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New bill would ban autoplay videos and endless scrolling

169 points| moltensodium | 6 years ago |theverge.com

238 comments

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[+] rsweeney21|6 years ago|reply
I'm the dev that built Netflix's autoplay of the next episode. We built it first on the web player because it is easy to A/B test new features there. We called it "post-play" at the time.

When I worked there the product team at Netflix had two KPIs all new features were tested against: hours watched and retention. We would come up with all sorts of ideas to try out, and release them to small user populations of about 100,000 or so. It was great because you didn't have to debate much about whether a new feature was a good idea or not, you just built it and tested it. If the feature didn't increase hours watched or retention in a statistically significant way, the feature was removed.

Autoplay massively increased hours watched. I can't remember the exact numbers, but it was by far the biggest increase in the hours watched KPI of any feature we ever tested. There was some skepticism about whether the number was inflated by Netflix continuing to play when the user left the room.

As part of the autoplay test, we tested how long the countdown should be between episodes. 5 seconds, 10 seconds or 15 seconds. 10 seconds caused the biggest increase in hours watched. We thought that it gave people time to digest what they had just watched, but wasn't too fast (5 seconds) where it became jarring. Interestingly, Netflix recently changed the countdown between episodes to 5 seconds. That means they tested it out and found that people watch more if with a shorter countdown. This didn't use to be the case. Netflix user have become conditioned to expect autoplay.

So yes, Netflix wants you to spend more hours watching Netflix and the product team is scientifically engineering the product to make it more addictive.

But...the product team at Doritos does the same thing.

[+] GhostVII|6 years ago|reply
Things like requiring accept and decline checkboxes to be the same font seem somewhat reasonable, even if I disagree with it, but banning autoplay videos and endless scrolling is insane. There are legitimate uses for autoplay videos (ex. Netflix playing next episode, YouTube playing next song when you are listening to music) which I personally use all the time and appreciate, and endless scrolling is great when you don't need to refer back to previous results, and don't want to keep clicking "next". I think people should have the freedom to consume content how they want, the government shouldn't compensate for their lack of self control.
[+] zbrozek|6 years ago|reply
While I agree that it's hard to support legislation that's likely to have a lot of unintended consequences, it's also important to realize what's driving folks to introduce a bill like this. It's also worth pointing out that (in particular with Netflix) your example is its own counter-argument. You can't turn off autoplay, and that's the opposite of letting me make choices for myself.

There's also plenty of other examples of government regulating or banning things which exploit human weakness. Ponzi schemes, meth, gambling, and more are all controlled. It's pretty clear that a lot of tech-company design is (intentionally or not) probably scratching a lot of the same itches. It's reasonable to expect regulation.

[+] floatrock|6 years ago|reply
I was with you until

> the government shouldn't compensate for their lack of self control.

Quite frankly, I don't believe in complete self-autonomy. I think it's a great trait to strive towards, but the rise of behavioral psychology by itself shows that we can be poked, prodded, and nudged to do things that we otherwise wouldn't do, because "what we want to do" is a muddy non-singular fuzzy idea that can be tipped in whatever way the environment happens to be arranged or designed.

It's not about regulating people's lack of self-control, it's about acknowledging there are proven techniques that influence behavior and figuring out when those techniques are being taken advantage of in a socially detrimental way.

We can discuss whether continuous scrolling really is socially detrimental, but calling it "government compensation for lack of an individual's self control" is flat-out dishonest given that half of us here are about to go evaluate our latest adwords optimization spend or look at our next A/B test results.

[+] mc32|6 years ago|reply
I’m torn about endless scrolling. I wholeheartedly agree with a ban on auto playing sound or video. It’s gratingly irritating.

It’s rather anti-human, experience wise.

[+] adventured|6 years ago|reply
Once the regulate everything people aggressively invited the government in, there was no going back. It's going to get extremely bad over the coming decade. Laughably bad. Politicians will regulate every possible inch of the Internet. And they rarely remove stupid regulations, so it will all pile-up deep. It will mirror the physical world, every click and every feature will involve breaking numerous laws. There is nothing that can stop this outcome now, the fox is in the hen house. The result will inevitably be stagnation, as creating anything online will be very burdensome in all possible regards. Most simply won't do it, they'll just work for a bigger corporation that can deal with the regulatory mess. Want to launch a simple service? Hire a lawyer, do a six month review before you write the first line of code, spend tens of thousands of dollars, and you're still going to be breaking some stray law if you dare to launch. Compliance requirements stacked up to your ears, placating every special interest group that wants their cause accounted for in regulations. And that's before we get deep into the big corporations buying/bribing/lobbying thousands of new regulations for their own protection.
[+] tjoff|6 years ago|reply
I can't think of a single situation where autoplay is remotely acceptable for anything but opt in.

