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.
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".
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...
[0]: https://matthewsinclair.com/blog/0177-what-if-we-taxed-adver...
OTOH I gladly pay for YouTube Premium.
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.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.
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".
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 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.
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.
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?
This. Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269
“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.
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.
But we can build a culture that knows how to avoid ads and the technology to enable 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?
"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
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.
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)
> 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.
Not, at least, until our machine overlords arrive.
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.
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.
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".
I'm not saying legislation is a good solution but you seem to be making a poetic plea that benefits the abusers.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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
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.
They haven't nailed it every time, but on the whole it's a good approach. It's hard on companies, but rightly so.
A very common tension in law everywhere.
In the US you now have a 'major questions doctrine'. What the hell is a major question?
[1] Eg: printables.com (for open source, 3D print files)
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
No more for profit nets. Time for civil digital infrastructure.
“You know it when you see it.”
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.
Not necessarily. The consequences of a few bad micro-niche ones would be, well, micro.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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]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.
Great, admission is the first step.
> but the pay is too good to find alternative.
Yet then you immediately undo it!
Try "I'm too greedy". You're the actor with the free will here. The subject of the sentencd shouldn't be "the pay". That is just an amount, a sum, that exists - neither too high nor too low. That is all in the eye of the beholder.
If you had to choose between two identical jobs and salary at a company but at big tobacco vs a hospital, which would you choose? I think most people would pick the hospital. Hence the only reason people work at big tobacco is either because of a genuine interest in their product (rare IMHO) OR because the pay is higher.
This applies to big tech too.
I am very curious if people here agree with my reasoning.
You don't sound psychopathic so I'm genuinely curious what you do with your money to keep your conscious clean.
Bevause I think your salary is practically blood money at this point.
Blood of the additional instagram girls with anorexia.
The additional children with severe myopia.
The additional people murdered by persons radicalized by media that had to polarize news to survive the loss in readership or by the false advertising of quality control on hate speech.
The list goes on and on.
The amount of paid shills opposing this is a good indicator that it's the right move.
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.
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.
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?
This learned (or lobbied) helplessness of never changing any laws and we are just stuck with this way of life is silly.
Dude, in case you don't know, you are the anomaly. Most people don't have the amount of free will as you do. They can't "just put down the phone". You can. They can't.
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.
It is thoroughly documented that social media and the modern web are designed to be addictive, by psychologists who specialize in this. We regulate access to other addictive things, because addictive things break humans' normal control systems.
> "the farther you get from the influence of bureaucrats, the happier life becomes"
only when things are "normal" and if you're a default power-holder in a community. For everyone else, really no.
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.
A huge portion of that market cap exists only because the companies in question are allowed to act unethically. Aside from that, all this wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small minority.
Ultimately the economy exists to serve us, not the other way around. What good all that market cap does for the average American?
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.
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.
Also, while I dislike infinite scrolling, why should the EU regulate the design of a website? I don't like this idea as a principle. This clearly comes from overpaid bureaucrats. I am not at all saying the EU should not become stronger, in the face of a very hostile and abusive USA - but the focus by these bureaucrats is wrong. Those micro-regulations will not get rid of US dominance in the software sector.
You’re perpetuating a gross misunderstanding of the cookie law. What it states is different from how the advertisers implement malicious compliance to bias people, like yourself.
Websites that implement basic functional cookies do not need to display any popups. They’re permitted to do so. Any cookies that are essential to the functioning of the website within reason are permitted. In fact at no point a website should serve you a cookie popup unless you seek it out because analytics and advertising cookies are supposed to be opt in.
So many websites do two things, serve you a popup that has everything enabled which is a clear violation; or a popup that has only functional cookies selected but the biggest highlighted button allows all of them.
The law is fine. Malicious compliance is to blame. The EU has been slow to rectify it.
There are laws regulating many things that could be considered "design", for example misleading packaging, mandatory information on some categories of ads, cigarette packaging, container sizes, accessibility requirements, etc.
