[jjcm]

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.

[Funes-]

>"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".

[bruce511]

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...

[gchamonlive]

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.

[matthewsinclair]

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...

[mrtksn]

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.

[nine_k]

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.

[rsolva]

Ban personalized advertising!

[Aloha]

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.

[fooker]

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.

[allan_s]

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.

[mmonaghan]

I don't think this changes the dynamic one bit. Every subscription product still optimizes for engagement. Then there's the free speech aspect - sure it's easy to say "we don't want to see cigarette ads"- what about your local mom n pop restaurant buying ads to try and get more people to eat in?

The primordial domino tile is human nature, which you're not going to knock over. The solution is probably closer to what China does - punish companies that don't prioritize/train algos to prioritize the values we hold dear. Basically, just keep beating meta and bytedance until they decide to get their timelines out of the politics game and into the education game, for example, or the democracy game, or whatever your country's main issues are.

I think there's definitely room to regulate "divisiveness" though, and that's a little clearer than "addictive design".

[hirenj]

Even better, don’t ban it, but require companies to do age verification (above a certain age?) before displaying advertising. You get two wins in one: make the child market less attractive for algorithmic feeds, and you also can get a better product (no algorithmic feeds) without ads if you don’t age verify. Win-win situation!

[thesmtsolver2]

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.

[xvector]

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!

[gloosx]

This is a brilliant idea, really, but unfotunately it is not a fit for the society we have constructed so far. There are little to no governments around which would willingly hit the brakes on Consumerism — it is having a hypnotic effect on the people they herd as well as being very profitable for them

[permo-w]

The major loss would be Youtube. Youtube is possibly the greatest educational tool the world has ever seen. Yeah there's some bad stuff, but you want to know how to do almost anything from tying your shoelaces to building a mega laser first-hand from an expert, and watch it be done? It's on Youtube, for free. Remove advertising and it dies and all of that goes with it. Even if the EU, say, buy it off Google and take it into public ownership, which the US government very probably wouldn't allow and also isn't really part of the EU's philosophy, you're still going to have to continuously pay creators for their work and hosting costs, forever. Otherwise I think it's a great idea. Maybe just carve out an exception for educational content

[virgildotcodes]

I’ll probably be crucified for this but I think the free w/advertising model is not fundamentally evil, and gives poor people access to lots of shit that they otherwise wouldn’t have, keeps the rest of us from death by 1,000 monthly subscriptions.

[phyzix5761]

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.

[thaumasiotes]

> 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".

You know, we used to have Flash games that were free to play and ad supported.

With the iPhone, those died, and now we have mobile games that support themselves with microtransactions.

The method of collecting fees on the games was to lower their quality, not to raise it.

[noosphr]

There has never been a mass information medium to survive on subscriptions. This includes everything since news papers in the 18th century.

[dehrmann]

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.

[derektank]

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.

[amelius]

Yes, and advertising drives mass overconsumption. So banning it will solve problems in that area too.

[normie3000]

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.

[raw_anon_1111]

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?

[fsflover]

> banning advertising on the Internet

This. Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269

[cyanydeez]

Wpuldnt it be better just to create a .noad ICANN domain and let see if that gets any traction?

[jaredklewis]

I’m sympathetic, but I think this idea seems pretty clearly a political non-starter.

“Good news voters! You now have to pay for your email, search engines, and social media accounts.” Privacy and healthy digital habits are issues dear to my heart and issues that I think are gaining some modest traction, but they just can’t compete with a core pocketbook issues like making everything cost more. In the US, we just elected a guy that campaigned on, among other things, ending democracy, because (at least according to some political pundits) egg prices went up under Biden.

“But you pay that cost now, it’s just hidden!” I know, I know. But that doesn’t strike me as a politically winning argument. It’s like trying to explain to people that inflation is ok as long as if in adjusted terms wages outpace it; technically correct, but a political loser.

I would be happy to be wrong of course.

[thfuran]

Not just the internet. Ban third-party advertising everywhere.

[kaycey2022]

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.

[samrus]

Positively luddian proposal. I kinda like it

[yallpendantools]

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.

[qsera]

Banning ads is not possible.

But we can build a culture that knows how to avoid ads and the technology to enable it.

[alsetmusic]

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?

[iamacyborg]

They already effectively banned the mechanism behind most online advertising with the GDPR, it’s just been really, really poorly enforced.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Thankfully that absurd comment about "vibes" dropped from the top spot

"It's the primordial domino tile."

