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.
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.
>"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".
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.
Infrastructure costs money. There's no way around it. I'm all up for banning ads. But there should be another viable business model to replace it.
I don't think we have a right to a business model. Either you figure one out for your particular site (selling access to the website, donations, etc) or you don't and stop and either is ok.
For Google, they figured out it's ads... So is it ok?
Ostensibly not, if it is outlawed.
Banning ads? That's just so authoritarian and absurd. I hope you never become king
Regulation is freedom. Think of ads powering the web as current day's lead in gas.
Have we come to such a low cultural point that ads are seen as some kind of basic human right?
Fuck ads. What's absurd is tolerating them and the damage they do to media, consumers, kids, lesser and/or more honest businesses, culture, products, and so on all the way to the Windows and macOS system UIs.
I work in ads... :-/
What do you do? Honest question
Work in something else. I make significantly more doing poison ivy removal than I ever did or was ever going to working in tech.
Tell that to the tobacco industry yeah?
Yeah hospitals cost money
If it can't only be funded by ads, it shouldn't be funded and is not essential to exist.
HTTP Error 402: Payment Required was created for a reason. Maybe we need to rethink micropayments.
There’s nothing wrong with macro payments either.
Five dollars a month to subscribe or whatever. If people get the value out of it, you can get them to pay it.
Sounds good to me.
Why? Serious question. The internet was a mistake.
How can your question be serious if you already decided the internet was a mistake? I don't think it was. Far from it.
What part of an endless sea of SEO spam, AI slop, malware, polarized astroturf, and addictive-by-design walled gardens strikes you as the win? Seriously, where is the win?
[delayed]
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.
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?
How will you ban that without infringing on free speech. That is a thing in the US and a lot of countries outside the EU.
"Commercial speech" being protected by free speech laws anywhere is abhorrent. The advertising industry, in and of itself, seems abhorrent to me. It's one of the worst things humans have come up with, ever.
Could one not categorize material published in a book, magazine, or on television as 'commercial speech', liable to restrictive licensing and censorship? This seems like a slippery slope which the USA is on the correct side of.
Commercial speech is not the same as advertising.
The product is the same as the speech, whereas in advertising the speech is in sycophantic service of another product.
I agree that commercial speech is not the same as advertising, but the comment I replied to was talking about restricting commercial speech, not advertising.
I'm kind of curious how people think a new business should make its existence known to prospective customers.
It's 2026.
We can have word of mouth, genuine, in forums and social media. We can have
We can have reviews, genuine, in websites.
We can have websites which present new products and business, not as paid sponsorships.
We can search on our own initiative and go to their website.
We can have online catalogs.
And tons of other ways.
And not a single one of these is tenable, even when combined. How do the people that post reviews, or spread something over word-of-mouth, discover the thing in the first place? Try your hand at starting a business and trying to sell goods or services using these methods and see how well it works.
Searchable catalogues of products with prices and features listed.
That assumes the customer is aware that the product exists.
It only assumes they are aware that the category of products exists, and ordinary word-of-mouth communication is sufficient to propagate that knowledge.
How does word-of-mouth communication propagate knowledge that is currently in the possession of zero existing customers? Or operate for products that people have little reason to discuss with other people?
Suppose you sell insulation and replacing the insulation in an existing house could save $2 in heating and cooling for each $1 the insulation costs. Most people know that insulation exists, but what causes them to realize that they should be in the market for it when they "already have it"?
People don't need to discuss specific products, they only need to be aware of the existence of product categories. If it's genuinely the case that whole product categories are unknown to many people who could realistically benefit from them, as determined by a disinterested third party, an exception could be made for advertising that does not mention specific products or brands.
The insulation example can be solved by publication of data on average heating costs. When people learn that their neighbors are paying less they will be naturally incentivized to investigate why. Equivalent problems can be solved with the same general technique.
>Suppose you sell insulation and replacing the insulation in an existing house could save $2 in heating and cooling for each $1 the insulation costs. Most people know that insulation exists, but what causes them to realize that they should be in the market for it when they "already have it"?
The same legit things that can cause them to realize it today. Word of mouth, a product review, a personal search that landed them on a new company website, a curated catalog (as long as those things are not selling their placements).
An ad is the worse thing to find such things out - the huge majority ranges from misleading to criminally misleading to bullshit.
True, you can't separate ads vs sponsored content quite easily.
but you can help this by banning all forms of active tracking.
Static ads only, no click tracking, and complete ban on profiling clients and especially on adjusting prices based on client/possible client behavior patterns.
Magazines made it work for decades.
