentrating never before seen levels of wealth in the process.
Wealth that in many case makes them more powerful than the government that should regulate them, which in many cases drank the kool-aid of self-policing these companies have gleefully distributed and lobbied for for years.
So, enough with this fine principled arguments about slippery slope that don't exist. What is your comment good for, if not for maintaining a status quo that makes these companies even reacher at the expense of everyone?
It's interesting how there may be an implicit assumption that imposing more rules on tech will lead to positive outcomes. From my perspective, technology is like reality itself: very difficult to control, with countless ways to achieve the desired result while circumventing the rules. And what's the actual result? Just look at the market capitalization of European companies compared to US companies...
Or maybe it just feels good to add new rules and engage in virtue-signaling contests. Or maybe it's just a way to make everything illegal—'find me the person, and I'll find you the crime' type of control. Maybe a combination of all those. Who knows?
From my experience, the farther you get from the influence of bureaucrats, the happier life becomes...
> And what's the actual result? Just look at the market capitalization of European companies compared to US companies..
Europe is actually doing quite well at the moment. The European stock markets have over-performed quite decently vs. the US ever since Trump became president, despite the various curveballs thrown at Europe in recent years. Market capitalisation in the US is held up primarily by the Magnificent 7 who are great outliers in the American stock market.
Aren't you happy that when you buy food, it doesn't contain cocaine? Regulations are totally necessary and addictive online social media is a well documented plague in our youths especially.
This very US lobbyists narrative that Europe regulate while missing out on the economy is used and abused anytime something look like contrary to US interests in MAGA land.
This comes from the same EU that's wholeheartedly embracing gambling across their member states, gambling mind you that children can just as easily jump into with their phones and some will, but devastating for grown-ups just as much.
They're not alone in this by any means, America has also opened their doors for all forms of gambling like Kalshi which now even sponsors news networks of all things.
The EU has this disconnect with the things they push, which makes sense considering their size and the speed at which it moves. One example that comes to mind is how they're both pushing for more privacy online while also pushing for things such as chat control which is antithetical to privacy.
Does social media need regulating? Yeah. Is infinite scrolling where they should be focusing? Probably not, there's more important aspects that should be tackled and are seemingly ignored.
Every member state has its own laws for it, and AFAIK all of them now regulate (or ban) online gambling more or less.
There were many startups here in Sweden in the early '00s, and I believe they had taken advantage of a legal loophole which has since been plugged. Regulation has tightened. Players have to be 18 y/o, use digital ID and not be registered as a gambling addict. But I still find the industry to be depraved, to be honest.
In Spain I can’t even have a meal at a restaurant, get groceries or go to IKEA without someone trying to sell me lottery tickets. They really need to regulate that.
Allowing something isn't the same as enforcing it to be allowed. If there's regulation, like with ending roaming charges between countries, then it's required to be followed simultaneously across the EU. If there's a directive, like the Working Time Directive, goals of legislation are set out and each member state is required to introduce legislation that implements it. There's also decisions (for one country for one issue), recommendations and opinions (obviously non binding).
There's also the Court of Justice which is the highest court, but only in EU matters. National courts can refer cases to it, or the commission/member states can bring cases against other member states, if they believe they are not following EU law. This would mean either they are not following a regulation, or that the state has not fully/correctly implemented a directive into their own national laws.
As I understand it, there's no specific regulation or directive aimed at gambling itself. There's things tangentially related (data protection, anti money laundering etc). But since there's no regulation or directive saying "gambling must be allowed", there's nothing stopping a member state banning it completely if they so wish.
The only point in which the EU might step in would be if the law was somehow discriminatory or inconsistent (e.g. we ban all foreign gambling sites, but not our own, we ban lottery tickets but not state run casinos, etc).
Germany has regulated it, (though states have slightly different regulations, some states even allowing online gambling, some banning all except the government run lottery).
What is next? Sex? Sex is addictive we should put a limit, ban after 33. How about chess? Running? Partying?
Making heroes out of social media users was not something expected in my lifetime. Imagine facebook users bragging how they managed to jailbreak their locked down feeds. That's a comical future
Having worked at multiple companies and talked to multiple legal teams about this, they tend to be very conservative. So the guidance I've gotten is that if we store any information at all on the person's computer, even to know whether they've visited the site before, we still need a cookie banner.
Basically, the law created enough fear among the lawyers that software developers are being advised to include the cookie banner in cases where it isn't strictly needed.
Agreed! Many sites don't actually comply with the GDPR because they don't provide simple tools to control the cookies and instead force you through a flow. Part of my gripe with the law is the way those violations are not being systematically cited.
You'd have much better retention rates if you don't cover up the content the viewer is trying to view.
How would you like it if I shoved a banner in your face the moment you walked into a store and forced you to punch a hole in it in order to view items on the shelves?
Laws should be evaluated on the effect they actually have on society, rather than the effect that we wish they had on society. I am very critical of laws that fail this test, and I think they should be updated to improve their performance. We want the right outcome, not the right rules.
I'm willing to argue that, sure (though it's purely a hypothetical point as I'm not a citizen of the EU and thus I don't and shouldn't have a voice in the laws there). I don't judge a law by a deontological measure of worth, but rather by whether it seems to be making things better or worse. The GDPR has overwhelmingly made my experience browsing the web worse, not better. Whether it should have resulted in that is beside the point: it has resulted in that, so that is what I judge it by. Therefore, I think it makes sense to get rid of the law as it seems that it is making things worse for people, not better.
> even to know whether they've visited the site before
So uh, don't do that.
You don't need to notify if you use cookies for required functionality like login sessions or remembering a functional setting.
If you're tracking whether they're returning or not your activity is exactly the kind of behaviour the rule is covering because, in legal terms, it's skeezy as fuck.
"Strictly necessary cookies — These cookies are essential for you to browse the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the site. Cookies that allow web shops to hold your items in your cart while you are shopping online are an example of strictly necessary cookies. These cookies will generally be first-party session cookies. While it is not required to obtain consent for these cookies, what they do and why they are necessary should be explained to the user."
Right, and then the legal teams tell me they don't care, and we should put up the cookie banner anyway. I feel like you didn't read my original comment.
That just means your legal team is lazy or incompetent. I work for a massive company that handles extremely sensitive PII and we don't have a cookie banner, because we don't need to have a cookie banner. GitHub doesn't have one, Gitlab doesn't have one.
> You don't need to notify if you use cookies for required functionality like login sessions or remembering a functional setting
Nobody wants to be the EU test case on precisely how "required functionality" is defined. Regardless of what the plaintext of the law says, it should be self-evident that companies will be more conservative than that, especially when the cost is as low as adding one cooke banner and tracking one preference.
>At GitHub, we want to protect developer privacy, and we find cookie banners quite irritating, so we decided to look for a solution. After a brief search, we found one: just don’t use any non-essential cookies. Pretty simple, really.
Go to that link, these are the cookies it writes (at least for me):
Some are from github.blog, some are from the cloudflare.com hosting. Not sure how the laws apply to that. But obviously there's several analytics cookies.
if you don't track users you don't need GDPR consent dialogs
I think in the past you still needed some info box in the corner with a link to the data policy. But I think that isn't needed anymore (to be clear not a consent dialog, a informational only thing). Also you can without additional consent store a same site/domain cookie remembering you dismissing or clicking on it and not showing it again (btw. same for opting out of being tracked).
But there are some old pre-GDPR laws in some countries (not EU wide AFIK) which do require actual cookie banners (in difference to GDPR consent dialogs or informational things). EU want them removed, but politic moves slow AF so not sure what the sate of this is.
So yes without checking if all the older misguided laws have been dismissed, you probably should have a small banner at the bottom telling people "we don't track you but for ... reasons .. [link] [ok]" even if you don't track people :(. But also if they haven't gotten dismissed they should be dismissed very soon.
Still such a banner is non obnoxious, little annoying (on PC, Tablet, a bit more annoying on Phone). And isn't that harass people to allow you to spy on them nonsense we have everywhere.
The regulatory body could clarify that a DO NOT TRACK header should be interpreted as a "functional/necessary cookies only" request, so sites may not interrupt visitors with a popup modal/banner if it's set.
Having the EU decide on a technical implementation is more of a last ditch effort, like what happened with more than a decade of the EU telling the industry to get its shit together and unify under a common charging port.
1. GDPR consent dialogs are not cookie popups, most things you see are GDPR consent dialogs
2. GDPR consent dialogs are only required if you share data, i.e. spy on the user
3. GDPR had from the get to go a bunch of exceptions, e.g. you don't need permission to store a same site cookie indicating that you opted out of tracking _iff_ you don't use it for tracking. Same for a lot of other things where the data is needed for operation as long as the data is only used with that thing and not given away. (E.g. DDOS protection, bot detection, etc.)
4. You still had to inform the user but this doesn't need any user interacting, accepting anything nor does it need to be a popup blocking the view. A small information in the corner of the screen with a link to the data policy is good enough. But only if all what you do falls under 3. or non personal information. Furthermore I think they recently have updated it to not even require that, just having a privacy policy in a well know place is good enough but I have to double check. (And to be clear this is for data you don't need permission to collect, but like any data you collect it's strictly use case bound and you still have to list how its used, how long stored etc. even if you don't need permissions). Also to be clear if you accept the base premise of GDPR it's pretty intuitive to judge if it's an exception or not.
5. in some countries, there are highly misguided "cookie popup" laws predating GDPR (they are actually about cookies, not data collection in general). This are national laws and such the EU would prefer to have removed. Work on it is in process but takes way to long. I'm also not fully sure about the sate of that. So in that context, yes they should and want to kill "cookie popups". That just doesn't mean what most people think it does (as it has nothing to do with GDPR).
But that would require directing the anger at specific companies (and their 2137 ad partners) rather than at an easy target of the banana-regulating evil authority.
Sadly whenever this kind of discussion pops up it's usually a very unpopular take.
The EU's mission statement seems to be to make the internet as difficult to legally utilize as possible.
I'm interested to see what measures people will use to get around the increasingly bizarre restrictions. Perhaps an official browser extension for each platform that reimplements bureaucrat-banned features?
I’m mixed on this. I do at times waste a lot of time doom scrolling, and would like regulation to prevent me from doing so. But also some times you just want to doomscroll to escape your day to day life. Do we want this decision to be made by the govt?
I guess we don’t let people have hard drugs even if sometimes they just need to escape their painful life. And maybe this could fall under that logic. But we do let people drink themselves, which serves the same purpose. And if I had to choose, I think doomscrolling is more at the level of Drinking, and less at the level of Heroin. So I would actually be fine with an age limit for doomscrolling after which, you have a hands off approach.
This sounds like a type of insanity. Why would anyone care about something like this to the degree they feel like expressing the opinion publicly let alone in a political regulatory body is beyond me.
Maybe you're not the type of person who's struggled with addiction, but it can do awful things to you. Yes, including being addicted to scrolling social media. It screws with your head to the point where you don't know how to live in the moment anymore.
IMO it's a feature that's not valuable enough to justify the fact that it contributes to poor quality of life for people who can't put it down.
What will stop the addicts from just installing a modified build? Will distributors of modified builds be subject to jail sentences like drug dealers? What about authors of auto-paginate scripts like Reddit Enhancement Suite, or the various HN client apps?
The first step to get on track in life is to stop blaming the outside for all problems. Yes some people had really bad luck but in the end you can only change yourself.
> Treating social media design as equal to something that can kill people in excess unnerves me.
As it should, because there's a really obvious "slippery slope" argument right there.
But… it can kill people.
There is a certain fraction of the population who, for whatever reason, can be manipulated, to the point of becoming killers or of causing injury to themselves. Social media… actually, worse than that, all A/B testing everywhere, can stumble upon this even when it isn't trying to (I would like to believe that OpenAI's experience with 4o-induced psychosis was unintentional).
When we know which tools can be used for manipulation, it's bad to keep allowing it to run unchecked. Unchecked, they are the tool of propagandists.
But… I see that slippery slope, I know that any government which successfully argues itself the power to regulate this, even for good, is one bad election away from a dictatorship that will abuse the same reasoning and powers to evil ends.
It looks to me like you're adding the conflation to "all addictions" because you can clearly distinguish between "sugar" and "cocaine" as both forms of addictions.
Why would you not be willing to include "scrolling" as another form of addiction? Just because it's labeled the same way you yourself are demonstrating that we handle that in different ways.
Social Media is being treated as "sugar" in this instance instead of as "cocaine".
(As I get older, unironically. I want my productive worker bees to be drug free, addiction free, enjoying simple pleasures that do not put me at risk. They pay Social Security. Everything is nice and safe. Freedom? Yeah no thanks, get to work and pay your taxes.)
I mean, lets do the opposite where a large corporation gets people intentionally addicted to drugs and then bilks them for every penny they have until they are husks. Remember, free market comes first!
Thank you from talking about the Holy Freedom, my brother. Looking forward to enjoying further freedoms thanks to laws that protect me from behavior that makes me unfree and in need to constantly control me and my surroundings!
‘Freedom does not consist in doing what we want, but in overcoming what we have for an open future; the existence of others defines my situation and is the condition of my freedom. They oppress me if they take me to prison, but they are not oppressing me if they prevent me from taking my neighbour to prison.’ -- Simone de Beauvoir
Because it impacts me, and I don't want it to impact me anymore?
Not because I use these products, but because I have to live in a society with these people, and if they are unhappy and angry, that impacts me directly, through various second-order effects.
Social Media companies have actively and intentionally tried to make their products more addicting... now they have to face the very obvious consequences of that decision.
We live in a society. We chose rules that we think will make society better. Freedom is meaningless without context. Freedom to doomscroll or freedom from doomscrolling. American propaganda really likes to divorce the concept from reality.
People have less free will than we'd like to admit. I'd like to have freedom from outdoor advertising and online monopolies shoving short video formats down my throat.
We have great freedoms in Europe. We just need to apply in advance with our detailed plan, in three copies and the Commission will decide whether to deny our application or to deny it and fine us for unhealthy thoughts, too.
Sarcasm now, but maybe what the near future will look like...
More to the point: this is indeed a massive overreach with the Commission being the police, judge, jury, and executioner... what could go wrong? Exactly what we are seeing is taking shape, precedent by precedent.
Why would someone care about a destructive addiction that's plaguing the lives of the majority of the planet, leading to mental health issues and proliferating massive levels of misinformation. I wonder. Freedom to be manipulated by algorithms, yay!
I wish they would go after the fake spinning wheel discount pattern and the "app exclusive" or "better in the app" pattern. That's all a way to get people to install apps that will then bombard folks with notifications or slurp data off the device.
The hunt has started: EU burocracy vs TK. In the past EU has rarely directly attacked a single company with so specific points. But anytime they remained consistent and dedicaded to their target and usually won. It just took a long time (from a few years till decades). The only time they lost a policy was at stopping summer-time switch which was cancelled when Covid started.
They avoid to mention the rest of social media platforms, which happen to be US based. It seems they choose a single quick and easy China-based target more like an experiment to decide for the rest. The key point is when: either the current kids will experience it or those that are not yet born.
I should be able to stare at my phone 8 hours a day without government interference if I want to. No one is holding me at gunpoint. It's my phone and it doesn't hurt anyone else.
I mean, clearly the companies at the top can't be trusted to do what's in the best interests of the users. So at some point someone has to do something. If this is the correct something that remains to be seen.
Facinating that they landed on infinite scrolling as the problem to spend time and energy on instead of all the other things happening online that have an impact on society.
Genuinely curious about the actual data on this.
Does anyone have a link to a reputable, sizable study?
Looks like the EU can just get a feature flag to use pagination or a "Load More" button? Doesn't seem as big of a deal as enforcing USB-C.
Though if it applies to the YouTube, seems annoying when trying to find a video to watch. I usually trigger a few infinite scrolling loads to look for videos.
And I assume they'd have to specify a maximum number of items per page, or else devs could just load a huge number of items up front which would technically not be infinite scrolling but enough content to keep someone occupied for a long time.
Early on in the internet age it somewhat bothered me that every page on the www either acts like it is the first thing one reads on a topic or assumes great knowledge of the subject. With nothing in between.
Wondering about a technical solution I couldn't find anything besides fold out explanations and links to explain jargon. Neither would really bridge the gap.
One obvious theory was to keep track of what the user knows and hide things they don't need or unhide things they do. This is of course was not acceptable from a privacy perspective.