I guess endless scrolling doesn't have to be bad. But I've yet to experience an implementation that isn't awful.

I don't think legislation is a good way to make developers behave. But I also don't know how to break the mess we are in.

[+] LoSboccacc|6 years ago|reply
> legitimate uses for autoplay videos

also saving bandwidth on gifs

[+] thorwasdfasdf|6 years ago|reply
Yes!

Instead of coming up with insane laws, the government can point people towards tools that will help them. For example, the govt could simply point people towards a chrome plugin that prevents those features from working, or a plugin that removes the links of any sites that have those features.

[+] gsich|6 years ago|reply
Your examples are from video sites. So having an autoplay there makes sense. There is no need for it to be the default setting.
[+] Nullabillity|6 years ago|reply
> I think people should have the freedom to consume content how they want

Absolutely! That doesn't mean corporations should have a right to decide for people how they should consume their content.

[+] Agustus|6 years ago|reply
If politicians could focus their efforts on actually solving problems instead of giving hand outs to their tort lawyer buddies, we might get a better system.

The lawsuits would include:

- autoplay of gifs vs web videos

- does Pinterest count as an auto scroll ad

- does an endless scroll populated with 50% real content count as non-ad?

The law will just create more headaches for the producers and less innovation thanks to having to fight lawsuits.

Example of the depths lawyers can class action: Godiva is being sued in court for putting “Godiva 1927” on the label; the lawyer is arguing that people believe that the chocolate was made in 1927.

*edited the content away from ideas.

[+] Nullabillity|6 years ago|reply
Outlawing X doesn't mean almost-X is completely fine. That said, none of your examples make much sense (to me).

> - autoplay of gifs vs web videos

Presumably the content is what matters, not the particular compression format. Does it show animated content continuously without being triggered by active user interaction? Yes, so it's an auto-playing video.

> - does Pinterest count as an auto scroll ad

It's primarily focused on a call to action, so yes, it's an ad. Would they show an equivalent popup for ordinary user-generated content that they have no stake in?

> - does an endless scroll populated with 50% real content count as non-ad?

Is there an ad that appears when the user scrolls? I don't even see what this example was supposed to demonstrate.

> The law will just create more headaches for the producers and less innovation thanks to having to fight lawsuits.

More headaches and less innovation in how to sell bullshit sounds like a very positive outcome to me.

[+] root_axis|6 years ago|reply
I apologize for making a comment with regard to politics, but I can't help feeling frustrated by the narrative around curbing "addictive behavior" coming from the political party that consistently extols the virtues of "personal responsibility" and regularly characterizes the desire to regulate harmful behavior as the machinations of a "nanny state". I find it especially frustrating in this case because the specifics of this proposal seem to be pretty poorly reasoned from a technical perspective.
[+] jkingsbery|6 years ago|reply
As someone who generally votes for Republicans, I agree 100% with you. It'll be interesting to see how much support it gets from other Republicans, but I'm not sure that it's good for the brand of "bias toward letting the market decide" to have a bill that will swoop in and decide for us. Based on his biography page (https://www.hawley.senate.gov/biography), this seems to be more about making life hard for tech companies. If anything though, it seems like it will make life harder mostly on new entrants.

Also, it seems impractical to implement. As soon as those specific tactics are gone, others will be implemented that do something similar in spirit if not in letter.

[+] nichos|6 years ago|reply
The Republican party is about personal responsibility as much as the Democrats are for ending wars. Both parties are essentially the same now, and have been for several years.
[+] hedora|6 years ago|reply
This is textbook regulatory capture.

Want to host your own website? Be sure to hire a specialized lawyer to audit and sign off on the user interface choices you made (and be sure to retain them indefinitely as your dependencies and the law evolve).

[+] post_break|6 years ago|reply
Based on the discussion about plastic earlier this week we should just tax websites that auto play videos.
[+] torgoguys|6 years ago|reply
> This is textbook regulatory capture.

I do not think it means what you think it means. (Or maybe I don't! :-)

[+] tantalor|6 years ago|reply
“If I take the bottom out of this glass and I keep refilling the water or the wine, you won’t know when to stop drinking”

That's not how drinking works. That's not how anything works.

[+] FabHK|6 years ago|reply
EDIT: see caveat from K-Wall below. Can't trust anything these days :-/ </edit>

That's exactly how it works, to an extent. In a study [1], people with self-refilling soup bowls ate 73% more soup (p < 0.01) than those eating from normal soup bowls. Similar with popcorn [2]. I first read about this either in Nudge or in Mindless Eating.