Websites can too.
If you know the kind of articles your readers like, you can find ads that your readers will like.
Free speech is a thing in the EU too.
To become a member of the EU, you have to first join the Council of Europe and its European Convention on Human Rights – article 10 of which guarantees the right to free expression. The EU also has its own Charter of Fundamental Rights which says the same thing. And the plan is for the EU to become a party to the Convention in its own right, although that's got bogged down in technical legal disputes and still hasn't happened, despite the 2009 Lisbon Treaty mandating it.
The US First Amendment has no exceptions as worded, but the US Supreme Court has read some into it. The Convention has exceptions listed in the text, although they are vaguely defined – but like the US, the European Court of Human Rights has developed extensive case law on the scope of those exceptions.
The big difference in practice is the US exceptions end up being significantly more narrow than those in Europe. However, given in both, the details of the exceptions are in case law – courts can and do change their mind, so this difference could potentially change (either by narrowing or broadening) in the decades to come.
https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/human-rights/human-right...
> "Article 10 of the Human Rights Act: Freedom of expression
1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.
2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary."
Seems to be about as strong as the Soviet Constitution's protections: https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/77cons02....
> Seems to be about as strong as the Soviet Constitution's protections:
In the 2015 case Perinçek v. Switzerland, the European Court of Human Rights applied Article 10 to find against a Swiss law making it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide. Can you imagine a Soviet court ever striking down a genocide denial law?
The decision is controversial because it introduces a double standard into the Court's case law – it had previously upheld laws criminalising Holocaust denial, now it sought to distinguish the Holocaust from the Armenian genocide in a way many find arbitrary and distasteful – the consistent thing would be to either allow denying both or disallow denying both.
But still, it just shows how mistaken your Soviet comparison is.
It would be worth a try to outlaw compensation for advertising. The spirit of free speech is usually that you aren’t being paid for it.
Suppose a company wants to write some product documentation so customers and prospective customers know what features their product has and how to use them. They hire someone to write the documentation and then someone else to distribute it. Is there a good way to distinguish this from advertising?
The most plausible way would be if the one you're paying to distribute it has some kind of exclusive control or market power over the distribution channel so that you're paying them a premium over competing distributors. But then wouldn't the best way to prevent them from extracting that premium to be to make it so nobody has exclusive control over distribution channels, e.g. by breaking up concentrated markets or requiring federated protocols?
>Suppose a company wants to write some product documentation so customers and prospective customers know what features their product has and how to use them. They hire someone to write the documentation and then someone else to distribute it. Is there a good way to distinguish this from advertising?
Yes. You self host it as a company, and it can only be reproduced (if they wish) in outlets (say review sites) when there's no payment or compensation of any kind involved for that.
It's a corporation though. It can't do anything without paying someone to do it, unless someone volunteers to do it for free, which isn't very likely. And how do you self-host distribution? You would have to run your own fiber to every customer's house or spin up your own postal service or you're paying someone to do that.
There are legal definitions of advertising, I’m sure the courts will be able to figure it out.
The "legal definition of advertising" is the thing you have to write into the law you want to enact. If you can't answer the question as the proponent of the proposal then how is a judge expected to do it?
What the parent is getting at is it's not a mystery, such definitions already exist in all kinds of jurisdictions.
In any case it's trivial to come up with such a definition that covers most cases. Doesn't matter if it doesn't cover some gray areas or 100% of it. Laws can be supplemented and ammended.
We don't have an all-encompassing definition of porn either, but we have legal definitions, and we have legal frameworks regarding it.
> Doesn't matter if it doesn't cover some gray areas or 100% of it.
That's exactly the thing that matters when you're dealing with something where every loophole is going to have a caravan of trucks driving through it.
> We don't have an all-encompassing definition of porn either, but we have legal definitions, and we have legal frameworks regarding it.
You're picking the thing which is a hopeless disaster as your exemplar?
Easy: free speech was never meant for and fought for advertising. Any judicial body who says otherwise is bullshiting people.
Conflating advertising with free speech is like conflating sex work with reproductive rights.
Outside of US free speech isn't the carte blanche it is stateside. There are guardrails, there are limitations pretty much everywhere else. Even in the US This militant application is fairly recent, post 1980s.
You don't need to ban advertising, you just need to ban paying for advertising. That doesn't harm free speech. When there's no money to be made the problem will sort itself out.
That's gonna probably just create a bunch of loopholes or hacks like paying with favors instead of cash
Loopholes can be addressed on a case-by-case basis. A solution being imperfect is not a good reason to leave the problem completely unaddressed.