Today however you could forge a curriculum for countless topics and [artificially] promote a great diversity of entry level videos. If the user is into something they can be made to watch more entry level videos until they are ready for slightly more advanced things. You can reward creators for filling gaps between novice and expert level regardless of view count.
Almost like Khan academy but much slower, more playful and less linear.
Imagine programming videos that assume the reader knows everything about each and every tool involved. The algorithm could seek out the missing parts and feed them directly into your addiction or put bounties on the scope.
This was long overdue. I hope killing other dark patterns that feast on attention or hunt on flaws in human psychology follow. However, my only concern is how this will be taken care of. I hope they learned something from the GDPR fiasco.
What does ranking vs. chronological having to do with infinite scrolling?
You can have a ranked paginated UI. You can also have an "infinite" (until you run out of items, but this is not different for ranked) chronological UI.
Moving away from chronological allows them to feed you more addicting content, as does the infinite feed. They involved together because they work together synergistically.
It’s of no value to point out both can technically be implemented independently. That isn’t what happened, and even if it did it would still be user hostile.
I still don't understand. If TikTok simply showed the user every single TikTok ever created, strictly in reverse chronological order, it would still be an infinite scrolling UI.
The sorting algorithm that they choose isn't what makes a UI infinite scrolling or not, they're completely orthogonal. In MVC architecture terms they're model and view respectively...
I admire the EU's attempts at things like the cookie law, age verification, and tackling the addictiveness of infinite scrolling, but the implementation is pure theater.
Trackers have much more effective techniques than "cookies", kids trivially bypass verification, and designers will make a joke of tell me you have infinite scrolling without telling me you have infinite scrolling. When you are facing trillions of dollars of competition to your law, what do you think is going to happen?
Maybe if there was an independent commission that had the authority to rapidly investigate and punish (i.e. within weeks) big tech for attempting engagement engineering practices it might actually have some effect. But trying to mandate end user interfaces is wasting everyone's time putting lipstick on a pig.
Dunno about using legislative moves, but yes please. The stupidest solution to a problem no one had. Moving layouts, unreachable footers, no or unsatisfactory indication of one's position.
All just to remove navigation clicks no one minded and reduce server loads, in exchange for users suffering laggy lazy loading (or, what a hate-inducing pattern!) inability to preload, print, search or link.
Infinite scrolling combined with the algorithmic feed is the real nasty.
Feeds should be heavily regulated, effectively they are a (personalized!) broadcast, and maybe the same strictures should apply. Definitely they should be transparent (e.g. chronological from subscribed topics), and things like veering more extreme in order to drive engagement should be outlawed.
>"Social media app TikTok has been accused of purposefully designing its app to be “addictive” by the European Commission, citing its infinite scroll, autoplay, push notification, and recommendation features."
All of these have immediate and easy replacements or workarounds. Nothing will substantially change (for the better; maybe it does for the worse, even).
Moreover, "purposefully designing something to be addictive" (and cheap to make) is the fundamental basis of late stage capitalism.
Technically this is about Tiktok's "addictive design", and their examples include "infinite scroll over time". It's totally unclear what they mean by that, or what Tiktok would have to change it to in order to be in compliance. The whole thing seems like it was written by a boomer bureaucrat who has never used Tiktok, let alone a computer.
What exactly is dystopian about protecting developing minds of children and teens from detrimental effects and social media addiction caused by companies like Meta and Bytedance. These companies profit immensely from being quasi unregulated.
How low do you have to sink to defend a legislature attacking the privacy of the sovereign again and again? Pathetic.
Von der Leyen, who illegally deleted her SMS and is being investigated for corruption, conflict of interest and destruction of evidence, must be glad she can count on you to defend spying on every citizen via "Chat Control" and forcing browser developers to accept any state-mandated root certificates via eIDAS.
This isn’t about addiction, it’s about censorship. If you limit the amount of time someone can spend getting information, and make it inconvenient with UI changes, it’s much harder to have embarrassing information spread to the masses.
Amazingly, the public will generally nod along anyway when they read governmental press releases and say “yes, yes, it’s for my safety.”
Scrolling through an infinity of AI slop videos can't really be classified as "getting information". If you want to read the news and stay up to date with the "embarrassing information" there's plenty of news websites out there.
I have a proud European coworker trying to get their H1B...
They talk about how great Europe is, how they like their 1-2 hour coffee/smoke breaks... These kind of moves give me that same vibe.
But why are so many Europeans trying to move to the US? Why isn't the opposite happening?
My hypothesis is that these kind of popular policies are short sighted. They are super popular, they use intuition and feeling. But maybe there is something missing. The unadulterated freedom has led people to enjoy these platforms. Obviously it affects the economy. So much so, even the US military has moved from Europe to Asia.
I don't typically like fiction, but it seems "I, Robot" was spot on about Europe. (Maybe mistaking new Africa for Asia)
Well, your freeeeedooooms include having to pay taxes when living outside of the US. I'd say that's a pretty big factor in deciding if it's worth it to leave the country.
Why are so many Americans trying to move to the EU? Turns out people have different wants and needs in life, and so they move to where they like best. I for one would never set foot in USA in fear of being shot, kidnapped by ICE (or shot by ICE), fear of being bankrupt by the healthcare options there if something happens to me, fear of the poison you call food, and the absolutely ignorant populace that seems to roam the streets there. I swear half the times I can't even tell if USA is a real place or some really bizarre reality TV show.
> But why are so many Europeans trying to move to the US? Why isn't the opposite happening?
Citation needed.
I took some minutes to try and find statistics, and also ChatGPT claims that the EU simply doesn't collect or publish that kind of data, so I'm wondering how you think you know.
And in two of my circles there is concern about people who do live in the US but are not citizens. Both married US citizens, both have clean paperwork, but whereas normally it'd take considerable paranoia to expect any trouble today it seems entirely on brand. One of the US citizens is angry because of course her rural hospital is going bankrupt and she'll be left in the middle of nowhere with her foreign-born sick and gradually dying husband and somehow that's not even near the top of the agenda. The other is just keeping her head down, crossing fingers, maybe in all the excitement they won't get around to undoing Obergefell and she can stay married to the love of her life?
I do know people who've gone, only on vacation and they were exactly the sort of unthreatening rich white folks that you'd expect to have least trouble. Oh, and some US citizens who went "home" to see family at Xmas but work here.
Same here, to the point I would even avoid layovers in the US and take a more expensive flight instead.
I don't want to deal with some power tripping immigration officer insisting to search my phone and social media to send me to some camp because I wrote critical comments about the current administration.
Does this only apply to companies the commission doesn't like or will it apply to the hn app I use, my email clients, shopping sites, etc? Because it seems like the actual concern how good the algorithms are and not the UI.
This is a finding of a violation of the DSA, which only applies to services (not local reader apps), and only if they have a lot of users.
Like, a significant fraction of the country level of usage. You don't need to worry about the EU coming and taking away your HN client APK. You do need to be worried about Google doing that, though.
Here's the actual statement from the European Comission: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_...
It's important to note they aren't creating laws against infinite scrolling, but are ruling against addictive design and pointing to infinite scrolling as an example of it. The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes". They point to certain features they'd like them to change, but there is no specific ruling around what you can/can't do.
My initial reaction was that this was a terrible precedent, but after thinking on it more I asked myself, "well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?". Everything I thought of would have some way or workaround that could be found, and equally would have terrible consequences on situations where this is actually quite valuable. IE if you disallow infinite scrolling, what page sizes are allowed? Can I just have a page of 10,000 elements that lazy load?
Regardless of your take around whether this is EU overreach, I'm glad they're not implementing strict laws around what you can/can't do - there are valuable situations for these UI patterns, even if in combination they can create addictive experiences. Still, I do think that overregulation here will lead to services being fractured. I was writing about this earlier this morning (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47005367), but the regulated friction of major platforms (ie discord w/ ID laws) is on a collision course with the ease of vibe coding up your own. When that happens, these comissions are going to need to think long and hard around having a few large companies to watch over is better than millions of small micro-niche ones.
>"well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?"
Hear me out: banning advertising on the Internet. It's the only way. It's the primordial domino tile. You knock that one over, every other tile follows suit. It's the mother of chain reactions. There would be no social media, no Internet as we know it. Imagine having TikTok, YouTube or X trying to survive on subscriptions alone in their current iterations. Impossible. They'd need to change their top priority from "maximizing engagement by fostering addictive behavior" to "offering a product with enough quality for someone to pay a fee in order to be able to use it".
Define "advertising". I feel this might be hard to do.
For example is my blog talking about Windows considered as Advertising? What about my blog discussing products we make? What about the web site for my local restaurant?
If I add my restaurant location to Google maps, is that advertising? Are review sites?
If I'm an aggregator (like booking.com) and I display the results for a search is that advertising?
I assume though you meant advertising as in 3rd party advertising. So no Google ad words, no YouTube ads etc. Ok, let's explore that...take say YouTube...
Can creators still embed "sponsored by" scenes? Can they do product placement?
Your suggestion is, unfortunately, not implementable. Leaving aside the merit for a moment, there's just no way that any politician can make it happen. Google and Facebook are too big, with too much cash to lobby with. And that's before you tell everyone that the free internet is no more, now you gotta pay subscriptions.
And, here's the kicker, even if you did force users to pay for Facebook and Google, it's still in their interest to maximize engagement...
Advertising = compensating someone to promote a product / company.
It’s about the compensation. That makes it advertising.
Regular booking.com is fine. Paying booking.com to allow your results to appear higher is not.
Regular Google Maps to register your restaurant is fine. Paying Google Maps to promote your restaurant is not.
It’s not that hard to implement. Advertising is pretty well defined.
>> Advertising = compensating someone to promote a product / company.
That's a definition, sure. I feel like it leaves loopholes (under this definition spam isn't advertising, and I guess affiliation programs are?)
If I pay someone to print flyers is that advertising? If I pay squarespace for my site, is that advertising?
What if I need a Google maps subscription to place pins? Is placing a pin then advertising? Even if the subscription gives me other abilities?
Under your definition I guess YouTube creators can't be sponsored. And all existing videos with sponsorship need yo be removed? And I guess no online watching of sports (lots of people paid to wear a logo there...)
Presumably no product placement in Netflix shows (not sure what to do with old content?)
Of course I'm not paid to advertise MiraclePill. My channel exists purely thanks to patreon. No, I don't know that my "executive level" patreons are all MiraclePill employees...
No, I don't pay Google for ads, the ads are free when I purchase GoogleCoin which I buy because I expect GoogleCoin to go up in value...
>> Advertising is pretty well defined.
Alas, I fear it isn't...
Being a little pedantic here no?
80/20 rule, it’s defined well enough to encompass 80% of advertisements. Anything beyond that is tolerated or illegal spam.
And if the situation arises that ads are being used unjustly the legal definition will eventually shift.
> Paying booking.com to allow your results to appear higher is not.
But booking takes a cut of the booking in all scenarios, so they’re already incentivized to prioritize results that result in more profit for them. This all gets very tricky unfortunately.
Promotion of anything at all is advertising, with or without compensation. The word advertising is pretty well defined, and the dictionary definitions don’t usually mention compensation, e.g. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/advertise.
An example I’m sure you would consider advertising - consider Google advertising Google Fiber in Google search results, or Facebook advertising business services on Facebook, or Apple, Netflix, Cinemark advertising their own shows & products in their own channels. You’ve seen lots of these, I’m sure you would consider them ads, but it’s not the compensation that makes them ads.
How would something like Github Sponsors work? Lots of projects use a "sponsor us for $LARGE_SUM and we'll mention you in our readme and release notes" model.
What would YouTube look like?
(Genuinely happy to read “like the good old days” as an answer!)
What about just banning personalized advertising? Like: you can pay Google Maps to show your result as sponsored, but Google can only show it to either everybody or randomized people.
> The Commission believes these terms are sufficiently clear and declines to add definitions of these terms.
- https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/federal_re...
Just answer this question: do you get a compensation for showing me something that I did not click for?
Let's drop the charade where you pretend you don't know what advertising is. You're smarter than that, and your playing dumb act would be more persuasive if you didn't ask leading questions that clearly show you know the answers. This isn't a good faith argument.
I mean are you really asking whether creators embedding "sponsored by" scenes is an ad as if you don't know? C'mon, don't insult your readers with this nonsense.
HN commenters are not legislators, and even if random HN commenters can't draft legislation, that doesn't mean that a minimally-funded team of experts would have any difficulty with the problem.
I have said for years - Micropayents, something like the traffic settlement system for termination charges in the NANPA PSTN, and when I say micropayments I mean 1000ths of a cent. Then the content that does cost money (news, social media, whatever can be monetized and the users are paying for consumption.
Infrastructure costs money. There's no way around it. I'm all up for banning ads. But there should be another viable business model to replace it.
I think that's revisionism. Social media existed before online advertising. Usenet was quite massive and vibrant, countless IRC servers were maintained by volunteers, web-based forums covered pretty much the same ground as Reddit does today. All supported by the goodwill of individuals, non-profits, and businesses such as ISPs that actively wanted the internet to be interesting because they were making money by selling access to it.
The thing that changed in the mid-2000s was that we found ways to not only provide these services, but extract billions of dollars while doing it. Good for Mark Zuckerberg, but I doubt the internet would be hurting without that.
The internet was absolutely better without that. I arrived after the original Eternal September, but there have been more and more until now everyone is perpetually online 24/7.
Now fucking everything about the world is a hustle to monetize every possible nook and cranny around content. There isn't even content anymore, it's nearly all AI slop as a substrate to grow ads on.
I am nostalgic for the era when I found "punch the monkey" irritating. People used to make websites as a labor of love.
I don't think we have a right to a business model. Either you figure one out for your particular site (selling access to the website, donations, etc) or you don't and stop and either is ok.
Tell this your local sports club that needs a new set of shirts.
I think we have rights to do lots of things that banning this business model would violate.
I assume you're primarily referring to freedom of expression? I take the view that it doesn't include the freedom to pay people to carry a particular message so long as the restriction on paying is neutral as to the content of the message, but I can certainly respect the view that it does.
My comment about not having a right to business models is in some ways more general. Regardless of whether this business model is protected for some other reason, business models in general aren't, and it's a common flawed argument that they are.
For Google, they figured out it's ads... So is it ok?
Ostensibly not, if it is outlawed.
But under what principle would you allow advertising, in general, online?
That seems like an arbitrary penalty. What harm is being prevented by banning advertising, in general?
Please, continue that "etc"...
Its been 30 years and no one has been able to continue that "etc".
Of course they have. Off the top of my head examples include: Grants in the form of tax dollars (e.g. arxiv). To benefit the authors reputation (e.g. numerous scientists, developers, etc personal sites. zacklabe.com as a useful example). As a hobby (I think aiarena.net falls into this category). To collect data for research purposes (e.g. the original chatgpt release, and early recaptcha)...
What could possible go wrong with the government funding media? It’s not like they would take away funding for media that they don’t agree with.
That works great when everyone has resources to pay for things online.
In practice, this cuts of 80% of the worlds population.
Oh you mean we can reverse the eternal September? Sign me up! Gatekeeping is good, actually! The “let people enjoy things” crowd is responsibility for facilitating the mass enshittification of everything.
Catering to the lowest common denominator is how we got the Burger King guy on spirit airlines.
Why are you commenting here instead of a website that gatekeeps commenters?
"You criticize society, yet you participate in it".
I have and do pay for website access. That doesn't mean much if the current model flocks to no paid services.
If it can only be funded via ads, it shouldn't be funded and is not essential to exist.
Banning ads? That's just so authoritarian and absurd. I hope you never become king
I disagree, most advertising is just an attempt at manipulation, not just a genuine "our products exist and you might like them." I would consider not being legally manipulated, especially by financially interested groups, more free than the reverse.
Regulation is freedom. Think of ads powering the web as current day's lead in gas.
Regulation is freedom? Peace is war, too, I guess.
Restricting freedom of bad actors means enhancing freedom of everyone else.
Say a a kid started throwing tantrums at school. By not punishing/ removing him you restrict the freedom of everyone else.
Ooh they should do that on planes!
Can you think of a singe freedom you enjoy that isn’t in one way or another supported by some form of regulation?
> Can you think of a singe freedom you enjoy that isn’t in one way or another supported by some form of regulation?
Regulations can protect freedoms, but they don’t create them. Freedom is inherent. Regulations protect.
Yeah most of them
What we have now sure it's freedom. Let's try having our tax dollars work for us this time.
Regulation took away your freedom when it took asbestos out of your house right? Please be serious.