[1] Wansink, B., Painter, J.E., & North, J. (2005). Bottomless Bowls: Why Visual Cues of Portion Size May Influence Intake Obesity Research, 13 (1), 93-100

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1038/oby.2005.12

[2] http://projectputthatcookiedownnow.com/2011/bottomless-bowls...

[+] tlibert|6 years ago|reply
He utterly mangled it, but there is an experiment which proves the underlying concept (which I'm guessing was his intent, live testimony is hard):

Bottomless Bowls: Why Visual Cues of Portion Size May Influence Intake

Objective: Using self‐refilling soup bowls, this study examined whether visual cues related to portion size can influence intake volume without altering either estimated intake or satiation.

Research Methods and Procedures: Fifty‐four participants (BMI, 17.3 to 36.0 kg/m2; 18 to 46 years of age) were recruited to participate in a study involving soup. The experiment was a between‐subject design with two visibility levels: 1) an accurate visual cue of a food portion (normal bowl) vs. 2) a biased visual cue (self‐refilling bowl). The soup apparatus was housed in a modified restaurant‐style table in which two of four bowls slowly and imperceptibly refilled as their contents were consumed. Outcomes included intake volume, intake estimation, consumption monitoring, and satiety.

Results: Participants who were unknowingly eating from self‐refilling bowls ate more soup [14.7 ± 8.4 vs. 8.5 ± 6.1 oz; F(1,52) = 8.99; p < 0.01] than those eating from normal soup bowls. However, despite consuming 73% more, they did not believe they had consumed more, nor did they perceive themselves as more sated than those eating from normal bowls. This was unaffected by BMI.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1038/oby.2005.12

[+] ryandvm|6 years ago|reply
It is a dumb analogy to be sure, but I think the point is valid. As intensely social creatures, humans are not particularly well adapted to handle the never-ending waterfall of synthetic social interactions you get from the likes of Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/etc.

In the past, getting as much social information as possible about your tribe was a huge reproductive advantage, but now that modern social network products have boosted the populations of our "tribes" into the thousands, trying to consume all that information has downsides that far outweigh the positive.

Facebook is basically the psychological equivalent of high fructose corn syrup.

[+] ChristianBundy|6 years ago|reply
I imagined this as a glass attached to a table with a false bottom that constantly refills the glass. When you drink some of the liquid (presumably with a straw?) the glass is instantly refilled, which makes it hard to tell how much you've drank.

In other words: I agree, this really isn't a great example.

[+] nostrademons|6 years ago|reply
Bottomless margaritas have led to many a poor decision.

(They remain legal, though.)

[+] isodude|6 years ago|reply
Like when my brother decided to keep my glass full all the time at the bar. I got soo wasted, didn't even realise.
[+] azinman2|6 years ago|reply
We know that portion size matters, because people will eat/drink what’s in front of them.
[+] godshatter|6 years ago|reply
Even if we could all agree that autoplay videos and endless scrolling are terrible ideas, I still don't understand why we should get the government involved. Use a service that has them, or refuse to. Find another service that doesn't use them. "There should be a law..." is often the wrong response. At least in my opinion.
[+] la_barba|6 years ago|reply
Its coming out of a social initiative that deals with the inability of parents to keep social media (and tech in general) addiction of their kids under control. Human beings have a lot of psychological vulnerabilities and, if you watched the senate hearing, you'd know how tech companies exploit some of our innate addictive personality traits to get people hooked on their product. Pick-up "artists" use this to get laid. Advertisers use it to sell their junk products, etc.

Its easy to point out whats wrong, but nobody sticks their neck out and tells people how to fix the situation. Here, someone seems to be trying, and for that I give them some props..

[+] geddy|6 years ago|reply
Absolutely agreed. There are plenty of things I want politicians removed from - but possibly getting fined over a website I design is absolutely ludicrous. It's like getting rid of deer coming on to your property and eating your flowers by planting landmines. Pretty sure there's something less extreme than making something illegal.

Although these days, everything has to be either extreme this or extreme that, and common sense (like just not using those websites, or utilizing this thing called personal responsibility to recognize and curb your own addictions) has gone the way of the 8-track. Nope, we need the government to start fining people.

This doesn't do anything except make instant-criminals out of people overnight, signed into law by politicians who aren't even remotely close to being experts at the subject matter.