This by the way is my understanding of why the EU writes laws the way they do.
If they just banned infinite scrolling someone would come up with something equivalent that works slightly differently. Now they need a whole new law. It’s just constant whack-a-mole.
So instead they seem to ban goals. Your thing accomplishes that goal? It’s banned.
It’s a pretty different way than how we seem to do things in the US. But I can see upsides.
That's the same in every domain when there's a profit. Doesn't mean laws and bans don't reduce the related activity dramatically.
I'm not following the relationship - because you'd have to pay, thus it's not "free" speech? It's hard to argue that having to pay a minimal fee (of let's say $1 per month) would be something against free speech. But the payment shall remain anonymous obviously.
What are you on about? Who’s speech? The speech of a massive multinational corporation? No thanks. I want the freedom to browse without getting pointless products shoved down my throat.
>How will you ban that without infringing on free speech
You don't, but the EU doesn't need to care about American ideas of free speech. This is actually in some sense the biggest hurdle to all of this, the psychologically defensive posture that somehow assumes that on European territory this should even be a concern. Also as a sidenote this is even within America a kind of revisionist history, the 20th century had plenty of broadcasting and licensing rules. This unfettered, deregulated commercial environment is even in the US a creature of the last ~40-50 years, and those unchained companies, not unironically, then went on to convince everyone to defend that state of affairs given each opportunity.
I'd say the first amendment is due for an overhaul anyway for a variety of reasons. (Heck, the whole constitution is.)
You can't say something like that and refuse to elaborate
Which parts specifically?
They already effectively banned the mechanism behind most online advertising with the GDPR, it’s just been really, really poorly enforced.
So much so that one wonders whether that was the point.
Make a lot of noise about privacy, force massive spend in the general direction of the EU, fund a new layer of bureaucracy, and actually do nothing to harm the toxic business models that were nominally the impetus for all this. Because someone’s gotta pay for all this new “privacy” infrastructure…
Perfect idea, the internet should only be for rich people. After all, who cares about the 50% of the planet that can barely afford a coffee? Or the millions of small businesses that are only able to survive because of targeted ads? Fuck 'em all, because people can't be trusted to use their own devices properly!
Poor people pay more for ads (as part of product price), and suffer more because of ads (from misleading advertising for shit products like junk food and drugs, to having certain out of reach lifestyles based on purchasing crap they don't need hammered on them and getting in debt). They also pay with having a worse media landscape, worse social media, and many more.
People would also be better of without 90% of the ad-driven internet.
Plain text with no tracking is cheaper than coffee.
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.
I’ve never figured out what I think advertising should be. I currently do basically everything I can to get rid of it in my life.
I’m totally fine with outlining targeted advertising. But even classic broadcast stuff poses the dilemma for me.
I have absolutely noticed I miss out some. As an easy example I don’t tend to know about new TV shows or movies that I might like the way I used to. There’s never that serendipity where you were watching the show and all of a sudden a trailer from a movie comes on and you say “What is THAT? I’ve got to see that.”
Maybe some restaurant I like is moving into the area. Maybe some product I used to like is now back on the market. It really can be useful.
Sure the information is still out there and I could seek it out, but I don’t.
On the other hand I do not miss being assaulted with pharmaceutical ads, scam products, junk food ads, whatever the latest McDonald’s toy is, my local car dealerships yelling at me, and so much other trash.
I’ve never figured out how someone could draw a line to allow the useful parts of advertising without the bad parts.
“You’re only allowed to show a picture of your product, say its name, and a five word description of what it’s for”.
Nothing like that is gonna be workable.
Such a hard problem.
what if ads were displayed only on request? “hi, ad page, I need some shoes, let’s go!”
So basically what Google & Amazon does and ban what Meta & Apple does ?
Can I get an amen.
>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)
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.
> 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.
Life is complex and beautiful and trying to regulate every possible outcome beforehand just makes it boring and depressing.
We should just let people with overwhelming amounts of money research and fund new ways to trick people's lizard brains into giving them even more money.
If you’re going to organize your society around the theory that humans don’t actually possess free will, you’re going to produce a fair number of outcomes that a classical liberal would find abhorrent.
It's only assuming that free will requires effort to exert. They shouldn't be required to waste that effort on defending themselves from attempts to trick them into buying things they don't need.
People aren't lizards, however. You demonstrate that by engaging in the distinctly unlizardlike behavior of employing a false dichotomy to imply the opposite.
What it does is allow for selective enforcement, making it possible to go after any company at will.