Viewing this thread, and the back and forth of it, I need to say something.
Advertising sucks in this thread too.
By that I mean, people are not speaking plainly, and it is almost ingrained into our societies now. We "sell" our position in a discussion, a debate.
For example, regulation does curtail freedom. Completely.
However, lack of regulation can harm people. Significantly.
Thus, regulation does not give people more freedom, it can however reduce harm.
In democratic nations, often judges will weigh these two things, when determining if a regulation passes the muster. In my country, we have the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and often judges will determine if a challenged regulation is of sufficient, required public good, whilst not overtly reducing freedom of the individual.
This is a mature conversation.
Advertising is not.
A primary example I've seen in the US, is people calling immigrants "undocumented" on one side, and "criminals" on the other. This is, of course, a reduction in nuance, and designed to advertise a position merely with the words used. And it is a societal sickness.
An illegal alien is just that, and using that term confers no judgement, for it is simply fact.
There was a time when politics were not first and fore in terms of the use of language. The current trend to be "touchy feely" over use of language, and find great offense at the use of language, does nothing other than stop debate. Reduce discussion. Cause schism instead of collaboration.
And there are those around us, which prefer that.
Don't feed them.
Completely fair, but I was responding to someone who doesn't think that it curtails freedom but that is the total opposite, you cannot be free if you are dead (except for a few niche philosophical definitions of the word), so human centric regulations like the asbestos ban are orthogonal to freedom, even if I admit in the strictest definition of the word yes, a regulation can curtail your freedom to harm yourself and hypothetically could curtail yourself from positive benefits as well.
But the thing is that statistically the likelihood they were discussing in good faith about this is near none, instead their way of speaking are telltales of a libertarian, where they have a almost religious believe that regulation is their biggest enemy and will never admit that the lack of it could harm or even kill them, I have wasted many many hours talking with such kind of people and don't aim to waste more arguing in good faith giving nuanced responses.
Oh I'm not blaming you, but the conversational framework we're being collectively trapped in.
Have we come to such a low cultural point that ads are seen as some kind of basic human right?
Fuck ads. What's absurd is tolerating them and the damage they do to media, consumers, kids, lesser and/or more honest businesses, culture, products, and so on all the way to the Windows and macOS system UIs.
We're on a startup entrepreneur site. I'm not surprised it's seen as the lifeblood of the industry here. It sort of is.
At the same time, this has the same energy of "if we release all the files, the system will collapse". Maybe we need the billionaires to feel some pain sometimes (even if yes, we'll feel more overall).
I work in ads... :-/
I think HGttG had a good solution for that involving a large spaceship.
I mean really I work in filmmaking. Ads just fund most of my business.
Work in something else. I make significantly more doing poison ivy removal than I ever did or was ever going to working in tech.
Are you willing to share rough numbers? Totally understand if not, just curious. Been thinking about something like this to get away from the AI force-feeding.
What do you do? Honest question
I work on the production end. I’m a producer and production manager for live-action ads.
Freedom of speech is a basic human right.
Ads are speech.
>Ads are speech.
No, they are not.
People have been brainwashed and legal systems have been paid and bought for to consider them as such, just like corporations have been whitewashed to be treated as "persons".
In any case, we regulate all other kinds of speech as well: explicit content, libel, classified information, cigarette ads, and so on.
Ads aren't free speech, they are the absence of it, because you are paid for a preselected speech.
We already ban tobacco ads on tv (in the us) is their freedom of speech violated?
I don’t think you need to count companies being able to put any message out there as free speech.
No. Ads are paying money to get a platform for that speech. Having a platform is in no way a basic right.
That’s not even true in the United States (they’re ‘commercial speech’, which carries a still significant but lesser set of protections), never mind in Europe.
Commercial speech rights are still part of the "free speech" bundle of 1A protections.
> mmmmm yes thank you daddy may I have some more?
If he's from the US, he's technically correct. That's the high level argument of Citizens United.
Granted, that's proven to be a horrible concept. So let's repeal that.
Tell that to the tobacco industry yeah?
Yeah hospitals cost money
HTTP Error 402: Payment Required was created for a reason. Maybe we need to rethink micropayments.
There’s nothing wrong with macro payments either.
Five dollars a month to subscribe or whatever. If people get the value out of it, you can get them to pay it.
Subscription fatigue will quickly limit that. Yes, people used to subscribe to magazines but usually just a few. And by the way, those magazines were full of ads too.
Half of the people on this site think that subscriptions are evil too, though.
Project Xanadu will be ready any decade now.
There should be no viable alternative to the free-because-your-attention-is-the-product business model because that is the core problem
Paying for content works just fine
Sounds good to me.
Why? Serious question. The internet was a mistake.
How can your question be serious if you already decided the internet was a mistake? I don't think it was. Far from it.
Good things get tainted over time. The internet was a good thing. Today, not so much. It's probably a net negative for most youth in terms of cognitive development. Aka a drag on the future of humanity.
Maybe it could be good again, but not on the path it's on.
What part of an endless sea of SEO spam, AI slop, malware, polarized astroturf, and addictive-by-design walled gardens strikes you as the win? Seriously, where is the win?
But the internet is so much more than that, isn't it?
It really isn't. It was so much more than that but a couple decades of "innovation" and here we are.
It used to be.
Honestly, some of the shit with ClawdBot^W MoltBot^W OpenClaw and molt.church and molt.book has been some quality entertainment, enabled largely by the Internet. And it's AI slop but that only seems to matter when one of them gets miffed about its PR being rejected and posts an unhinged blog post about the maintainer who rejected said PR. And in a "comedy equals tragedy plus time" way, it's pretty easy to laugh at that, too.
You know there's individuals who will unironically defend any dark pattern one cares to point to so your take here is pretty unsurprising. I feel like this is getting excited over finding a kernel of undigested corn in a random turd.
I think this would have an opposite effect. An addicted customer is a customer willing to pay. Think about gambling or tobacco. BTW OnlyFans somehow lives off subscriptions.
OTOH I gladly pay for YouTube Premium.
Because you want to support the platform or because you don't want to see ads?
What counts as an advertisement? What about a testimonial?
If you try to regulate this, everything will be an ad in disguise.
In my opinion, that's the direction we are heading towards with AI anyway.
I'm surprised we haven't seen an instance of 'pay to increase bias towards my product in training' yet.
I think you can get most of the benefit by just banning targeted advertising.
Require that every user must be shown the exact same ads (probabilistically). Don't allow any kind of interest or demographic based targeting for paid content.
Advertisers would still be able to place Ads on pages they know there target audience goes, but wouldn't be able to make those same Ads follow that target audience around the internet.
How will they know where their target audience goes if there is no tracking?
Use 0.01% of brain power? How is it that Fox News always has the buy/sell gold ads? Hyper-segmenting society into advertising bubbles is about the same as if you hyper-segmented your body into cell clumps. You need unintentional cross-pollination, otherwise there is no more society.
Yes, a user in GA should be shown an ad for a car dealership in Hawaii…
Geofenced ads are not the same as targeted ads.
Okay what if I am in Florida and Facebook sees that all of my posts are in Spanish, should it not be allowed to target me with Spanish speaking ads?
Correct. The proposal is to not be able to use your posts to determine which ads to show. But showing you ads in Spanish because you’re in southern Florida or Puerto Rico would be acceptable.
Such a law will probably allow targeting based on the browser's language (browsers already send a "Accept-Language" field, doxing you with every single http request), or whatever language you have configured a website/app interface to be shown in.
But not guess a language based on the content of posts.
But I don’t speak Spanish and I’m in Florida…
Good policy in my opinion.
Paying someone for promoting your product or message. I don’t think it’s all that complicated. Talking about your own product on the internet is fine. Paying to promote your message wouldn’t be. TikTok and Reddit and Instagram aren’t trying to keep people endlessly scrolling because they are free-speech fanatics. It entirely comes down to “more time in app = more revenue”. Take away that monetization method and you take away the single incentive that has driven virtually every dark pattern that has developed in social media in the last two decades.
Subscription based services have exactly the same incentive to increase engagement.
What counts as pornography? What counts as art? What counts as music? Please, yeah we know, we absolutely know categorization is hard, doesn't mean there is no benefit in having them and shaping them as we go.
You'll see that none of these things are banned unilaterally.
Interestingly, there are autocratic governments who do try to ban vague things. The goal there is selective enforcement, not good public policy.
Going too far - laws state that if you were paid for a testimonial by a firm, or if the firm provided the service or product you disclose / it counts as paid endorsements /
You don’t need to go too far down the rabbit hole. You need to introduce friction to ads.
Subscription revenues are tiny when compared ad revenue, so I expect people will resist this idea ferociously.
Thats too vague and drastic, every "show HN" is an ads, for notoriety at least. I would prefer we draw the line at "content pushed by a third party against payment must be displaid only with regard to where it is displaid and must not use information about to whom it is displaid" .
I.e displaying an ads about Sentry on a ads technica page, find . Displaying an ads about hiking equipment on ars techbica because i made a google search abd it is estimated I like that -> not fine. It would kill all the incentive to overtrack the ROI will no more justify the cost.
Show HN isn’t advertising in the sense they are addressing: paying a website for space to promote something. There’s no payment taking place with Show HN. If no payment can be made, websites have to find another revenue model besides advertising, and don’t have an incentive to keep users addicted and endlessly consuming.
Nah, advertisement in general. Just make the internet a paid sub. We don't need influencers or snake oil ads. And without ads and influencers, there is no reason for meta to try to keep people infinitely stuck to their phones. They can get their cut just from a paid sub.
Netflix (even before they introduced ads) optimized for watch time. Higher watch time = higher retention for subscriptions (even when prices go up).
I agree [0]. Well, taxed rather than banned. But we’re in the same postcode.
[0]: https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0177-what-if-we-taxed-adver...
Then X will become the only social media as Musk can keep it free unlike any competition and use it to push politics he likes or finds it beneficial for his other companies. In fact, according to reports X is already not making much ad money so it’s already there.
There's already free ad-free social media, see countless services in the fediverse
Who pays for the costs of those and why?
There are many Mastodon servers run by ordinary people simply because they want to. And before the shit-show the internet has become, there were many forums and IRC channels, absolutely free, and with 0 ads.
Very low traction on these. Let me know when there’s something that people actually use in tens or hundreds of millions and random people are just providing the infrastructure out of pocket and spending all their time on this without expectation.
Maybe low traction is a good thing. We don’t need social media to be an all consuming addictive mega platform.
I could have agreed if the high traction ones that do all the bad things didn’t exist.
We've come full circle to banning advertising. It seems like we have good reason to believe that people will create the infrastructure for the communities that they _want_ to exist and fund them. So just banning advertising will probably be fine. Worst case scenario, we gradually loosen the ban. The advertising hellscape will grow back immediately, nothing of value will be lost.
Moving the goalposts much? Of course there aren't any free services serving millions currently, how could they, when Facebook/X spends millions to make sure everyone stays on their platform? Which non tech savvy would want to move to a platform without all their friends? That's the gotcha with social networks, once you grow big enough, it is really hard for people to move off of it.
Still, funny how you ignored IRCs/forums that I mentioned. Those were used by MANY people, and could scale infinitely. You are literally arguing against something that has already happened.
> Still, funny how you ignored IRCs/forums that I mentioned. Those were used by MANY people, and could scale infinitely.
At its peak (late 1990s to early 2000s), IRC was estimated to have about 3–4 million concurrent users worldwide at any given moment, with tens of millions of total users over time.
Pales in comparison with the scale that’s needed today, given the number of people, variety of media, and bandwidth required.
Storage/compute/etc were orders of magnitude more expensive at the time, so the fact that it was 3-4 million is uh, pretty impressive? You could host a Matrix server for your 1,000 closest friends for basically no money.
No I am not moving the goalposts, the alternative shouldn’t just exist it should actually do the job and by doing the job, I don’t mean that if people made the effort to use it, it can do the job. I mean people should be using it. Also, no people are not stupid and its not their fault for not using it.
If these companies fail because their quality isn't good enough to support paid subscribers isn't that effectively the same thing as people choosing to not use their platform?
Those of us who dislike these practices already have a choice. We can simply not use the service. So why remove that choice from others who don't mind ads and are willing to use the free version?
Also, forcing a paid only model raises the barrier to entry. Most of the world lives on less than $10 a day, so a subscription would effectively limit access to relatively wealthy people by global standards.
You don’t even have to move towards a full ban. Instead, simply tax companies that offer ads in proportion to how long users spend on their site. This will naturally encourage websites to get users in, experience whatever content it is that they’re offering ads against, and then GTFO.
So for the people who couldn’t afford it? Let them eat cake?
Are you going to put up a “Great Firewall of America” to keep non US sites advertising sites from being seen by US citizens? Are you going to stop podcasts from advertising?
There has never been a mass information medium to survive on subscriptions. This includes everything since news papers in the 18th century.
How will you ban that without infringing on free speech. That is a thing in the US and a lot of countries outside the EU.
"Commercial speech" being protected by free speech laws anywhere is abhorrent. The advertising industry, in and of itself, seems abhorrent to me. It's one of the worst things humans have come up with, ever.
Could one not categorize material published in a book, magazine, or on television as 'commercial speech', liable to restrictive licensing and censorship? This seems like a slippery slope which the USA is on the correct side of.
Commercial speech is not the same as advertising.
The product is the same as the speech, whereas in advertising the speech is in sycophantic service of another product.
I agree that commercial speech is not the same as advertising, but the comment I replied to was talking about restricting commercial speech, not advertising.
99.9% of businesses in the US are considered small businesses. If we look at all the businesses in the world small businesses make up an even larger percentage. In most parts of the world these are people with 0-5 employees; meaning they're just families and individuals trying to make ends meet.
If you remove the ability for these people to advertise there goes their livelihood. I understand the desire to want to punish big evil corporations but all this will do is strengthen them because they're the ones who have enough capital to survive something like this and scoop up the marketshare left behind by the millions of small businesses that will fail when this is implemented.
99.9% of small businesses do little to no advertising. I can’t recall seeing an ad for a single one of the small businesses I am a customer of. 99.9% of ads I get are for megacorporations and national brands.
I'm kind of curious how people think a new business should make its existence known to prospective customers.
It's 2026.
We can have word of mouth, genuine, in forums and social media.
We can have reviews, genuine, in websites.
We can have websites which present new products and business, not as paid sponsorships.
We can search on our own initiative and go to their website.
We can have online catalogs.
And tons of other ways.
And not a single one of these is tenable, even when combined. How do the people that post reviews, or spread something over word-of-mouth, discover the thing in the first place? Try your hand at starting a business and trying to sell goods or services using these methods and see how well it works.
Tenable for what, global business? Many local businesses do fine without advertising and/or using these methods.
Making global business harder and forcing things more local actually sounds like a great benefit.
I'm all for that as well.
We could use less 1T companies and more a few billion or 100s of millions level companies too. I miss the "focused on Mac and iPod" era Apple.
Banning advertising would have the opposite effect; entrenched players would have a massive moat. The biggest gains from advertising by far accrue to newer entrants, not the big companies.
>How do the people that post reviews, or spread something over word-of-mouth, discover the thing in the first place?
The follow industry conventions, visit registries of industry websites, have professional lists where companies submit their announcements (and not to the general public) and so on.
>Try your hand at starting a business and trying to sell goods or services using these methods and see how well it works.
If advertising is banned, it will work just as good as for any competitor.
Searchable catalogues of products with prices and features listed.
That assumes the customer is aware that the product exists.
It only assumes they are aware that the category of products exists, and ordinary word-of-mouth communication is sufficient to propagate that knowledge.
How does word-of-mouth communication propagate knowledge that is currently in the possession of zero existing customers? Or operate for products that people have little reason to discuss with other people?
Suppose you sell insulation and replacing the insulation in an existing house could save $2 in heating and cooling for each $1 the insulation costs. Most people know that insulation exists, but what causes them to realize that they should be in the market for it when they "already have it"?
People don't need to discuss specific products, they only need to be aware of the existence of product categories. If it's genuinely the case that whole product categories are unknown to many people who could realistically benefit from them, as determined by a disinterested third party, an exception could be made for advertising that does not mention specific products or brands.
The insulation example can be solved by publication of data on average heating costs. When people learn that their neighbors are paying less they will be naturally incentivized to investigate why. Equivalent problems can be solved with the same general technique.
> If it's genuinely the case that whole product categories are unknown to many people who could realistically benefit from them, as determined by a disinterested third party, an exception could be made for advertising that does not mention specific products or brands.
