BRUSSELS — Doom scrolling is doomed, if the EU gets its way.
The European Commission is for the first time tackling the addictiveness of social media in a fight against TikTok that may set new design standards for the world’s most popular apps.
Reading this on Jerboa with infinite scrolling 😱
Of course such measures are much simpler than fixing the current education system, which is the root cause of lack of critical thinking and self-control.
Highly educated people can be addicted to gambling tactics too
What-about-ism.
Why should people looking at social media addiction look at the education system?
In what world is it a choice between the two?
Yes, it could be better. But its also parents who need to get their shit together. I know so many who park their kids in front of tablet, phone or pc - not for a breather or a short distraction, but as the standard way to entertain kids.
Because they fear that the kids might be bored. But boredom is good, it gets creative juices flowing. However, you have to be hard and tell nagging kids no, and that is hard
If kids have been inducted to immediately get a phone whenever they whine a bit, there is not much school can do.
That’s still a separate issue. Infinite scroll is scarcely ever used in a good way, and is almost always used to encourage addictive behavior; something which affects adults just as much as children. Even on the rare occasion that it isn’t being implemented as an engagement tool, it still often ends up being one anyway. It’s a dark pattern and little else.
As far as I’m concerned, banning infinite scroll could easily be a very good thing, and I’m in favor.
Doesn’t look like this extends beyond TikTok, or at least mainstream social media as a whole.
Infinite scroll itself isn’t really a problem. It’s just one of the many tools used to keep users engaged on these platforms specifically by removing an interruption from the experience, but isn’t sufficient on its own to create that unhealthy behavior. It’s also used in healthier ways, like search results, chat logs, and so on.
The EU attempting to rein in these platforms’ control over its users will be interesting to watch. There are decades of research these companies have done on user psychology to maximize their capture of the user’s attention. Forcing them not to use all the tools they developed might result in people breaking out of the cycle of endlessly scrolling. Or it might just annoy users. I don’t know which will happen.
I don’t don’t think this is useful at all, if it only results in a next button occasionally popping up.
I think the thought is, it’s not a bad thing if you get annoyed after scrolling through 100 of something and having to click next. It’s like that lady that comes up on TikTok and says why the fuck are you still scrolling? Touch grass, maybe.
I basically agree with you. You can’t really ban dark patterns even though we all agree they suck. Legislature is the worst group of people to design UX.
You can’t really ban dark patterns even though we all agree they suck.
I think the point I was getting at was that a lot of things dark patterns do are individually things that have the potential for good or bad. Infinite scroll is one example. There’s also modals, sale banners, and so on.
What makes a dark pattern dark isn’t the specific, individual tools at use. It’s the sum of those, plus the intent.
sad John Perry Barlow noises
So, sans much context (short of a quick read on Wikipedia on the Telecommunications Act of 1996), this honestly looks like naive libertarianism, and reads like an obnoxious manifesto. Feels appropriate for the attitude of the 90s, I suppose – from what I know, there was a lot more belief in the internet as a frontier of freedom and justice, then – but it’s not so fitting these days. Many of the internet’s ills have spawned from an environment of shockingly little regulation, and I’d argue the all-too-common “move fast and break things” paradigm devolved into existence from that, too. Yet this appears to be rebuffing regulation writ large, in some misguided belief that the internet was perfectly fine how it was, would continue to be so forever, and that no positive government intervention was possible — rather than the reality that the internet was flawed, at risk, and that good law was possible if only a state had been willing to pursue such a thing. 1
Which isn’t to say that a low- or even zero-regulation environment can’t work. But it needs specific alternatives; you can’t just not fix something. And infinite scroll is definitely a something, here. It absolutely contributes to creating an addictive environment while rarely being used for anything good. Personally, even if this letter had aged well, I don’t think this would be an appropriate time to reference it.
1. Some of which was passed in the very law this article so hates! Section 230 comes from the TCA!
Wow, look: crazies start to address actual problems instead of banning children and forcing IDs. What happened? Some important fascist died?