FWIW, I believe this is correct

However when using the term "banning" this needs to be placed in context; advertising might be "banned" only in certain circumstances.. Mind you, advertising has been banned whole cloth from computer networks in the past. It is still banned on many computer networks.^1 Before the internet (an interconnected network of computer networks) opened to the public there was a rule, i.e., policy, against advertising

A better term than "banning" might be simply "regulating". Online advertising is not regulated in the same way that advertising is regulated on billboards, in print publications, radio or television. For example, regulating the time (electoral campaigns), place (billboards), subject matter (cigarettes)

Whenever this topic comes up on HN, it draws inane replies about people being unable to distinguish advertising from anything else

But there is zero evidence to support this theory in practice. Everyone knows what advertising is, and how to identify it. That's why and how people are capable of complaining about it

Even this forum, Hacker News, places limits on advertising. YC may promote its participating companies but others are generally not permitted to advertise. Submissions that are deemed to be ads are killed. If advertising was undefinable, then how is HN able to define it

If advertising was impossible to define then how could anyone design a so-called "ad blocker"

1. If advertising were undefinable then why would any computer network have a "Network Use Policy" that prohibited using the network for disseminting advertising

The suggestion that advertising is undefinable, that either everything is advertising or nothing is advertising, is pure nonsense

It's only when the subject of tampering with the sole "business model" of the so-called "tech" company having nothing else to sell, or the means of substinence for the low quality website operator republishing public information in pages crammed full of ads and tracking, that HN commenters try to argue that advertising is beyond definition

A large percentage of internet users, perhaps a majority, have never experienced the internet without ads. Hence it may be difficult for these people to understand the place of advertising on a computer network. Let's be clear, originally, there was _no place for it_

Some people alive today did experience the internet without ads. Sadly, many of them are now engaged in providing internet advertising services for financial gain. Others are not. I'm in the later category

Some of the loudest voices defending internet advertising will be people in the former category. They have cashed in at every internet user's expense

[jama211]

lol good luck with that

[almostdeadguy]

Can I get an amen.

[burnto]

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?

[hyperman1]

Isn't this the standard EU way? First, they publish a statement, declaring what they want to see. 'Deal with addictive design', in this case. We've had 'Deal with the zillion different connectors on cell phones' in the past. It is now up to the industry to do this, in whatever way they see fit. If this happens, no law will be written. However, if the industry doesn't deal with it adequately, Laws will Follow, and the industry will not like them.

European companies know this pattern, and tend to get the hint. US companies tend to try and maximize what they can get while claiming there is no law against it, then go very pikachu-faced when the consequences hit them.

[paulddraper]

> claiming there is no law against it

Is there a law against it?

[sincerely]

>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)

[rambambram]

This exactly. The post you reply to implies they have discovered something very novel, which they did not. I don't remember which ancient king it was, but they already tried thousands of years ago to make codes of law with every situation described in it. They failed. Just leave the final interpretation to the judge, and let the politicians make broad laws (in good faith, I hope).

> as much as us stem-brained people want legal systems to work like code

I see this a lot on HN, and it makes sense to think like this if you're a programmer. It's also a sign these programmers should open up their world view a bit more.

[idiotsecant]

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.

[loeg]

"I know it when I see it" notoriously does not work in law, either. Instead, we have the Miller test.

[johannes1234321]

> 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.

[piva00]

I think it's a general misunderstanding of Americans about other law systems, the American way of codifying laws leaves a lot of loopholes (intentionally or unintentionally) due to it being a game to be played, the spirit of the law is second to the letter of the law. They expect precise and well-defined constraints in the letter of the law.

Most European countries, and the EU as a legislative body, work with the premise of the spirit of the law. It is less precise and requires real world judgment to determine its boundaries but it can be much harder to side-step with technicalities and "gotchas" using loopholes in the letter of the law.

It's just a different system, in my opinion it's less exploitable even though it's riskier. I prefer the spirit of the law to be defended instead of a whole system of gaming technicalities, really don't like the whole vibe of playing Munchkin the USA has in its legal system. Makes some good legal drama though.

[randomNumber7]

Life is complex and beautiful and trying to regulate every possible outcome beforehand just makes it boring and depressing.

[torlok]

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.

[Unai]

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.

[ApolloFortyNine]

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".

[andybak]

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.

[samrus]

Yeah. I would have liked to have fun with all that asbestos in my walls

[coffeemug]

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.

[zestyping]

I like this approach.

Specifying the requirement in terms of measured impact is a good strategy because it motivates the app companies to do the research and find effective ways to address addiction, not just replace specific addictive UI patterns with different addictive UI patterns.

Building measurement into the law also produces a metric for how well the law is working and helps inform improvements to the law.

[vanviegen]

And what about games that are actually just great fun? That would be easy to confuse with addictive, right?