Now all of the "brought to you by America's <industry group>" ads are back in. So is every pharma ad and every other patented product because they don't have to tell you a brand when there is only one producer.
> The insulation example can be solved by publication of data on average heating costs.
Publication where? In the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard"? Also, who decides to publish it, decides what it will say or pays the costs of writing and distributing it?
An industry group is not a disinterested party. Minimum competition requirements can be imposed. As I said elsewhere in the thread, a solution being imperfect is not a good reason to leave the problem unaddressed.
> An industry group is not a disinterested party.
No, but they can convince a disinterested party that people aren't aware of <fact about industry that industry wants people to know> because that's actually true.
> Minimum competition requirements can be imposed.
But that brings back the original problem. Company invents new patented invention, how does anybody find out about it?
> a solution being imperfect is not a good reason to leave the problem unaddressed.
This is the legislator's fallacy. Something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do this.
If a proposal is full of problems and holes, the alternative isn't necessarily to do nothing, but rather to find a different approach to the problem.
Proposals that are full of holes are often worse than nothing, because the costs are evaluated in comparison to the ostensible benefit, but then in practice you get only a fraction of the benefit because of the holes. And then people say "well a little is better than nothing" while not accounting for the fact that weighing all of the costs against only a fraction of the benefit has left you underwater.
Advertising causes great harm. Banning advertising, or better yet, making it economically nonviable without restricting freedom of speech, solves this problem. As already pointed out by several other posts in this thread, the purported benefits of advertising are already available through non-harmful means.
But I acknowledge that there may be edge cases. My point is that the existence of edge cases does not mean we should permit the harm to continue. Those specific edge cases can be identified and patched. My suggestion is a hypothetical example of a potential such patch, one that might possibly be a net benefit. Maybe it would actually be a net harm, and the restriction should be absolute. The specifics don't matter, it's merely an example to illustrate how edge cases might be patched.
Your objections to this hypothetical example are nit-picking the edge cases of an edge case. They're so insignificant in comparison to the potential harm reduction of preventing advertising that they can be safely ignored.
No, the problem is that the "edge cases" will swallow the rule if you make an exception for every instance where advertising is actually serving a purpose, but if you don't make those exceptions then you would have created so many new problems or require so many patches that each carry its own overhead and opportunity for cheating or corruption that the costs would vastly exceed the benefits.
> The specifics don't matter, it's merely an example to illustrate how edge cases might be patched.
Only it turned out to be an example to illustrate how patching the edge cases might be a quagmire.
>Suppose you sell insulation and replacing the insulation in an existing house could save $2 in heating and cooling for each $1 the insulation costs. Most people know that insulation exists, but what causes them to realize that they should be in the market for it when they "already have it"?
The same legit things that can cause them to realize it today. Word of mouth, a product review, a personal search that landed them on a new company website, a curated catalog (as long as those things are not selling their placements).
An ad is the worse thing to find such things out - the huge majority ranges from misleading to criminally misleading to bullshit.
how did business do before the internet?! assuming people bought things before we had the internet?
They don't think of that. At all.
Many don't think businesses should exist in the first place.
You make your feelings clear, but don't give any arguments for it.
That won't convince anyone.
True, you can't separate ads vs sponsored content quite easily.
but you can help this by banning all forms of active tracking.
Static ads only, no click tracking, and complete ban on profiling clients and especially on adjusting prices based on client/possible client behavior patterns.
Magazines made it work for decades.
Websites can too.
If you know the kind of articles your readers like, you can find ads that your readers will like.
It's amusing that after all this time and (hundreds of?) billions of dollars invested in adtech I still find the adverts in old magazines far more relevant and compelling than any of the "personalised" adverts of today. The industry as a whole has missed the forest for the trees by over-fitting their systems; I might be interested in the broader category, or a tangentially related one, but at no point do I want to see the exact same product I was looking at a day ago on every ad. I didn't buy it then for a reason, so I'm not buying it now.
Pervasive surveillance to make a system that's practically worse than the alternative that doesn't require mass surveillance, and is much simpler and cheaper. Did I say amusing before? Depressing is probably a better fit.
Free speech is a thing in the EU too.
To become a member of the EU, you have to first join the Council of Europe and its European Convention on Human Rights – article 10 of which guarantees the right to free expression. The EU also has its own Charter of Fundamental Rights which says the same thing. And the plan is for the EU to become a party to the Convention in its own right, although that's got bogged down in technical legal disputes and still hasn't happened, despite the 2009 Lisbon Treaty mandating it.
The US First Amendment has no exceptions as worded, but the US Supreme Court has read some into it. The Convention has exceptions listed in the text, although they are vaguely defined – but like the US, the European Court of Human Rights has developed extensive case law on the scope of those exceptions.
The big difference in practice is the US exceptions end up being significantly more narrow than those in Europe. However, given in both, the details of the exceptions are in case law – courts can and do change their mind, so this difference could potentially change (either by narrowing or broadening) in the decades to come.
https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/human-rights/human-right...
> "Article 10 of the Human Rights Act: Freedom of expression
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary."
Seems to be about as strong as the Soviet Constitution's protections: https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/77cons02....
> Seems to be about as strong as the Soviet Constitution's protections:
In the 2015 case Perinçek v. Switzerland, the European Court of Human Rights applied Article 10 to find against a Swiss law making it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide. Can you imagine a Soviet court ever striking down a genocide denial law?
The decision is controversial because it introduces a double standard into the Court's case law – it had previously upheld laws criminalising Holocaust denial, now it sought to distinguish the Holocaust from the Armenian genocide in a way many find arbitrary and distasteful – the consistent thing would be to either allow denying both or disallow denying both.
But still, it just shows how mistaken your Soviet comparison is.
I can definitely imagine the Soviet Union making arbitrary rules about which genocides were recognized and ‘protected’, and which were not.
But can you imagine a Soviet court declaring a law to be in violation of human rights?
Yes, much like the EU, they would regularly over-ride the ‘opinions’ of their subordinate states.
The central party and state organs in Moscow would sometimes overrule decisions by the governments of the SSRs and other subordinate entities. But they didn't do this by having the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union declare laws unconstitutional. They did it by administrative fiat.
“Free speech” and yet people are arrested for mean memes
Thats UK after they left EU.
The European Court of Human Rights has upheld a conviction on the charge of blasphemy for calling Mohammed a pedophile: https://globalfreedomofexpression.columbia.edu/cases/e-s-v-a...
Easy: free speech was never meant for and fought for advertising. Any judicial body who says otherwise is bullshiting people.
Conflating advertising with free speech is like conflating sex work with reproductive rights.
A restriction on prostitution is absolutely a restriction on reproductive rights, but there is no such right in the constitution.
It would be worth a try to outlaw compensation for advertising. The spirit of free speech is usually that you aren’t being paid for it.
The spirit of free speech is that I can say whatever I damn well please for any purpose that suits me including that someone paid me to.
Suppose a company wants to write some product documentation so customers and prospective customers know what features their product has and how to use them. They hire someone to write the documentation and then someone else to distribute it. Is there a good way to distinguish this from advertising?
The most plausible way would be if the one you're paying to distribute it has some kind of exclusive control or market power over the distribution channel so that you're paying them a premium over competing distributors. But then wouldn't the best way to prevent them from extracting that premium to be to make it so nobody has exclusive control over distribution channels, e.g. by breaking up concentrated markets or requiring federated protocols?
>Suppose a company wants to write some product documentation so customers and prospective customers know what features their product has and how to use them. They hire someone to write the documentation and then someone else to distribute it. Is there a good way to distinguish this from advertising?
Yes. You self host it as a company, and it can only be reproduced (if they wish) in outlets (say review sites) when there's no payment or compensation of any kind involved for that.
It's a corporation though. It can't do anything without paying someone to do it, unless someone volunteers to do it for free, which isn't very likely. And how do you self-host distribution? You would have to run your own fiber to every customer's house or spin up your own postal service or you're paying someone to do that.
>And how do you self-host distribution?
You have your own website and your copy on it. Don't start that "but if you pay some hosting provider to host that website that would be advertising", or the
"And how do you self-host distribution? You would have to run your own fiber to every customer's house or spin up your own postal service or you're paying someone to do that."
that borders on being obtuse on purpose.
If you pay some hosting provider then you're obviously paying someone, and now you have the caravan of trucks going through the loophole because Facebook et al get into the hosting business and then their "spam filter" trusts the things on their own hosting service so using it becomes the way to get seen.
>If you pay some hosting provider then you're obviously paying someone
Yes. You're still allowed to pay someone - for YOUR OWN corporate website. Still your copy is not on my fucking social media, news websites, forums, tv programming, and so on.
>and now you have the caravan of trucks going through the loophole because Facebook et al get into the hosting business and then their "spam filter" trusts the things on their own hosting service so using it becomes the way to get seen.
They can go into the hosting business all they want. If they show what they host (i.e. ads) on my social media feed, or links to it there, they're breaking the law. What they host should only be accessible when somebody consciously navigates to it in some hierarchical scheme or directly enters the address/handle.
> If they show what they host (i.e. ads) on my social media feed, or links to it there, they're breaking the law.
They're already hosting everything in your feed, and if there were actually no ads then everyone on the site would be paying them to do it, at which point what do you expect to be in your feed?
Advertising is a monetary transaction between an advertiser and a publisher. The customer (or product) is not involved in the transaction; it is their attention that is being bought and sold.
That's a different model than paying a technical writer to do technical writing.
You're contrasting authorship with distribution. The advertising equivalent to paying a technical writer is paying an ad agency to create the ad. The customer isn't a party to that transaction either.
But now how are you distributing either of them?
I am not making such an error. Paying a technical writer for labor is not the same as paying a publisher for conversions. The scenario you posed was "hire someone to write the documentation and then someone else to distribute it." Those are two parties, each of which is paid independently for services rendered. The customer is not selling their attention, here. The customer is (presumably) purchasing a product and is reading the documentation to understand how to operate it.
Advertising is not distribution. Publishing is distribution, and advertising sometimes comes along for the ride.
The proposal was to "outlaw compensation for advertising". That would presumably include paying people to create ads and not just to publish them, hence the first example. What you're arguing is that the first example is different from the second one, but they were intended to be, because they map to two different parts of the process.
> The customer is (presumably) purchasing a product and is reading the documentation to understand how to operate it.
Product documentation is also available to prospective customers so they can review it to decide whether they want to purchase the product.
And then the question is, how do they get it? There are many ways to distribute. They could pay to print it out on paper and put it in the lobby in their corporate offices, but then customers would have to come to their corporate headquarters to get it, which most won't do, so obviously some methods of distribution have a higher likelihood of being seen. Then companies will prefer the ones that allow them to be seen more.
But they're paying someone for any of them, so "is paying for it" isn't a useful way to distinguish them.
And then we're back to, suppose you pay Facebook to host your documents on your company's Facebook page. Furthermore suppose that they, like most hosting companies, charge you more money if you get more traffic. Meanwhile their "hosting customers" on the "free tier" (i.e. ordinary Facebook users) have a very small quota which is really only enough for their posts to be seen by their own friends. So paying them for distribution -- like paying for any other form of distribution -- causes your documents to have better visibility. Now you can show up in the feed of more people before you run out of quota, just like paying more for hosting means more people could visit your website before you exceed your transfer allowance.
How do you tell if someone is paying for computing resources or eyeballs when the same company provides both? Notice that "don't let them do both" is a bit of a problem if you also don't let them sell advertising, because if they can't sell ads or charge for using the service then what are they doing for revenue?
Indeed, advertisers would layoff or displace their marketing teams, as the role would have no value to the company if advertising was outlawed (meanwhile, technical writers would be just fine). I'm not disputing that. I'm disputing the framing you put forth that equates advertising with technical writing.
> Product documentation is also available to prospective customers so they can review it to decide whether they want to purchase the product.
I agree with this statement, but it is irrelevant. The primary purpose of documentation is what I said: for understanding how to operate the product. The only purpose of advertising is to make a sale. Advertising has no secondary purpose. These are not the same thing.
The test is quite simple: Is the sole purpose of the payment to make a sale? If so, it is advertising.
We don't really need to discuss documents any longer. Documentation is not an advertisement.
There are legal definitions of advertising, I’m sure the courts will be able to figure it out.
The "legal definition of advertising" is the thing you have to write into the law you want to enact. If you can't answer the question as the proponent of the proposal then how is a judge expected to do it?
What the parent is getting at is it's not a mystery, such definitions already exist in all kinds of jurisdictions.
In any case it's trivial to come up with such a definition that covers most cases. Doesn't matter if it doesn't cover some gray areas or 100% of it. Laws can be supplemented and ammended.
We don't have an all-encompassing definition of porn either, but we have legal definitions, and we have legal frameworks regarding it.
> Doesn't matter if it doesn't cover some gray areas or 100% of it.
That's exactly the thing that matters when you're dealing with something where every loophole is going to have a caravan of trucks driving through it.
> We don't have an all-encompassing definition of porn either, but we have legal definitions, and we have legal frameworks regarding it.
You're picking the thing which is a hopeless disaster as your exemplar?
>That's exactly the thing that matters when you're dealing with something where every loophole is going to have a caravan of trucks driving through it.
Everything with profit "is going to have a caravan of trucks driving through it". He have laws anyway for those things, and for the most part, they're effective. I'd take a relative improvement even if it's not 100% over free reign.
>You're picking the thing which is a hopeless disaster as your exemplar?
I don't consider it a "hopeless disaster" (except in it's effects on society). As a business it's regulated, and for the most part, stays and follows within those regulations. The existence of dark illegal versions of it, or exploitation in the industry, doesn't negate this.
> Everything with profit "is going to have a caravan of trucks driving through it". He have laws anyway for those things, and for the most part, they're effective.
For the most part they're trash. There is a narrow range of effectiveness where the cost of compliance is low and thereby can be exceeded by the expected cost of reasonable penalties imposed at something significantly less than 100% effective enforcement, e.g. essentially all gas stations stopped selling leaded gasoline because unleaded gasoline isn't that much more expensive.
The cost of complying with a ban on advertising is high, so the amount of effort that will be put into bypassing it will be high, which is the situation where that doesn't work.
> As a business it's regulated, and for the most part, stays and follows within those regulations.
It essentially bifurcated content creation and distribution into "this is 100% porn" and "this company will not produce or carry anything that would cause it to have to comply with those rules" which inhibits quality for anything that has to go in the "porn" box and pressures anything in the "not porn" box to be sufficiently nerfed that they don't have to hire more lawyers.
The combination of "most human communication now happens via social media" and "expressing your own sexuality is effectively banned on most major social media platforms" is probably a significant contributor to the fact that people are having less sex now and the fertility rate is continuing to decline. "All the boobs you could ever possibly look at but only on the sites where there is no one you will ever marry" is not a super great way to split up the internet.
The ambiguity in the definition frequently causes people to be harassed or subject to legal risk when doing sex education, anatomy, etc. when they're trying to operate openly with a physical presence in a relevant jurisdiction. Conversely, it's the internet and it's global so every terrible thing you'd want to protect anyone from is all still out there and most of the rules are imposing useless costs for no benefits, or worse, causing things to end up in places where there are no rules, not even the ones that have nothing to do with sex.
It's now being used as an guise to extract ID from everyone for surveillance purposes.
It's a solid example of bad regulations setting fire to the omnishambles.
I’m saying that these definitions already exist, and are being appllied by courts. It’s not a novel concept. I’m also not interested in arguing about exact definitions. We all know well enough what an ad is, in particular the kind we don’t want to see when browsing the web. My main point was to illustrate how I don’t consider this to be a free speech issue.
Outside of US free speech isn't the carte blanche it is stateside. There are guardrails, there are limitations pretty much everywhere else. Even in the US This militant application is fairly recent, post 1980s.
You don't need to ban advertising, you just need to ban paying for advertising. That doesn't harm free speech. When there's no money to be made the problem will sort itself out.
That's gonna probably just create a bunch of loopholes or hacks like paying with favors instead of cash
Loopholes can be addressed on a case-by-case basis. A solution being imperfect is not a good reason to leave the problem completely unaddressed.
This by the way is my understanding of why the EU writes laws the way they do.
If they just banned infinite scrolling someone would come up with something equivalent that works slightly differently. Now they need a whole new law. It’s just constant whack-a-mole.
So instead they seem to ban goals. Your thing accomplishes that goal? It’s banned.
It’s a pretty different way than how we seem to do things in the US. But I can see upsides.