I would say regulating against addictive design (infinite scrolling is not banned per se, it just makes for a catchy headline) is well within what laws are meant for.
Except, what actually has happened is that the annoying pop-ups became ubiquitous, and then relatively standardized, so that now an extension like Consent-o-Matic (because the browser companies don't want to upset their advertisers) can automate away your actual choices.
If you want to allow websites to track you, tell the extension to make those choices. If you don't, then tell the extension that. It does a great job almost instantly clearing the popups, and you have more control over your digital identity.
Try selling something containing Nicotine and you will find the EU has an opinion on that, too.
I say great this is a great initiative from the EU.
Probably not. But the dominance will be regulated.
Is ticktock addictive because of it's design, or is it addictive because it brings thousands of people and experiences and emotions right to you? Probably both, but it's hard to separate one from the other. Apps are not opium, it's not as clear cut.
Instead of micromanaging technology and culture they should make sure that society is kind, that there is slack in the system, that people don't have reason to want to flee their real lives, that those hurt by new technology get support.
Of course truly malicious dark patterns and fraud should be punished. But that feels like a different category.
We have clear answers here. Yes it’s by design
Disclaimer: I anal and this is not legal advice.
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).
Most sites didn't need a banner. Even post-GDPR, many use-cases don't need one.
I like my feed being personalized to who I am. I am unique. I'm not like anyone else.
Genuinely curious about the actual data on this.
Does anyone have a link to a reputable, sizable study?
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.
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.
my money (lol) is on that EU will move to complete ban advertising of gambling in the next 2-3 years
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.
If you don't do it this way to apply for everyone, then any good actor products will be crushed by profitmaxxing competitors. Or any good actor executives and workers will be pushed out by profitmaxxing shareholders.
Legislators need to be careful to keep requirements tight and manageable, but it's better to limit negative externalities than outright ban something. Banning infinite scroll or any particular pattern is nonsense, but restricting addictive design (e.g. TikTok) and algorithm weaponization (e.g. TikTok) is very sensible.
This is what I always say, and defended by many economists: The free market needs legislation and enforcement! Especially public companies, which are especially adamant to maximize shareholder profits at any cost.
Fee market only reacts in a positive way by default in matters that are clear to customers, eg pricing. But when the user isn't the customer, and the defects are not immediately sensed, winners will never do the good thing on their accord.
Keep in mind that in Europe, TikTok is still run by the original owners with China connections - unlike the new "American TikTok" after the owner change in the US.
The US legislature only seemed to discover its concern about addictive behavior when foreign actors or pro-palestinian content were involved, but had no problem with YouTube or Facebook doing the same stuff.
I seriously hope it's different in the EU but wouldn't bet on it.
The DSA for instance has only been used against to western companies so far (doesn't mean Chinese companies are immune).
One is arbitrarily banned by unelected bureaucrats. The other is fine.
We blame social companies for failing to raise our children the way we think they should.
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.
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.
There’s a finite (albeit vast) amount of content to serve up.
I'm curious how they plan to pretend to enforce this. Will you need a loisence to implement infinite scroll?
What about video games? We need session limits of 30mins, kids get too addicted to it.
In fact we're going to put a timer in every bedroom so that if you have sex with your wife for too long we'll fine you because it can turn into a real addiction.
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.
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.
> We use cookies and other technologies to store and access personal data on your device
Evidently you don't value privacy.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.”
>"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.
I'm fine with EU resisting late stage capitalism.
hopefully AI will wake them up and save us from all this nonsense
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.
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)
Curious where you got your statistics?
If anything it’s probably the opposite, with more Americans wanting to move to Europe than the reverse.
Don't get me wrong; I've spent months in the US and there are things I love about it. The almost naive way in which everyone believes their own bullshit is energizing. The way individuality and risk taking is celebrated allows for the interesting and novel (but also sometimes the worst) to happen. It is invigorating. But soon it all drains you, the grind, the lack of depth in relationships... The lack of social security net, the dystopian levels of inequality, the egotism, the fetichization of violence. It's all crystalized now in the goverment. No, thank you.
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.