[bjackman]

The thing is, I doubt anyone at TikTok ever says "this design choice is good because it's addictive". Almost certainly, their leadership gives them metrics to target, like watch time, and they just hypyothesise and experiment on changes with those metrics in mind. Almost certainly the design of TikTok is almost entirely emergent. Just like the scientific method is "revealing" truth I think TikTok is just "revealing" the design that maximises its target metrics.

So what we have is a machine designed to optimise for something adjacent to addictiveness, and then some rules saying "you can't design for addictiveness"...

What happens when an underspecified vibe rule clashes with a billion dollar optimisation machine? Surely the machine wins every time? The machine is already defeating every ruleset that it's ever come up against.

Feels like the only way regulation could achieve anything is if it said "you can't build a billion dollar optimisation machine at all".

[astrobe_]

France is considering a ban on certain social media for minors, and parental consent on all social media for minors under 15, pretty much like Australia. They had work around EU laws that prevented them to force service providers to do things, the trick they used is to make it illegal for those services to let minors register on the platform, because EU law acknowledge that local laws on forbidden content apply.

If this law passes and they "blacklist" some of these design-for-addiction (sorry, "engagement") platforms, I believe it should send a strong signal for adults as well. Most adults are pretty much aware that these platforms are bad for everyone; according to some polls, the public opinion is unambiguously in favor of these laws.

[braiamp]

> "well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?"

You can't. You don't need to specify how to comply with the law, just that generally a goal must be met. That's good lawmaking there, since it's flexible enough to catch all future potential creatives way to break it. I remember someone comment about how working at MSFT as a compliance officer, dude was going around saying that it's not the letter of the law that must be followed, but the spirit of thereof. They rolled over him and released the product nonetheless. Almost immediately came the EU investigation and that crap had to be reversed an put in accordance to what the stated goal of the law is.

[StopDisinfo910]

> The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes".

That's not really accurate. The EU actually legislated in a way which is very typical of how countries regulate things which are now to carry hard to characterized and varied risks.

Companies have to carry out a risk assessment and take appropriate preventive actions when they find something. The EU audits the assessment. That's how finance has been regulated for ages.

It's all fairly standard I fear.

[Someone]

> 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 EU, in general, phrases laws and regulations more in terms of what they want to accomplish with them than in terms of what you can’t do.

In contrast, common law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law), over time, more or less collects a list of all things you may not do.

[sriku]

"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.)

[roenxi]

> 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.

[luplex]

What will probably happen is that someone will develop an industry standard for "non-addictive design" and go around certifying products or product development practices. Like for example, they might disallow optimizing time spent, or they might require more transparency or customizability for your recommendation algorithm.

[RamblingCTO]

Breaking infinite scrolling on these apps is one good step, but for me it's something else that would be more important.

I'm recovering from a surgery and can't do much besides existing. So I'd like to scroll to keep me occupied and numb the pain in my face. But instagram tries to shove content down my throat that I don't want to see. It's always only a matter of time until I see THOT/incel content. No matter how often I click "not interested", they try again and again. If it's not playing genders out against each other, it's politics. It's brain rot. I don't wanna see that. I have interests and they know what they are. But no, they show me this garbage. The algorithms need to be the second thing we need to regulate imho

[henrikschroder]

I remember the GDPRpocalypse which had a lot of Americans up in arms because of the wildly different approach to lawmaking that the EU has. Everyone on the US side was screaming for a checklist they could implement, and assumed they would get maximum penalties if they didn't cross every t and dot every i. But it just doesn't work like that, EU laws are generally not very procedural, they are a lot more about intent.

These findings are very much in line with that, they bring up a feature, a checkbox, a specific thing TikTok did to pay lip-service to protect minors, and then they're simply saying that it doesn't appear to work. So it doesn't matter that TikTok checked the box and crossed the t.

[anomaly_]

GDPR is in the process of being unwound by the EU as it has been an unmitigated disaster.

[danpalmer]

This is the EU digital strategy for legislation: vague but reasonable, so that you have to comply with the spirit of the law not the letter of it.

They haven't nailed it every time, but on the whole it's a good approach. It's hard on companies, but rightly so.

[svara]

> The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes".

A very common tension in law everywhere.

In the US you now have a 'major questions doctrine'. What the hell is a major question?

[lukan]

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.

[Springtime]

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)

[saidinesh5]

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...

[rolph]

a webgame or a document browser, e.g. side scrollers, topdown/bottom up scroller, continuous page view.

[Yiin]

I like to scroll my logs w/o pagination

[KPGv2]

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."

[johnnyanmac]

>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.

[dakolli]

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.

[bojan]

For Discord the regulation is just an excuse to gather as much personal information as possible: https://www.pcgamer.com/software/platforms/oh-good-discords-...