That's the same in every domain when there's a profit. Doesn't mean laws and bans don't reduce the related activity dramatically.
I'm not following the relationship - because you'd have to pay, thus it's not "free" speech? It's hard to argue that having to pay a minimal fee (of let's say $1 per month) would be something against free speech. But the payment shall remain anonymous obviously.
>How will you ban that without infringing on free speech
You don't, but the EU doesn't need to care about American ideas of free speech. This is actually in some sense the biggest hurdle to all of this, the psychologically defensive posture that somehow assumes that on European territory this should even be a concern. Also as a sidenote this is even within America a kind of revisionist history, the 20th century had plenty of broadcasting and licensing rules. This unfettered, deregulated commercial environment is even in the US a creature of the last ~40-50 years, and those unchained companies, not unironically, then went on to convince everyone to defend that state of affairs given each opportunity.
What are you on about? Who’s speech? The speech of a massive multinational corporation? No thanks. I want the freedom to browse without getting pointless products shoved down my throat.
I'd say the first amendment is due for an overhaul anyway for a variety of reasons. (Heck, the whole constitution is.)
You can't say something like that and refuse to elaborate
Which parts specifically?
Obvious examples of negative consequences of the first amendment include the profusion of false and misleading advertising, the scourge of political campaign spending, and the disastrous firehouse of misinformation being pushed out in various online forums. The idea that an abstract carte blanche for free speech outweighs those real and present ills is misguided. At the same time, we see that the limitation to only protection from government action enables effective quelling of speech by private actors.
At the core of the first amendment is the idea that people should not be punished for criticizing their government. I think that idea is worth preserving. But the idea that people are free to say anything they choose, in any context, regardless of its factual status, and also that their permission to do so is limited only by the resources they can muster to promulgate their speech, is an unwarranted extension of that concept.
I think you would find that the cure is far, far worse than the disease. We speak of rights, and those are important, but there's also a very important practical reason why we have freedom of speech: because you cannot trust that future government officials will stick to banning speech that is justly banned. Once you open that door, sooner or later someone is going to start abusing the power. How would you like it if the Trump administration was able to (with complete legality) declare that claims Biden fairly won the 2020 election are "misinformation", and punish people who make those claims? Or if you're a Trump guy, how would you like it if the next Democrat administration declared it to be "misinformation" to claim that Trump fairly won the same election, and punish people for it?
The cold hard reality is that no matter how much you trust the people in the government today, eventually they will be replaced by people you consider to be the scum of the earth. And when that day comes, you will curse the day you allowed the government to punish speech, because you'll see speech you consider perfectly justified become illegal.
Maybe this would be the nudge people need, but there are a handful of well-researched, reputable newspapers out there that you can subscribe to and support quality journalism. For the most part, people don't. They'd rather have entertainment news for free with ads than quality journalism they pay for.
How would you ban advertising? Would astroturfing be banned? Would LLM-assisted astroturfing be banned?
Using an ad-blocker gets rid of most visible ads online, but there's still paid content in various forms which may be more effective than straight adverts anyway.
If you want to ban something, then ban free social media. There has to be a minimum charge like 100$ or something a month (keep it tax free for all I care), to access any social media service with more than a 1000 members.
How does one start a new social media network in that world? Cover the $100 fee, essentially making it free to use? It would kill any competitors from being created, at least until inflation makes $100 worthless.
Microfiction:
Today, on June 1st 2030, I'd like to announce the launch of the fediverse cooperative, the first cooperative social media platform.
We pay out all our membership fees (minus hosting costs) to our entire cooperative.
To use our servers, you'll obviously have to become member of our cooperative, paying $100 a month in membership fees, and earning $99.50 a month in dividends.
I agree with you. Advertising corrupts companies. It’s also annoying and I hate it.
I don’t know how we’d ban advertising without impinging on free speech laws in the USA, where a lot of huge companies reside.
How would you do it?
Banning ads is not possible.
But we can build a culture that knows how to avoid ads and the technology to enable it.
Don't you realize that those with money are the ones who have the means to build a culture? How do you propose we compete with Jeffrey Epsteins who have a shit-ton of money to spend on pushing whatever narrative they want to? Just look around and see the "culture" we're in.
Perfect idea, the internet should only be for rich people. After all, who cares about the 50% of the planet that can barely afford a coffee? Or the millions of small businesses that are only able to survive because of targeted ads? Fuck 'em all, because people can't be trusted to use their own devices properly!
Poor people pay more for ads (as part of product price), and suffer more because of ads (from misleading advertising for shit products like junk food and drugs, to having certain out of reach lifestyles based on purchasing crap they don't need hammered on them and getting in debt). They also pay with having a worse media landscape, worse social media, and many more (not to mention the influece big companies with big spending budgets get).
People would also be better of without 90% of the ad-driven internet.
Plain text with no tracking is cheaper than coffee.
They already effectively banned the mechanism behind most online advertising with the GDPR, it’s just been really, really poorly enforced.
So much so that one wonders whether that was the point.
Make a lot of noise about privacy, force massive spend in the general direction of the EU, fund a new layer of bureaucracy, and actually do nothing to harm the toxic business models that were nominally the impetus for all this. Because someone’s gotta pay for all this new “privacy” infrastructure…
Ads per se are not evil. The motherfucker we'd want to shoot, however, is targeted advertising and especially those that rely on harvested user data.
In a sense, I'm just agreeing with a fellow comment in the vicinity of this thread that said GDPR is already the EU's shot at banning (targeted) ads---it's just implemented piss-poorly. Personally formulated, my sentiment is that GDPR as it stands today is a step in the right direction towards scaling back advertisement overreach but we have a long way to go still.
Ofc it's impossible to blanket ban targeted ads because at best you end up in a philosophical argument about what counts as "targeting", at worse you either (a) indiscriminately kill a whole industry with a lot of collateral casualties or (b) just make internet advertising even worse for all of us.
My position here is that ads can be fine if they
1. are even somewhat relevant to me.
2. didn't harvest user data to target me.
3. are not annoyingly placed.
4. are not malware vectors/do not hijack your experience with dark patterns when you do click them.
To be super clear on the kind of guy talking from his soapbox here: I only browse YT on a browser with ad blockers but I don't mind sponsor segments in the videos I watch. They're a small annoyance but IMO trying to skip them is already a bigger annoyance hence why I don't even bother at all. That said, I've never converted from eyeball to even customer from sponsor segments.
I'd call this the "pre-algorithmic" advertising approach. It's how your eyeballs crossed ads in the 90s and IMO if we can impose this approach/model in the internet, then we can strike a good balance of having corporations make money off the internet and keeping the internet healthy.
Ads are mostly evil. No one said that ads were inherently evil. It's bad enough that ads are mostly evil.
Let's be clear what we mean by "evil". My time is valuable. I have a finite number of heartbeats before I die. If I have to spend 30 seconds watching a damn soap commercial before I get to watch a Twitch stream, that's 36 heartbeats I will never get back. Sure, I could press mute and do something else for 30 seconds that seems more valuable, but that doesn't fit my schedule. Stealing heartbeats is evil.
I have so far optimized against wasting my heartbeats by paying subscriptions to remove ads. Spotify, Twitch, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, and a bunch of others I'm forgetting. Because it's worth $150/month or whatever to not waste my time with the most boring, uninteresting, irrelevant, nauseating crap that advertisers come up with.
And thank science for SponsorBlock, because sponsored segments in videos are the devil. Sponsored segments use the old non-tracking advertisement model. They pay publishers practically nothing because they aren't paying for conversions, but for an estimate based on impressions and track record woo. Bad for publishers, bad for advertisers, and bad for content consumers. Everybody loses. I'm well over my lifetime quota of BS from VPNs, MOBAs, and plots of land scams. So many heartbeats lost.
I’ve never figured out what I think advertising should be. I currently do basically everything I can to get rid of it in my life.
I’m totally fine with outlining targeted advertising. But even classic broadcast stuff poses the dilemma for me.
I have absolutely noticed I miss out some. As an easy example I don’t tend to know about new TV shows or movies that I might like the way I used to. There’s never that serendipity where you were watching the show and all of a sudden a trailer from a movie comes on and you say “What is THAT? I’ve got to see that.”
Maybe some restaurant I like is moving into the area. Maybe some product I used to like is now back on the market. It really can be useful.
Sure the information is still out there and I could seek it out, but I don’t.
On the other hand I do not miss being assaulted with pharmaceutical ads, scam products, junk food ads, whatever the latest McDonald’s toy is, my local car dealerships yelling at me, and so much other trash.
I’ve never figured out how someone could draw a line to allow the useful parts of advertising without the bad parts.
“You’re only allowed to show a picture of your product, say its name, and a five word description of what it’s for”.
Nothing like that is gonna be workable.
Such a hard problem.
Yeah I want my cake and to eat it too. I get annoyed when ads are irrelevant to me, and I get creeped out when they are too relevant.
I want to be able to browse the internet for free, where the sites have a sustainable business model and can therefore make high-quality content, but I don't want to have to sign up to a subscription for everything.
I want to be able to host websites that get lots of views, but I don't want that popularity to cost me.
Can someone please come up with something that solves all of these dilemmas for me?
what if ads were displayed only on request? “hi, ad page, I need some shoes, let’s go!”
So basically what Google & Amazon does and ban what Meta & Apple does ?
Can I get an amen.
That’s a thought-provoking suggestion. Most services would go out of business, and there would be a cascade of change. I wonder what would remain?
>The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes"
This is not such an unusual thing in law, as much as us stem-brained people want legal systems to work like code. The most famous example is determining art vs pornography - "I know it when I see it" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it)
"I know it when I see it" notoriously does not work in law, either. Instead, we have the Miller test.
Which is of course the only way it makes sense to write laws, since code can't model infinite reality.
Not, at least, until our machine overlords arrive.
Not just reality. Adversaries trying to find loopholes. Luckily the git history of law goes back millenia so its had some time to adapt to humans.
The wording is vague enough so they canm milk american/chinese companies for fines in a few months. EU being sad again
> The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes". They point to certain features they'd like them to change, but there is no specific ruling around what you can/can't do.
The issue is: If you do a precise wording of what you don't want a lawyer will go through it wird by word and the company finds a way to build something which violated the spirit, but not the exact wording. By being more generic in the wording they can reach such cases and future development with very little oversight for later corrections and courts can interpret the intention and current state of art.
There are areas where law has to be precise (calculation of tax, criteria for criminal offenses, permissions for authorities, ...), but in many cases good laws are just as precise as needed and as flexible as possible.
In the US we often use a "reasonable person" standard to get around trying to write super precise descriptions of things. "don't do X where a reasonable person would think Y."
Life is complex and beautiful and trying to regulate every possible outcome beforehand just makes it boring and depressing.
We should just let people with overwhelming amounts of money research and fund new ways to trick people's lizard brains into giving them even more money.
If you’re going to organize your society around the theory that humans don’t actually possess free will, you’re going to produce a fair number of outcomes that a classical liberal would find abhorrent.
It's only assuming that free will requires effort to exert. They shouldn't be required to waste that effort on defending themselves from attempts to trick them into buying things they don't need.
Yeah, good, okay
People aren't lizards, however. You demonstrate that by engaging in the distinctly unlizardlike behavior of employing a false dichotomy to imply the opposite.
Laws should protect what's beautiful about life. And life is less beautiful when trillion dollar companies abuse the human nature to extract value, damaging society and individuals for the benefit of the very few.
What it does is allow for selective enforcement, making it possible to go after any company at will.
When rules are vague enough you can pretty much always find a rule someone is 'breaking' depending on how you argue it.
It's why countries don't just have a single law that says "don't be evil".
No, that's what case law is for. Modelling the zillion little details. One party claims something breaks a law another claims it doesn't, and then we decide which is true. The only alternative is an infinitely detailed law.
Case law, also known as common law, is a British legal tradition. Most of the EU does not follow the common law tradition. There may be supreme courts, but the notion of binding precedent, or stare decisis as in the US legal system does not exist. Appeal and Supreme court decisions may be referenced in future cases, but don't establish precedent.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precedent>
The equivalent doctrine under a civil legal system (most of mainland Europe) is jurisprudence constante, in which "if a court has adjudicated a consistent line of cases that arrive at the same holdings using sound reasoning, then the previous decisions are highly persuasive but not controlling on issues of law" (from above Wikipedia link). See:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurisprudence_constante>
Interestingly, neither the principle of Judicial Review (in which laws may be voided by US courts) or stare decisis are grounded in either the US Constitution or specific legislation. The first emerged from Marbury v. Madison (1803), heard by the US Supreme Court (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison>), and the second is simply grounded in legal tradition, though dating to the British legal system. Both could be voided, possibly through legislation, definitely by Constitutional amendment. Or through further legal decisions by the courts themselves.
Yeah I'm really glad we don't have common law where I live. It makes the law way too complicated by having all these precedents play a role. If the law is not specific enough we just fix it.
Also it breaks the trias politica in my opinion. Case in point: the way the Supreme Court plays politics in the US. It shouldn't really matter what judge you pick, their job is to apply the law. But it matters one hell of a lot in the US and they've basically become legislators.
No, case law is when the interpretation of the law is ambiguous in specific cases where the law as written intends for a specific meaning.
This is different, it is intentionally ambiguous precisely so bureaucrats get to choose winners and losers instead of consumers.
But how do you stop the boring and depressing - and abusive and manipulative parts?
I'm not saying legislation is a good solution but you seem to be making a poetic plea that benefits the abusers.
>I'm not saying legislation is a good solution but you seem to be making a poetic plea that benefits the abusers.
Only if you believe everyone else has no agency of their own. I think most people outgrow these things once they have something more interesting in their lives. Or once they're just bored.
Back when this thing was new, everyone was posting pictures of every food item they try, every place they've been to etc.. that seems to slowly change to now where there are a lot more passive consumers compared to a few polished producers.
If you're calling people delivering the content "abusers", what would you call people creating the content for the same machine?
I don't believe people have no agency.
But I do believe we overestimate our own agency. Or more importantly society is often structured on the assumption that we have more agency then we actually do.
because some people suffer from mental health issues and need help and encouragement to break these behaviours.
And companies should not be allowed to predate on the vulnerable.
where does it stop though? I suffer from cant-stop-eating-nutella but should we shut down ferrero? it is simply not possible to protect the vulnerable in a free society. any protection only gives power into the wrong hands and will eventually get weaponized to protect “vulnerable” (e.g. our kids from learning math cause some ruling party likes their future voters dumb)
Dumb argument. They don’t intentionally make Nutella addictive and then test out recipes on the public to make it even more addictive. Other people can’t stop eating ice cream or oranges or salami.
I would say the core problem is that we lack a goal as society. If you only care about making money stuff like this happens regardless how many regulations you do.
> The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes". They point to certain features they'd like them to change, but there is no specific ruling around what you can/can't do.
“You know it when you see it.”
I thought about it for only a few seconds, but here is one way to do it. Have users self-report an "addiction factor", then fine the company based on the aggregate score using a progressive scale.
There is obviously a lot of detail to work out here-- which specific question do you ask users, who administers the survey, what function do you use scale the fines, etc. But this would force the companies to pay for the addiction externality without prescribing any specific feature changes they'd need to make.
fracture all the services, idc.
3 hrs a day on your phone is equivalent to 15 years of your life (accounting for a 16 hour waking day). I know people that do a solid 6... That's 30 years of their life scrolling, getting their brains completely fried by social media, and soon the infinite jest machine that is generative AI.
Sorry, we don't let people fry their brains with drugs, well we at least try to introduce some societal friction in between users and the act of obtaining said drug.
"what specific laws ...?"
If a company chooses a design and it can be proved through a subpoena of their communications that the design was intended and chosen for its addictive traits, even if there has been no evidence collected for the addictiveness, then the company (or person) can be deemed to have created a design in bad faith to society and penalized for it.
(Well that's my attempt. I tried to apply "innocent until proven guilty" here.)
> My initial reaction was that this was a terrible precedent, but after thinking on it more I asked myself, "well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?". Everything I thought of would have some way or workaround that could be found...
This doesn't solve the problem though - the enforcers still have to come up with a standard that they will enforce. A line has to be drawn, letting people move the line around based on how they feel today doesn't help. Making the standard uncertain just creates opportunities for corruption and unfairness. I haven't read the actual EU stance on the matter but what you are describing is a reliable way to end up in a soup of bad policy. There needs to be specific rulings on what people can and can't do.