[+] Jazgot|6 years ago|reply
This sounds like complete joke. Next another bill will ban pagination?
[+] fhood|6 years ago|reply
This seems like an extremely short sited, overly broad and unlikely to pass bill, and to make it all worse, based on the title, I thought that someone was attempting to ban videos that play automatically when you visit a website, which would have been a deeply noble cause.
[+] nemonemo|6 years ago|reply
I have suspicion that these politicians know what they are doing and they are doing these stupid things with the fullest knowledge that the bill does not help the addicted people. Also probably they know these things don't even threaten the tech giants. Then why are they spending their precious time for such a meaningless bill?

This makes me think of McConnell gaining support or lobbying from tobacco industry. Maybe this is a thinly veiled threat or request to the tech giants?

[+] segmondy|6 years ago|reply
Tech needs to fight. There are tons of new regulations being pushed to regulate tech with politics. It's going to end very badly. This is not about caring for people, but controlling tech. People care about high hospital bills, expensive insurance and high college costs. Why are these same politicians not writing new bills to fix those? Why do they want to tame Netflix, Youtube, Facebook, Google, Amazon?
[+] scarface74|6 years ago|reply
Because tech companies are run by the “liberal elite” and they don’t bribe enough congressmen.

People in tech should be much more concerned than they are about the government encroaching on it. The government does not represent big states/big cities in proportion to the population once you consider the tiniest state has the same two senators as the largest.

[+] i_am_proteus|6 years ago|reply
It seems like a lot of the bill could run up against first amendment challenges. The only parts that seem "safe" are checkbox parts that deal with contracts; agreeing and disagreeing to terms. I am not a lawyer.
[+] bigsassy|6 years ago|reply
An app I worked on had a similar feature to Snapstreaks, but it was used to help people quit smoking. This bill would have killed this feature that helped many people lead healthier lives.
[+] djrogers|6 years ago|reply
This bill would only apply to social media sites, so unless your 'quit smoking' app was such, it woulnd't have affected it at all.
[+] ilovetux|6 years ago|reply
I would like to see warnings on certain websites which use user retention tactics such as these to prominently display warnings like cigarette companies are required to do. Something like the following:

"Facebook is known to be addictive and use deceptive practices in user interface design to influence you into spending an unhealthy amount time on their platform in order to maximize the number of advertisements you view."

[+] BFatts|6 years ago|reply
Uh, TV is unending, constantly "scrolling" to new content meant to addict you as well, correct? How does this differ from having the TV on and just consuming what's on it versus Netflix autoplay feature? Is it possible to distinguish autoplay (auto-continuation) from just regular TV streaming over the airwaves or cable?
[+] DannyB2|6 years ago|reply
From TFA...

> Deceptive design played an enormous part in last week’s FTC settlement with Facebook, and Hawley’s bill would make it unlawful for tech companies to use dark patterns to manipulate users into opting into services. For example, “accept” and “decline” checkboxes would need to be the same font, format, and size to help users make better, more informed choices.

So don't use color. Make the two choices equally clear.

Example:

Would you like to enroll in our craptacular offer which is free for 90 days and then costs $9.95 per month thereafter?

Please check one of the following options:

[_] No. Please DO NOT add me to the list of people to be excluded from being automatically enrolled in our special craptacular offer.

[_] Yes. Please DO add me to the list of people ineligible to not be excluded from not being enrolled in our special craptacular offer.

If you do not select one of the options, then default will automatically be selected for you.

Thank you for enrolling in our craptacular special offer!

[+] ahallock|6 years ago|reply
The government has nothing better to do priority-wise than regulate UI/UX behaviors like video autoplay? This is not essential to the functioning of society; it's bureaucrats avoiding the real issues. Also, ironic coming from the party that is ostensibly for less government intrusion.
[+] Fjolsvith|6 years ago|reply
I doubt this will happen. First Amendment free speech restriction will get batted down by the Supreme Court.
[+] hackbinary|6 years ago|reply
I thought I was going insane with all these videos auto playing in Facebook and Twitter. It truly is annoying.

I'm not sure if I am against endless scrolling, however. I would, though, accept the loss of endless scrolling if that would stop videos from auto playing.

[+] eridius|6 years ago|reply
I could support something like this if, instead of banning it, simply made these practices opt-in. Autoplay is great if you want it. It sucks if you don't. And Netflix makes it so dang hard to disable (you have to use a web browser and find an obscure preference). So instead of autoplay, it should require interaction the first time, with an option to autoplay for the rest of the session. Similarly for infinite scrolling, how about we don't infinitely scroll the first time, but have a footer you can click to load more, with an option to infinitely scroll for the rest of the session.