[InsideOutSanta]

Many laws work like that. They don't have very precise definitions of things, but instead depend on what an average, reasonable person would think.

An example of this is contract law. There is no clear definition of what a legal contract must look like. Instead, a contract's validity can depend on whether an average, prudent person would have entered into it in similar circumstances.

[iamflimflam1]

This is a classic play book by anyone who is anti regulation. Present it as something that appears to be ludicrous - eg “they are banning infinite scroll!” and rely on the fact that very few people will actually dig any deeper as you’ve already satisfied their need for a bit of rage.

[sophrosyne42]

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

[Llamamoe]

> 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.

[trhway]

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".

[ArchieScrivener]

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.

[Waterluvian]

> 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.”

[grumbel]

> "well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?"

Expand the GDPR "Right to data portability" to publicly published content for third parties, i.e. open up the protocols so you can have third party clients that themselves can decide how they want to present the data. And add a realtime requirement, since at the moment companies still circumvent the original rule with a "only once every 30 days" limit.

Also add an <advertisment> HTML tag and HTTP header and force companies to declare all their ads in a proper machine readable way.

The core problem with addictive design isn't the addictive design itself, but that it's often the only way to even access the data. And when it comes to communication services that benefit from network effects, that should simply not be allowed.

[kawera]

> 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.

[SllX]

> 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.

[hinkley]

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?

[akersten]

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?

[direwolf20]

It seems like most EU tech rules are about vibes. Like the well–known GDPR, which doesn't say thou shalt have a cookie popup, but says users shalt notify users and gain their consent for all unnecessary processing of personal data. Websites were the ones that chose to spitefully use cookie popups.

[KolibriFly]

The Commission seems to be saying: not without guardrails

[paulcole]

Laws should be strict!

[atoav]

I am betting people would quickly ignore the spitit of the law and make it about "inginite scroll verboten" like with the GDPR where some people quickly moved to make it mean "you have to have a cookie banner!"

No you don't have to have a cookie banner. The law means you need to ask for informed consent for each purpose where you collect and or transfer personal data from your users. So (1) if you don't collect the data, you don't have to ask for consent at all and (2) it doesn't matter too much if cookies are involved (or you use some other client side storage for tracking) and (3) you need to have their informed consent, meaning just having them click OK somewhere is absolutely useless unless you explained which data you collect for what purpose. Good luck doing that for your 300+ "partners".

The ad industry and self-declared SEO experts have displayed an astounding inability to read the text of the law and follow its spirit. One could argue, probably on purpose. The same will happen here. This is clearly about giving users an way to sue against addictive designs and giving the EU a lever to protrct consumers from particularily bad actors. Now anybody who still profits from using these dark patterns will try to make it about one thing "infinite scroll verboten" and then proceed to violate the spirit of the law.

[Valakas_]

Dude, if you have a page with 10 000 elements, it's practically as if it was infinite. Obviously addiction is a spectrum, but we can and should have some boundary that is 'good enough'. If a computer screen is usually 20-40cm, it can simply be defined on allowing max 2-4 screens for laptops and 2-4 screens for mobile phones. Of course the problem in the future might be proving whether something is addictive. But that's another story, I think the intention is good.

[paulddraper]

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.

[shevy-java]

> but are ruling against addictive design and pointing to infinite scrolling as an example of it

I still don't like that explanation at all. They imply that infinite scrolling is a sign of addictive design. How do they reach this conclusion? I can think of other ways that don't necessitate an addictive design. Some art form for instance. It may not be your cup of tea but that is art in general. I just don't see the logical connection.

Not that I am against taxing these greedy and evil US corporations. But that argument by the EU is simply not sound.

> 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.

But why would you be in favour then? Does this make sense?

> but the regulated friction of major platforms (ie discord w/ ID laws) is on a collision course

This will happen anyway. Trump and his TechBros leverage the US corporations for their wars. You only need to listen to Vance, or Rubio doing his latest dance. Sadly the european politicians are also too weak to do anything other than talk big.

[asdfman123]

> 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.

[spwa4]

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.

[wasabi991011]

> 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.

[tehjoker]

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.

[ginko]

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.

[foldr]

> 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.

[Aarchive]

> 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.

[JoshTriplett]

> 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".

[jamestest2e4p6x]

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.

[seydor]

The wording is vague enough so they canm milk american/chinese companies for fines in a few months. EU being sad again

[deaux]

Those companies are incredibly welcome to stop doing business in the EU.

Or abide by the laws, which truly isn't that difficult.

The fact that no one at Meta lets their own children use their platforms on its own justifies these laws a hundred times over.

[enaaem]

America forced the sale of Tiktok and China doesn't even allow American social media companies. I would argue the EU is late to the game.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

"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]

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

s/Wikit/Wikt