If you can't identify the problem, then you aren't in a position to solve it. Applies to most things. Regulation by vibe-checks is a great way to kill off growth and change - which the EU might think is clever, but the experience over the last few centuries has been that growth and change generally make things better.
And what they actually seem to be doing here is demanding that sites spy on their users and understand their browsing habits which does seem like a terrible approach. I don't see how their demands in that statement align with the idea of the EU promoting digital privacy.
> It's important to note they aren't creating laws against infinite scrolling, but are ruling against addictive design and pointing to infinite scrolling as an example of it.
If the EU passes a law that seems general but start giving out specific examples ahead of time, they’re outlawing those specific examples. That’s how they work, even if you read the law closely and comply with the letter of the law. And they’ll take a percentage of your global revenue while people shout “malicious compliance” in the virtual streets if they don’t get their way.
I’m trying to think of what use I’d make of infinite scroll that would specifically not be for addictive purposes. Maybe ticket backlogs?
I'm also trying to think of what use I'd make of sugar that would specifically not be for addictive purposes. Maybe keeping down medicine?
Point being, the internet is the clutchable pearl de jour for easy political points. There's far more proven addictions and harm elsewhere, but those problems are boring and trodden and don't give a dopamine hit to regulate quite like the rancor that proposals like this drum up. Hey, aren't dopamine hits what they're trying to mediate in the first place?
In the USA at least, we need a nation specific intranet where everyone on it is verified citizens and businesses where the government cant buy your data but instead is tasked with protecting it, first and foremost, from itself.
No more for profit nets. Time for civil digital infrastructure.
> I asked myself, "well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?".
Only allowing algorithmic feeds/recommendations on dedicated subpages to which the user has to navigate, and which are not allowed to integrate viewing the content would be an excellent start IMO.
to me it isn't about addictive design, it is about infinite scrolling jerking/straining my eyes (and thanks to that strain, it brings me back to reality, and i immediately disconnect from the content thus avoiding whatever addiction it could have sucked me in).
That actually makes me think that any page containing addictive design elements should, similar to cigarette warning, carry a blinking, geocities style, header or footer with "WARNING: Ophthalmologist General and Narcologist General warn about dangers of addictive elements on this page".
Assuming it was "just" about banning infinite scrolling. Not saying it is a good idea, but right now I cannot think of a legitimate use case where you would need it, unless your goal is engagement.
I've seen it used in non-addictive ways for search results (both specialized[1] and generic global search engines) and portfolios (for showcasing work progressively not merely constantly appending content to the end of singularly viewed work like say news sites do now), off the top of my head.
[1] Eg: printables.com (for open source, 3D print files)
Or just help you avoid clicking next next while searching for something you want.
Although there is a special place in hell for those who put a website options for customer care at the bottom of an infinite scrolling page...
a webgame or a document browser, e.g. side scrollers, topdown/bottom up scroller, continuous page view.
I like to scroll my logs w/o pagination
But they ain't infinite (I assume). Maybe long, but finite. That is a big difference as it still gives meaning to the scrollbar. Infinite scroll is endlessly adding new content so you simply cannot scroll to the bottom.
Technically, infinite scroll is of course finite, too. Unless it adds newly created content, but if you count that as infinite then logs can be infinite too.
That's exactly why you don't write legislation to ban infinite scroll but 'addictive' design. Then it's ultimately up to the courts to decide, and they have the necessary leeway to judge that journalctl -f isn't addictive but TikTok is, even if they both use a version of infinite scroll.
I dunno, have you tried? Maybe you just need to scroll faster.
if your systemlog is very active or very verbose, this will happen.
i do get the idea though. abusive infinate scroll games/exploits, the compulsion to "finish" the feed.
> having a few large companies to watch over is better than millions of small micro-niche ones
Not necessarily. The consequences of a few bad micro-niche ones would be, well, micro.
No, this is far worse. This is just a license for bureaucrats to selectively choose winners or losers in social media. Once regulatory capture happens it merely turns into a special privilehe for pre-established businesses or a vehicle for one business to destroy another without outcompeting it
Laws should be strict!
>My initial reaction was that this was a terrible precedent, but after thinking on it more I asked myself, "well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?".
I'd make the algorithms transparent, then attack clearly unethical methods on a case by case basis. The big thing about facebook in the 2010's was how we weren't aware of how deep its tracking was. When revealed and delved into, it lead to GDRP.
I feel that's the only precision method of keeping thins ethical.
> My initial reaction was that this was a terrible precedent
These laws are harsh... but, as much as I hate to say it, the impact social media has had on the world has been worse.
This is everything terrible about laws.
Laws are supposed to be just that — predictable, enforceable, and obeyable rules, like the laws of physics or biology.
Bad laws are vague and subjective. It may be impossible to remove all ambiguity, but lawmakers should strive to create clear and consistent laws for their citizens.
Else it is not a nation of laws, but a domain of dictators.
I wouldn't worry about that. You're ignoring politics, and what this actually is. If the EU had a real problem with addictive designs and social media the time to move against it was of course 10+ years ago. They do not intend, not even remotely, to sabotage the profit machines that those companies are, they just want political weapons against the companies. The intention here is not to cure addiction, destroy profits, the intention is to use economic power to achieve political ends. The EU is built on this, it just didn't use to involve that many private companies.
Like most famous EU laws, this is not a law for people. Like the Banking regulations, the DMA, the GPDR, the AI act, this law cannot be used by individuals to achieve their rights against companies and certainly not against EU states, who have repeatedly shown willingness to use AI against individuals, including face recognition (which gets a lot of negative attention and strict rules in the AI act, and EU member states get to ignore both directly, and they get to allow companies to ignore the rules), violate GPDR against their own citizens (e.g. use medical data in divorce cases, or even tax debt collection, and they let private companies ignore the rules for government purposes (e.g. hospitals can be forced report if you paid for treatment rather than pay alimony, rather than pay your back taxes)). The first application of the GPDR was to remove links about Barrosso's personal history from Google.
These laws can only be used by the EU commission against specific companies. Here's how the process works: someone "files a complaint", which is an email to the EU commission (not a complaint in the legal sense, no involvement of prosecutors, or judges, or any part of the justice system of any member state at all). Then an EU commissioner starts a negotiation process and rules on the case, usually imposing billions of euros in fines or providing publicly-backed loans (in the case of banks). The vast, vast, vast majority of these complaints are ignored or "settled in love" (French legal term: the idea is that some commission bureaucrat contacts the company and "arranges things", never involving any kind of enforcement mechanism). Then they become chairman of Goldman Sachs (oops, that just happened once, giving Goldman Sachs it's first communist chairman, yes really. In case you're wondering: Barrosso), or join Uber's and Salesforce's executive teams, paid through Panama paper companies.
In other words: these laws are not at all about addictive design, and saving you from it, they're about going after specific companies for political means. Google, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, ...
Ironically the EU is doing exactly what Trump did with tariffs. It's just that Trump is using a sawed-off shotgun where the EU commission is using a scalpel.
> If the EU had a real problem with addictive designs and social media the time to move against it was of course 10+ years ago.
Addictive designs and social media have changed a lot in the last 10 years, for one. But more importantly, there's no statute of limitation on making laws.
You are in all likelihood correct, it's the more realpolitik reading of it. One other more charitable interpretation would be that the EU was under the US's thumb so they never took action, but now that there is some more separation, they are willing to act against these design patterns. It's probably some combination of both elements, weighting each according to how cynical you are, and high cynicism is justified.
> Like the Banking regulations, the DMA, the GPDR, the AI act, this law cannot be used by individuals to achieve their rights against companies
Of course the GDPR gives individuals rights, counter example:
> The first application of the GPDR was to remove links about Barrosso's personal history from Google.
The GDPR is a joke. Such a law should have prevented companies from collecting data in the first place. All we got are annoying pop-ups that do nothing for our privacy.
Is it really so hard for you people to imagine that MAYBE, there's politicians that see what social media look like these days and think they might want to do something against that?
The fact that all of these companies aren't European certainly doesn't help, but if you think this and GDPR, DMA etc. are purely schemes to milk foreign companies then you've been drinking way too much cynicism juice.
> These laws can only be used by the EU commission against specific companies.
In the UK at least, the GDPR was incorporated into UK law (where it remains, essentially unmodified, even after Brexit). So it is certainly not necessary to get the EU commission involved to enforce the law. In the UK, the ICO is the relevant regulator. There are other national regulators that enforce the GDPR, such as the French CNIL.
One of the best replies on hackernews in years. Hear. Hear.
The EU realized they can extort the US big tech. The EU will now just focus on laws and taxing (the war in Ukraine isn't their problem). And frankly, we should just ignore EU laws in the US.
Companies that exist in the US don't have to obey EU laws. For instance the UK tried to tell 4chan that it needs to obey the UK Online Safety Act, and 4chan replied with, essentially, "fuck off".
Companies that try to do business in the EU have to follow EU laws because the EU has something that can be used as leverage to make them comply. But if a US company doesn't have any EU presence, there's no need to obey EU laws.
And the rest of the world should ignore US laws. Drug law, copyright law and of course, patent law. Let's throw it all in the bin, where it belongs.
> They do not intend, not even remotely, to sabotage the profit machines that those companies are
I think you are projecting values on entities that don't share those values. I don't think they'd have any problem destroying a pile of companies and not enabling replacements; they are not pro-business, and they have not shown a history of regulating in a fashion that's particularly designed to enable home-grown EU businesses. Predictability and consistency of enforcement are not their values, either. They don't seem to have any problem saying "act in what we think the spirit of the law is, and if you think you can just understand and follow the letter of it we'll hurt you until you stop".
"The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes"."
s/Wikit/Wikt
I hope this goes through. Trillion dollar companies are waging a war on our attention, using everything at their disposal to make these apps addictive. It isn't a fair fight and the existence of infinite feeds is bad both for people and democracy. Regulating consumer products that cause harm to millions is nothing new.
As a person working at social media I support this as well. I'm a hypocrite. I admit, but the pay is too good to find alternative.
Terms like "DAU" or "engagement" is common in our field and the primary objective is how to make users spend more time on our platform. We don't take safety or mental health seriously internally but only externally for PR reasons.
CEOs won't change that because the more time user spends on the platform, the more ad revenue it brings.
Only way is to regulate it.
I do so too. Dark patterns should never be acceptable.
The amount of paid shills opposing this is a good indicator that it's the right move.
> Trillion dollar companies are waging a war on our attention, using everything at their disposal to make these apps addictive.
Or you could just shut the phone off and/or not install the app. It's a simple solution, really, and one that is available at your disposal today at no cost.
Just stop using heroin. Just stop eating fast food. Just stop going to the casino. Just don't smoke anymore.
We know plenty of things are quite bad for us, and yet we find them difficult to stop. Somewhat famously difficult to stop.
I think telling people, "just don't..." trivializes how difficult that is.
It's a phone. Put it in the trash. You will not go through physiological withdrawal symptoms.
The amount of people in here right now clamoring for legislation to keep them away from electronics which they themselves purchased is mind-bogglingly insane.
Oooooof. Can I recommend you spend some time developing some empathy?
The world is complicated. People's lives are complicated (and often meditated by their phones). People's emotional and social wellbeing is complicated, and simply ghosting all your social groups on a random Tuesday is likely to cause significant problems.
It's already annoying to buy drugs just because some % of people get too addicted. Now you also want to forbid doomscrolling?
Yes. To be clear, the implication of this comment is that you would like to deregulate addictive drugs...?
If ~20% of users get an addiction problem I think its not that clear it should be forbidden for everyone.
If basically everyone who takes it for a while gets addicted and dies of course it should be forbidden.
So I would argue that cigaretts should not be allowed but we could discuss cocaine.
I think it's really bigger than that. I'm hooked myself scrolling reels, but I go to the pub after work and see retired or 50-70 year old men (barely know how to work a phone) scrolling through them as well. That's when you know they're addicting as anything. Can't go anywhere nowadays in public without hearing someone scrolling through reels who don't know how to behave themselves in public by turning down the volume or wearing earphones.
If it's so easy to do this, then it should also be easy to not make addictive apps right? Why are multi billion dollar companies unable to make a compliant app? They clearly have no issues paying for labor and since this is software, the labor is the true cost for compliance. Are they unable to hire devs that are unethical or what?
Shesh, maybe we should start fining individual developers too if companies aren't able to do it themselves.
And what about the increasing number of things in society that basically demand you have a phone to participate?
This is unrealistic.
It's unrealistic to not install TikTok?
Laws are not created to be malleable about the population's trivial mental illnesses.
We don't need new laws on the books because some people are incapable of turning their phones off. They have addictive personalities and will fulfill this by other means, while everyone high-fives claiming success.
For many people, it is unrealistic to uninstall Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Instagram, Bluesky, whatever the fuck else all at the same time.
I'm proud of you that you are as disconnected as you are. I'm the same -- ditched my addictive social media accounts back in like 2011 -- but not everyone is like us.
> but not everyone is like us
There will never be anything close to uniformity, so we must decide if we cripple freedom to protect the weak while increasing bureaucracy and authoritarianism, or allow natural selection to take its course while improving treatment of symptoms.
I'm empathetic to the struggle of addiction, which is a real and terrible thing, but I don't think we should create vague nanny laws as a solution. Even if you're an addict, personal responsibility is still a thing.
> allow natural selection to take its course while improving treatment of symptoms.
I have a feeling natural selection will take its course at the level of nations, with nations that do protect their weak surviving and the ones that let profit extractors exploit and abuse theirs dying off.
Darwinism exists at the level of nations, but I think you may have the outcome exactly backwards.
>cripple freedom to protect the weak
This is an exaggeration intended to provoke.
>allow natural selection to take its course
This is hideous.
>I'm empathetic to the struggle of addiction
You are very strongly implying that this is untrue.
> This is an exaggeration intended to provoke.
No, I consider adding laws that ban a simple navigation technique as overreach and a reduction in freedom. To me it feels like banning candy bars because some people eat way too many candy bars. My intention wasn't to provoke, and you shouldn't make statements based off assumptions of someone else's thoughts. My intention is to point out that there's no one-size-fits-all solution, and that there are negatives associated with the top-down legal approach. I want to promote personal and societal responsibility instead of banning every harmful thing.
> This is hideous.
Yes, humans and life in general are filled with terrible things. Doom scrolling was created by us. We allow irresponsible and uncoordinated people to drive cars.
> You are very strongly implying that this is untrue.
So I'm lying because I don't think banning scrolling is the best solution? And you say I'm the one provoking... Have a nice day.
> we must decide if we cripple freedom to protect the weak
Well, we do want to protect the weak (that's a function of society, after all), and I'm totally okay with removing infinite scrolling from social media apps (or "crippling freedom" as you put it). I don't see any significant benefit it provides to individuals or society. Indeed, it has a negative impact on both. So it sounds like a win/win.
It's not that infinite scrolling is good, I'm just not a fan of the legal solution because it sets precedent and is yet another law. I'm not an anarchist, I think some laws are needed, but I want society to be more engaged and responsible for our collective future, not helpless and dependent on laws and government to save us from ourselves.
Don't put words in my mouth. I called your comment unrealistic, holistically.
> It's a phone. Put it in the trash.
Dude, it's 2025.
A few years ago, I accidentally left my phone at home when I went to work, and when I arrived I found that because I no longer had my 2FA device, I couldn't do any work until I went home again and picked it up.
I'm fine without doomscrolling. I've gone from the minimum possible service with internet, to pure PAYG with no internet, and I'm fine with that. But society has moved on, and for a lot of people, phones are no longer an option.
And for a meaningful fraction of people, somehow, I don't get it either, TikTok is the news. Not metaphorically, it's actually where they get news from.
> Dude, it's 2025.
Actually, it's 2026 and has been for six weeks.
> A few years ago, I accidentally left my phone at home when I went to work, and when I arrived I found that because I no longer had my 2FA device, I couldn't do any work until I went home again and picked it up.
Sounds like a personal problem. There are many other 2FA authenticators available. Yubikey, TOTP tokens, smart cards, etc. Using a smartphone (which can lose power at any time) for critical authentication was a silly idea to begin with. I would refuse anything work-related on my personal phone.
> Actually, it's 2026 and has been for six weeks.
D'oh. But fair.
> There are many other 2FA authenticators available.
Specified by job, so no choice in this matter.
> I would refuse anything work-related on my personal phone.
Quite reasonable as a general rule, though my then-employer only required the 2FA app and nothing else, and in this case it would've just meant "get an additional phone".
We were literally not given the choice in the matter, in the case of $JOB. Plenty of people complained about having to use their phones to access the buildings, but that was the policy.
I suspect the next thing you're going to say is along the lines of "then just switch jobs", though.
> I suspect the next thing you're going to say is along the lines of "then just switch jobs", though.
I mean even that might not work out. We just switched to MS Teams last year and Microsoft uses a push-based app, not TOTP or other offline keys like we'd used before. And Teams just seems to be getting more popular...
Microsoft can actually use TOTP, Push, or offline keys.
Which of them are available depends on what your company has configured.
If the push version is configured, it's possible it has also installed an MDM profile on your device. Avoid that, or your phone will get wiped when you leave the company in the future.
> I would refuse anything work-related on my personal phone.
What a wonderful privileged position you hold. If only everyone could afford to tell their employer to pound sand in the same heroic manner you have undertaken.
So brave.
Join a union. That's what they are for.
The brain is part of your physiology. And people do go through withdrawal symptoms when they stop using social media that’s been designed for addiction.
Engineering addiction should be a punishable offense. It already is if you’re a chemist.
"If you're homeless, just buy a house" ahh statement
"Just" is the all time champion weight lifter of the English language.
You could say that about literally every single type of addictive behavior present on the face of the planet. You could just stop smoking and/or not buying cigarettes. You could just stop drinking and/or stop buying alcohol. It's a completely pointless observation. There's a reason why these are addictions.
Drug stores should stock morphine available without age restriction and if you don't want it, just don't buy it.
People start using these apps and sites to stay in touch with friends and with current events — and those things are real needs. People should not be exploited for them.
The whole point is that these companies are spending a lot of cash making sure that their products are as addicting as possible to as many people as possible, so "just" shutting the phone off isn't a viable strategy.
It's as idiotic a statement as saying "Just stop smoking" around the time when big tobacco was lobbying politicians and bribing scientists and doctors to straight up lie about the deleterious effects of tobacco. It's engineered in such a way as to make it basically impossible for a large swathe of the population to "just not use" the apps.
Or the people can decide how their society functions.
This learned (or lobbied) helplessness of never changing any laws and we are just stuck with this way of life is silly.
Honestly, at this point, just ** OFF to all the useful idiots that just relentlessly block any possible solution to the overbearing power of social media companies with this crooked vision of individual responsibility.
They are trying to block a harmless mechanism, that has proven to be addictive, and that companies have willfully exploited for this very reason, proceeding to wreak havoc to various facets of society while concentrating never before seen levels of wealth in the process.
Wealth that in many case makes them more powerful than the government that should regulate them, which in many cases drank the kool-aid of self-policing these companies have gleefully distributed and lobbied for for years. So, enough with this fine principled arguments about slippery slope that don't exist. What is your comment good for, if not for maintaining a status quo that makes these companies even reacher at the expense of everyone?
It's interesting how there may be an implicit assumption that imposing more rules on tech will lead to positive outcomes. From my perspective, technology is like reality itself: very difficult to control, with countless ways to achieve the desired result while circumventing the rules. And what's the actual result? Just look at the market capitalization of European companies compared to US companies... Or maybe it just feels good to add new rules and engage in virtue-signaling contests. Or maybe it's just a way to make everything illegal—'find me the person, and I'll find you the crime' type of control. Maybe a combination of all those. Who knows? From my experience, the farther you get from the influence of bureaucrats, the happier life becomes...
> Just look at the market capitalization of European companies compared to US companies...
Counterexample: just look at the state of EU tech companies compared to Chinese tech companies.
I’m not saying China is an attractive example, but chalking up Europe’s tech issues to a regulation problem fails to address europe’s digital woes.
> And what's the actual result? Just look at the market capitalization of European companies compared to US companies..
Europe is actually doing quite well at the moment. The European stock markets have over-performed quite decently vs. the US ever since Trump became president, despite the various curveballs thrown at Europe in recent years. Market capitalisation in the US is held up primarily by the Magnificent 7 who are great outliers in the American stock market.
Aren't you happy that when you buy food, it doesn't contain cocaine? Regulations are totally necessary and addictive online social media is a well documented plague in our youths especially.
This very US lobbyists narrative that Europe regulate while missing out on the economy is used and abused anytime something look like contrary to US interests in MAGA land.
Given how badly scrolling has cooked the brain of the average American, seems like a smart thing for the EU to ban.
And based on some of the replies in this thread we better act fast before it's too late.
This comes from the same EU that's wholeheartedly embracing gambling across their member states, gambling mind you that children can just as easily jump into with their phones and some will, but devastating for grown-ups just as much.
They're not alone in this by any means, America has also opened their doors for all forms of gambling like Kalshi which now even sponsors news networks of all things.
The EU has this disconnect with the things they push, which makes sense considering their size and the speed at which it moves. One example that comes to mind is how they're both pushing for more privacy online while also pushing for things such as chat control which is antithetical to privacy.
Does social media need regulating? Yeah. Is infinite scrolling where they should be focusing? Probably not, there's more important aspects that should be tackled and are seemingly ignored.
Every member state has its own laws for it, and AFAIK all of them now regulate (or ban) online gambling more or less.
There were many startups here in Sweden in the early '00s, and I believe they had taken advantage of a legal loophole which has since been plugged. Regulation has tightened. Players have to be 18 y/o, use digital ID and not be registered as a gambling addict. But I still find the industry to be depraved, to be honest.
In Spain I can’t even have a meal at a restaurant, get groceries or go to IKEA without someone trying to sell me lottery tickets. They really need to regulate that.
Is your country allowed to ban it even if the EU in general allows it?
Allowing something isn't the same as enforcing it to be allowed. If there's regulation, like with ending roaming charges between countries, then it's required to be followed simultaneously across the EU. If there's a directive, like the Working Time Directive, goals of legislation are set out and each member state is required to introduce legislation that implements it. There's also decisions (for one country for one issue), recommendations and opinions (obviously non binding).
There's also the Court of Justice which is the highest court, but only in EU matters. National courts can refer cases to it, or the commission/member states can bring cases against other member states, if they believe they are not following EU law. This would mean either they are not following a regulation, or that the state has not fully/correctly implemented a directive into their own national laws.
As I understand it, there's no specific regulation or directive aimed at gambling itself. There's things tangentially related (data protection, anti money laundering etc). But since there's no regulation or directive saying "gambling must be allowed", there's nothing stopping a member state banning it completely if they so wish.
The only point in which the EU might step in would be if the law was somehow discriminatory or inconsistent (e.g. we ban all foreign gambling sites, but not our own, we ban lottery tickets but not state run casinos, etc).
Germany has regulated it, (though states have slightly different regulations, some states even allowing online gambling, some banning all except the government run lottery).
So it should be possible to regulate it.
Thanks. I’m not an EU citizen so I don’t know when EU level laws override member states or not.
I move that they should kill infinite regulation.
What is next? Sex? Sex is addictive we should put a limit, ban after 33. How about chess? Running? Partying?
Making heroes out of social media users was not something expected in my lifetime. Imagine facebook users bragging how they managed to jailbreak their locked down feeds. That's a comical future
They should move to kill the cookie popup
You don't have to have a cookie popup if you don't do stupid stuff. Don't use anything other than strictly necessary cookies and you are good to go.
Disclaimer: I anal and this is not legal advice.
Having worked at multiple companies and talked to multiple legal teams about this, they tend to be very conservative. So the guidance I've gotten is that if we store any information at all on the person's computer, even to know whether they've visited the site before, we still need a cookie banner.
Basically, the law created enough fear among the lawyers that software developers are being advised to include the cookie banner in cases where it isn't strictly needed.
But it should not be obnoxious, look at steam how is a small banner with two simple actions, vs all other cookie banners.
Agreed! Many sites don't actually comply with the GDPR because they don't provide simple tools to control the cookies and instead force you through a flow. Part of my gripe with the law is the way those violations are not being systematically cited.
You literally just described something obnoxious
If I see a cookie banner I often bounce.
You'd have much better retention rates if you don't cover up the content the viewer is trying to view.
How would you like it if I shoved a banner in your face the moment you walked into a store and forced you to punch a hole in it in order to view items on the shelves?
There is a push for something like that: https://www.adweek.com/commerce/cooler-screens-rolls-out-to-...
So? You're not arguing that we should get rid of 'reasonable' laws out of misinterpretations of them, are you?
Laws should be evaluated on the effect they actually have on society, rather than the effect that we wish they had on society. I am very critical of laws that fail this test, and I think they should be updated to improve their performance. We want the right outcome, not the right rules.
If the law is stupid, don't follow it. Simply as
I'm willing to argue that, sure (though it's purely a hypothetical point as I'm not a citizen of the EU and thus I don't and shouldn't have a voice in the laws there). I don't judge a law by a deontological measure of worth, but rather by whether it seems to be making things better or worse. The GDPR has overwhelmingly made my experience browsing the web worse, not better. Whether it should have resulted in that is beside the point: it has resulted in that, so that is what I judge it by. Therefore, I think it makes sense to get rid of the law as it seems that it is making things worse for people, not better.
> even to know whether they've visited the site before
So uh, don't do that.
You don't need to notify if you use cookies for required functionality like login sessions or remembering a functional setting.
If you're tracking whether they're returning or not your activity is exactly the kind of behaviour the rule is covering because, in legal terms, it's skeezy as fuck.
It's a site where they log in and we store a cookie.
"Strictly necessary cookies — These cookies are essential for you to browse the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the site. Cookies that allow web shops to hold your items in your cart while you are shopping online are an example of strictly necessary cookies. These cookies will generally be first-party session cookies. While it is not required to obtain consent for these cookies, what they do and why they are necessary should be explained to the user."
https://gdpr.eu/cookies/
Right, and then the legal teams tell me they don't care, and we should put up the cookie banner anyway. I feel like you didn't read my original comment.
That just means your legal team is lazy or incompetent. I work for a massive company that handles extremely sensitive PII and we don't have a cookie banner, because we don't need to have a cookie banner. GitHub doesn't have one, Gitlab doesn't have one.
I've built software used by EU governments, and we don't use a cookie banner for our login cookies either.
If your legal team genuinely suggests that, it's likely your company uses the login cookies for some additional purposes.
> You don't need to notify if you use cookies for required functionality like login sessions or remembering a functional setting
Nobody wants to be the EU test case on precisely how "required functionality" is defined. Regardless of what the plaintext of the law says, it should be self-evident that companies will be more conservative than that, especially when the cost is as low as adding one cooke banner and tracking one preference.
Yep. GitHub wrote a blog post on removing their cookie banner years ago.
https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/no-cookie-for...
>At GitHub, we want to protect developer privacy, and we find cookie banners quite irritating, so we decided to look for a solution. After a brief search, we found one: just don’t use any non-essential cookies. Pretty simple, really.
Go to that link, these are the cookies it writes (at least for me):
Some are from github.blog, some are from the cloudflare.com hosting. Not sure how the laws apply to that. But obviously there's several analytics cookies.Sounds like the marketing team finally won.
I get a cookie banner accessing that page.
You need to wait for a meta-blog about removing banners from the blog
Don't several of the EU's own government information websites use cookie popups?
Yes; but usually it's because they embed videos from YouTube or other external sources that force cookies to be set.
if you don't track users you don't need GDPR consent dialogs
I think in the past you still needed some info box in the corner with a link to the data policy. But I think that isn't needed anymore (to be clear not a consent dialog, a informational only thing). Also you can without additional consent store a same site/domain cookie remembering you dismissing or clicking on it and not showing it again (btw. same for opting out of being tracked).
But there are some old pre-GDPR laws in some countries (not EU wide AFIK) which do require actual cookie banners (in difference to GDPR consent dialogs or informational things). EU want them removed, but politic moves slow AF so not sure what the sate of this is.
So yes without checking if all the older misguided laws have been dismissed, you probably should have a small banner at the bottom telling people "we don't track you but for ... reasons .. [link] [ok]" even if you don't track people :(. But also if they haven't gotten dismissed they should be dismissed very soon.
Still such a banner is non obnoxious, little annoying (on PC, Tablet, a bit more annoying on Phone). And isn't that harass people to allow you to spy on them nonsense we have everywhere.
It is up to the websites to do that, and to the users to boycott those websites showing cookie popups.
The regulatory body could clarify that a DO NOT TRACK header should be interpreted as a "functional/necessary cookies only" request, so sites may not interrupt visitors with a popup modal/banner if it's set.
The do not track header was good enough in this German case: https://dig.watch/updates/german-court-affirms-legal-signifi...
Having the EU decide on a technical implementation is more of a last ditch effort, like what happened with more than a decade of the EU telling the industry to get its shit together and unify under a common charging port.
I like the cookie banners since it is an immediate indication to me that I should leave the site. It's an innate reflex at this point.
Just so long as that means killing all the tracking, not just going back to hiding it.
ahhhh, every time the same discussion
1. GDPR consent dialogs are not cookie popups, most things you see are GDPR consent dialogs
2. GDPR consent dialogs are only required if you share data, i.e. spy on the user
3. GDPR had from the get to go a bunch of exceptions, e.g. you don't need permission to store a same site cookie indicating that you opted out of tracking _iff_ you don't use it for tracking. Same for a lot of other things where the data is needed for operation as long as the data is only used with that thing and not given away. (E.g. DDOS protection, bot detection, etc.)
4. You still had to inform the user but this doesn't need any user interacting, accepting anything nor does it need to be a popup blocking the view. A small information in the corner of the screen with a link to the data policy is good enough. But only if all what you do falls under 3. or non personal information. Furthermore I think they recently have updated it to not even require that, just having a privacy policy in a well know place is good enough but I have to double check. (And to be clear this is for data you don't need permission to collect, but like any data you collect it's strictly use case bound and you still have to list how its used, how long stored etc. even if you don't need permissions). Also to be clear if you accept the base premise of GDPR it's pretty intuitive to judge if it's an exception or not.
5. in some countries, there are highly misguided "cookie popup" laws predating GDPR (they are actually about cookies, not data collection in general). This are national laws and such the EU would prefer to have removed. Work on it is in process but takes way to long. I'm also not fully sure about the sate of that. So in that context, yes they should and want to kill "cookie popups". That just doesn't mean what most people think it does (as it has nothing to do with GDPR).
you can simply choose not to use it
Kill cookie pop up dark patterns*
But that would require directing the anger at specific companies (and their 2137 ad partners) rather than at an easy target of the banana-regulating evil authority.
Sadly whenever this kind of discussion pops up it's usually a very unpopular take.
Simply banning most forms of advertising would be extremely welcome and might largely solve the cookie-popup issue, too.
Note that, back when it started (pre-GDPR cookie banners), this was pure malicious compliance in 90% of cases.
Most sites didn't need a banner. Even post-GDPR, many use-cases don't need one.
and then the inventor should go to prison along with the guys who design the UI of microwave ovens (joke)
Well then where would be the incentive to download apps/not clear your cookies...? :-)
The EU's mission statement seems to be to make the internet as difficult to legally utilize as possible.
I'm interested to see what measures people will use to get around the increasingly bizarre restrictions. Perhaps an official browser extension for each platform that reimplements bureaucrat-banned features?
Even c0rnhub doesn't have infinite scrolling. It knows to stop after the first 10-20 thumbs.... according to my friend.
I’m mixed on this. I do at times waste a lot of time doom scrolling, and would like regulation to prevent me from doing so. But also some times you just want to doomscroll to escape your day to day life. Do we want this decision to be made by the govt?
I guess we don’t let people have hard drugs even if sometimes they just need to escape their painful life. And maybe this could fall under that logic. But we do let people drink themselves, which serves the same purpose. And if I had to choose, I think doomscrolling is more at the level of Drinking, and less at the level of Heroin. So I would actually be fine with an age limit for doomscrolling after which, you have a hands off approach.
That sounds reasonable
This sounds like a type of insanity. Why would anyone care about something like this to the degree they feel like expressing the opinion publicly let alone in a political regulatory body is beyond me.
Whatever happened to freedom?
Maybe you're not the type of person who's struggled with addiction, but it can do awful things to you. Yes, including being addicted to scrolling social media. It screws with your head to the point where you don't know how to live in the moment anymore.
IMO it's a feature that's not valuable enough to justify the fact that it contributes to poor quality of life for people who can't put it down.
What will stop the addicts from just installing a modified build? Will distributors of modified builds be subject to jail sentences like drug dealers? What about authors of auto-paginate scripts like Reddit Enhancement Suite, or the various HN client apps?
The first step to get on track in life is to stop blaming the outside for all problems. Yes some people had really bad luck but in the end you can only change yourself.
I suspect there's not a huge amount of overlap between those who would like this banned and those who are targeted by it.
Would you ban alcohol and video games and Netflix?
Alcohol would have been definitely banned if it was feasible
> Why would anyone care about something like this ...
Because it is a dangerous addiction [1] with recognised adverse effects on human health. Like sugar, tobacco, or drugs.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46959832
While I agree it's not a net positive, I find it dangerous to equate all addictions.
He’s not equating all addictions beyond saying they are all addictions and should be treated as such.
But that's the problem - different substances require different solutions.
You reduce sugar intake, not eliminate it.
You eliminate cocaine intake, not just reduce it.
Treating social media design as equal to something that can kill people in excess unnerves me.
> Treating social media design as equal to something that can kill people in excess unnerves me.
As it should, because there's a really obvious "slippery slope" argument right there.
But… it can kill people.
There is a certain fraction of the population who, for whatever reason, can be manipulated, to the point of becoming killers or of causing injury to themselves. Social media… actually, worse than that, all A/B testing everywhere, can stumble upon this even when it isn't trying to (I would like to believe that OpenAI's experience with 4o-induced psychosis was unintentional).
When we know which tools can be used for manipulation, it's bad to keep allowing it to run unchecked. Unchecked, they are the tool of propagandists.
But… I see that slippery slope, I know that any government which successfully argues itself the power to regulate this, even for good, is one bad election away from a dictatorship that will abuse the same reasoning and powers to evil ends.
There's literally a name for using this on purpose: stochastic terrorism.
There's also a very good TED talk on this topic from 8 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFTWM7HV2UI
It looks to me like you're adding the conflation to "all addictions" because you can clearly distinguish between "sugar" and "cocaine" as both forms of addictions.
Why would you not be willing to include "scrolling" as another form of addiction? Just because it's labeled the same way you yourself are demonstrating that we handle that in different ways.
Social Media is being treated as "sugar" in this instance instead of as "cocaine".
Lets do the nanny state!
(As I get older, unironically. I want my productive worker bees to be drug free, addiction free, enjoying simple pleasures that do not put me at risk. They pay Social Security. Everything is nice and safe. Freedom? Yeah no thanks, get to work and pay your taxes.)
The thing is, why do you care? We like it this way. These companies are a cancer and they should be erradicated.
You think that attacking these horrible companies is bad for our freedoms, we think our freedoms are fine with it.
I mean, lets do the opposite where a large corporation gets people intentionally addicted to drugs and then bilks them for every penny they have until they are husks. Remember, free market comes first!
Thank you from talking about the Holy Freedom, my brother. Looking forward to enjoying further freedoms thanks to laws that protect me from behavior that makes me unfree and in need to constantly control me and my surroundings!
> Whatever happened to freedom?
Freedom from, or freedom to?
>Why would anyone care about something like this to the degree they feel like expressing the opinion publicly
Why would anyone publicly express any negative opinion about the effects of doomscrolling? I don't think I'm uncharitably paraphrasing, right?
Because it impacts me, and I don't want it to impact me anymore?
Not because I use these products, but because I have to live in a society with these people, and if they are unhappy and angry, that impacts me directly, through various second-order effects.
Nothing happened, just that the bureaucrats are slowly catching up with new technologies to make them as free as everything else
Social Media companies have actively and intentionally tried to make their products more addicting... now they have to face the very obvious consequences of that decision.
We live in a society. We chose rules that we think will make society better. Freedom is meaningless without context. Freedom to doomscroll or freedom from doomscrolling. American propaganda really likes to divorce the concept from reality.
People have less free will than we'd like to admit. I'd like to have freedom from outdoor advertising and online monopolies shoving short video formats down my throat.
Out of curiosity, do you or have you ever worked for one of the FAANGs?
We have great freedoms in Europe. We just need to apply in advance with our detailed plan, in three copies and the Commission will decide whether to deny our application or to deny it and fine us for unhealthy thoughts, too.
Sarcasm now, but maybe what the near future will look like...
More to the point: this is indeed a massive overreach with the Commission being the police, judge, jury, and executioner... what could go wrong? Exactly what we are seeing is taking shape, precedent by precedent.
Why would someone care about a destructive addiction that's plaguing the lives of the majority of the planet, leading to mental health issues and proliferating massive levels of misinformation. I wonder. Freedom to be manipulated by algorithms, yay!
it turns out that all those jokes about EU regulating the curvature of the cucumber were on to something
>Whatever happened to freedom?
Turns out it was a big lie you've told yourself so you can let the rich and powerful get away with atrocities.
Hey, we all have free speech, it's just that I can buy a whole lot more of it than you can.
I wish they would go after the fake spinning wheel discount pattern and the "app exclusive" or "better in the app" pattern. That's all a way to get people to install apps that will then bombard folks with notifications or slurp data off the device.
The hunt has started: EU burocracy vs TK. In the past EU has rarely directly attacked a single company with so specific points. But anytime they remained consistent and dedicaded to their target and usually won. It just took a long time (from a few years till decades). The only time they lost a policy was at stopping summer-time switch which was cancelled when Covid started.
They avoid to mention the rest of social media platforms, which happen to be US based. It seems they choose a single quick and easy China-based target more like an experiment to decide for the rest. The key point is when: either the current kids will experience it or those that are not yet born.
Forcing designs on companies... wtf is going on here
So, like https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/07/12/2021-14... ?
Companies are part of society and we have a rule-based society.
Imagine a society that had rules on the designs of haircuts, and punishments to enforce those rules.
Except people aren’t addicted to haircuts and presumably don’t spend 8 hours a day staring at their hair in the mirror.
I should be able to stare at my phone 8 hours a day without government interference if I want to. No one is holding me at gunpoint. It's my phone and it doesn't hurt anyone else.
Nobody is holding you or other addicts at gunpoint to stop that, so what are you complaining about?
This is pretty normal? I work for a company that develops lab machines and we have a bunch of designs we have to follow:
ISO 12100 (Safety of Machinery): Sets general, fundamental principles for design, risk assessment, and reduction (Type A standard).
ISO 13849-1 (Safety-Related Parts of Control Systems): Defines performance levels and categories for safety-related components (Type B standard).
ISO 13850 Safety of machinery – Emergency stop function – Principles for design
And that's just some of them.
I mean, clearly the companies at the top can't be trusted to do what's in the best interests of the users. So at some point someone has to do something. If this is the correct something that remains to be seen.
is this your first year on the internet?
Facinating that they landed on infinite scrolling as the problem to spend time and energy on instead of all the other things happening online that have an impact on society.
Genuinely curious about the actual data on this.
Does anyone have a link to a reputable, sizable study?
I see some synergy between this and the "iOS keyboard sucks" thread. Maybe they can regulate that next.
I'm curious how they plan to pretend to enforce this. Will you need a loisence to implement infinite scroll?
How many days before the only legal social media in the EU is the official government run platform?
The implication that the scrolling mechanic itself is causal in the harm feels like a bit of a leap to me.
Next: Gaming company sued because a game is fun to play.
Looks like the EU can just get a feature flag to use pagination or a "Load More" button? Doesn't seem as big of a deal as enforcing USB-C.
Though if it applies to the YouTube, seems annoying when trying to find a video to watch. I usually trigger a few infinite scrolling loads to look for videos.
And I assume they'd have to specify a maximum number of items per page, or else devs could just load a huge number of items up front which would technically not be infinite scrolling but enough content to keep someone occupied for a long time.
Its addictive design in general, but only for Tik-tok. If it works and is applied to others it will be the best thing the EU has ever done.
Early on in the internet age it somewhat bothered me that every page on the www either acts like it is the first thing one reads on a topic or assumes great knowledge of the subject. With nothing in between.
Wondering about a technical solution I couldn't find anything besides fold out explanations and links to explain jargon. Neither would really bridge the gap.
One obvious theory was to keep track of what the user knows and hide things they don't need or unhide things they do. This is of course was not acceptable from a privacy perspective.
Today however you could forge a curriculum for countless topics and [artificially] promote a great diversity of entry level videos. If the user is into something they can be made to watch more entry level videos until they are ready for slightly more advanced things. You can reward creators for filling gaps between novice and expert level regardless of view count.
Almost like Khan academy but much slower, more playful and less linear.
Imagine programming videos that assume the reader knows everything about each and every tool involved. The algorithm could seek out the missing parts and feed them directly into your addiction or put bounties on the scope.
What if we implement something like "pay per scroll"?
This was long overdue. I hope killing other dark patterns that feast on attention or hunt on flaws in human psychology follow. However, my only concern is how this will be taken care of. I hope they learned something from the GDPR fiasco.
Good. Infinite scrolling is a scourge. Give me back my time ordered feed that if I navigate away stays on the page where I left off.
What does ranking vs. chronological having to do with infinite scrolling?
You can have a ranked paginated UI. You can also have an "infinite" (until you run out of items, but this is not different for ranked) chronological UI.
Moving away from chronological allows them to feed you more addicting content, as does the infinite feed. They involved together because they work together synergistically.
It’s of no value to point out both can technically be implemented independently. That isn’t what happened, and even if it did it would still be user hostile.
I still don't understand. If TikTok simply showed the user every single TikTok ever created, strictly in reverse chronological order, it would still be an infinite scrolling UI.
The sorting algorithm that they choose isn't what makes a UI infinite scrolling or not, they're completely orthogonal. In MVC architecture terms they're model and view respectively...
I admire the EU's attempts at things like the cookie law, age verification, and tackling the addictiveness of infinite scrolling, but the implementation is pure theater.
Trackers have much more effective techniques than "cookies", kids trivially bypass verification, and designers will make a joke of tell me you have infinite scrolling without telling me you have infinite scrolling. When you are facing trillions of dollars of competition to your law, what do you think is going to happen?
Maybe if there was an independent commission that had the authority to rapidly investigate and punish (i.e. within weeks) big tech for attempting engagement engineering practices it might actually have some effect. But trying to mandate end user interfaces is wasting everyone's time putting lipstick on a pig.
Dunno about using legislative moves, but yes please. The stupidest solution to a problem no one had. Moving layouts, unreachable footers, no or unsatisfactory indication of one's position.
All just to remove navigation clicks no one minded and reduce server loads, in exchange for users suffering laggy lazy loading (or, what a hate-inducing pattern!) inability to preload, print, search or link.
Here here. Nothing is infinite except for God, I say.
> We value your privacy
> We use cookies and other technologies to store and access personal data on your device
Evidently you don't value privacy.
As long as this doesn't create yet another cookie popup UX nonsense we've ended up with...
Infinite scrolling combined with the algorithmic feed is the real nasty.
Feeds should be heavily regulated, effectively they are a (personalized!) broadcast, and maybe the same strictures should apply. Definitely they should be transparent (e.g. chronological from subscribed topics), and things like veering more extreme in order to drive engagement should be outlawed.
Would it affect HackerNews? The list of topics on the main page is a form of infinite scroll.
No it's not? It's paged.
From another article:
>"Social media app TikTok has been accused of purposefully designing its app to be “addictive” by the European Commission, citing its infinite scroll, autoplay, push notification, and recommendation features."
All of these have immediate and easy replacements or workarounds. Nothing will substantially change (for the better; maybe it does for the worse, even).
Moreover, "purposefully designing something to be addictive" (and cheap to make) is the fundamental basis of late stage capitalism.
Oh, no, this will kill all slop innovation!
I don't know how the EU has time for this kind of thing right now. Honestly
Yes they should be banning the political propaganda instead.
another cookie warning disaster incoming
hopefully AI will wake them up and save us from all this nonsense
Technically this is about Tiktok's "addictive design", and their examples include "infinite scroll over time". It's totally unclear what they mean by that, or what Tiktok would have to change it to in order to be in compliance. The whole thing seems like it was written by a boomer bureaucrat who has never used Tiktok, let alone a computer.
Jesus the EU is becoming a dystopian nightmare.
What exactly is dystopian about protecting developing minds of children and teens from detrimental effects and social media addiction caused by companies like Meta and Bytedance. These companies profit immensely from being quasi unregulated.
Where are you suggest we move to escape this dystopian nightmare?
To Muskland where corporations own everything including the infinite scroll feeds.
You can buy as much freedom as you want there.
Yeah exactly, right? Europe is the dystopian nightmare, sure.
How low do you have to sink to defend a legislature attacking the privacy of the sovereign again and again? Pathetic.
Von der Leyen, who illegally deleted her SMS and is being investigated for corruption, conflict of interest and destruction of evidence, must be glad she can count on you to defend spying on every citizen via "Chat Control" and forcing browser developers to accept any state-mandated root certificates via eIDAS.
Watch what governments do, not what they say.
This isn’t about addiction, it’s about censorship. If you limit the amount of time someone can spend getting information, and make it inconvenient with UI changes, it’s much harder to have embarrassing information spread to the masses.
Amazingly, the public will generally nod along anyway when they read governmental press releases and say “yes, yes, it’s for my safety.”
Scrolling through an infinity of AI slop videos can't really be classified as "getting information". If you want to read the news and stay up to date with the "embarrassing information" there's plenty of news websites out there.
I have a proud European coworker trying to get their H1B...
They talk about how great Europe is, how they like their 1-2 hour coffee/smoke breaks... These kind of moves give me that same vibe.
But why are so many Europeans trying to move to the US? Why isn't the opposite happening?
My hypothesis is that these kind of popular policies are short sighted. They are super popular, they use intuition and feeling. But maybe there is something missing. The unadulterated freedom has led people to enjoy these platforms. Obviously it affects the economy. So much so, even the US military has moved from Europe to Asia.
I don't typically like fiction, but it seems "I, Robot" was spot on about Europe. (Maybe mistaking new Africa for Asia)
They aren’t trying to move to the US? At least in western/Northern Europe.
Curious where you got your statistics?
If anything it’s probably the opposite, with more Americans wanting to move to Europe than the reverse.
Well, your freeeeedooooms include having to pay taxes when living outside of the US. I'd say that's a pretty big factor in deciding if it's worth it to leave the country.
Jobs in the EU don’t even pay enough to require paying taxes in the US lol. Nice try though.
Why are so many Americans trying to move to the EU? Turns out people have different wants and needs in life, and so they move to where they like best. I for one would never set foot in USA in fear of being shot, kidnapped by ICE (or shot by ICE), fear of being bankrupt by the healthcare options there if something happens to me, fear of the poison you call food, and the absolutely ignorant populace that seems to roam the streets there. I swear half the times I can't even tell if USA is a real place or some really bizarre reality TV show.
> But why are so many Europeans trying to move to the US? Why isn't the opposite happening?
Citation needed.
I took some minutes to try and find statistics, and also ChatGPT claims that the EU simply doesn't collect or publish that kind of data, so I'm wondering how you think you know.
> But why are so many Europeans trying to move to the US?
All I see in my circle is people refusing to even go on vacation in the US, let alone move there.
And in two of my circles there is concern about people who do live in the US but are not citizens. Both married US citizens, both have clean paperwork, but whereas normally it'd take considerable paranoia to expect any trouble today it seems entirely on brand. One of the US citizens is angry because of course her rural hospital is going bankrupt and she'll be left in the middle of nowhere with her foreign-born sick and gradually dying husband and somehow that's not even near the top of the agenda. The other is just keeping her head down, crossing fingers, maybe in all the excitement they won't get around to undoing Obergefell and she can stay married to the love of her life?
I do know people who've gone, only on vacation and they were exactly the sort of unthreatening rich white folks that you'd expect to have least trouble. Oh, and some US citizens who went "home" to see family at Xmas but work here.
Same here, to the point I would even avoid layovers in the US and take a more expensive flight instead. I don't want to deal with some power tripping immigration officer insisting to search my phone and social media to send me to some camp because I wrote critical comments about the current administration.
Irrational fear. So who do you think funds this propaganda? Russia or China?
Irrational fear in whose opinion?
I bet 100$ the good intention will outcome as a terrible joke, EU dumb bureaucrats are famous for.
Does this only apply to companies the commission doesn't like or will it apply to the hn app I use, my email clients, shopping sites, etc? Because it seems like the actual concern how good the algorithms are and not the UI.
This is a finding of a violation of the DSA, which only applies to services (not local reader apps), and only if they have a lot of users.
Like, a significant fraction of the country level of usage. You don't need to worry about the EU coming and taking away your HN client APK. You do need to be worried about Google doing that, though.