When rules are vague enough you can pretty much always find a rule someone is 'breaking' depending on how you argue it.
It's why countries don't just have a single law that says "don't be evil".
No, that's what case law is for. Modelling the zillion little details. One party claims something breaks a law another claims it doesn't, and then we decide which is true. The only alternative is an infinitely detailed law.
No, case law is when the interpretation of the law is ambiguous in specific cases where the law as written intends for a specific meaning.
This is different, it is intentionally ambiguous precisely so bureaucrats get to choose winners and losers instead of consumers.
But how do you stop the boring and depressing - and abusive and manipulative parts?
I'm not saying legislation is a good solution but you seem to be making a poetic plea that benefits the abusers.
>I'm not saying legislation is a good solution but you seem to be making a poetic plea that benefits the abusers.
Only if you believe everyone else has no agency of their own. I think most people outgrow these things once they have something more interesting in their lives. Or once they're just bored.
Back when this thing was new, everyone was posting pictures of every food item they try, every place they've been to etc.. that seems to slowly change to now where there are a lot more passive consumers compared to a few polished producers.
If you're calling people delivering the content "abusers", what would you call people creating the content for the same machine?
I don't believe people have no agency.
But I do believe we overestimate our own agency. Or more importantly society is often structured on the assumption that we have more agency then we actually do.
because some people suffer from mental health issues and need help and encouragement to break these behaviours.
And companies should not be allowed to predate on the vulnerable.
where does it stop though? I suffer from cant-stop-eating-nutella but should we shut down ferrero? it is simply not possible to protect the vulnerable in a free society. any protection only gives power into the wrong hands and will eventually get weaponized to protect “vulnerable” (e.g. our kids from learning math cause some ruling party likes their future voters dumb)
I would say the core problem is that we lack a goal as society. If you only care about making money stuff like this happens regardless how many regulations you do.
> It's important to note they aren't creating laws against infinite scrolling, but are ruling against addictive design and pointing to infinite scrolling as an example of it.
If the EU passes a law that seems general but start giving out specific examples ahead of time, they’re outlawing those specific examples. That’s how they work, even if you read the law closely and comply with the letter of the law. And they’ll take a percentage of your global revenue while people shout “malicious compliance” in the virtual streets if they don’t get their way.
I 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.
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
> I asked myself, "well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?".
Only allowing algorithmic feeds/recommendations on dedicated subpages to which the user has to navigate, and which are not allowed to integrate viewing the content would be an excellent start IMO.
to me it isn't about addictive design, it is about infinite scrolling jerking/straining my eyes (and thanks to that strain, it brings me back to reality, and i immediately disconnect from the content thus avoiding whatever addiction it could have sucked me in).
That actually makes me think that any page containing addictive design elements should, similar to cigarette warning, carry a blinking, geocities style, header or footer with "WARNING: Ophthalmologist General and Narcologist General warn about dangers of addictive elements on this page".
> 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.
Assuming it was "just" about banning infinite scrolling. Not saying it is a good idea, but right now I cannot think of a legitimate use case where you would need it, unless your goal is engagement.
I've seen it used in non-addictive ways for search results (both specialized[1] and generic global search engines) and portfolios (for showcasing work progressively not merely constantly appending content to the end of singularly viewed work like say news sites do now), off the top of my head.
[1] Eg: printables.com (for open source, 3D print files)
Or just help you avoid clicking next next while searching for something you want.
Although there is a special place in hell for those who put a website options for customer care at the bottom of an infinite scrolling page...
a webgame or a document browser, e.g. side scrollers, topdown/bottom up scroller, continuous page view.
I like to scroll my logs w/o pagination
But they ain't infinite (I assume). Maybe long, but finite. That is a big difference as it still gives meaning to the scrollbar. Infinite scroll is endlessly adding new content so you simply cannot scroll to the bottom.
Technically, infinite scroll is of course finite, too. Unless it adds newly created content, but if you count that as infinite then logs can be infinite too.
That's exactly why you don't write legislation to ban infinite scroll but 'addictive' design. Then it's ultimately up to the courts to decide, and they have the necessary leeway to judge that journalctl -f isn't addictive but TikTok is, even if they both use a version of infinite scroll.
I dunno, have you tried? Maybe you just need to scroll faster.
if your systemlog is very active or very verbose, this will happen.
i do get the idea though. abusive infinate scroll games/exploits, the compulsion to "finish" the feed.
> 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.
I wouldn't worry about that. You're ignoring politics, and what this actually is. If the EU had a real problem with addictive designs and social media the time to move against it was of course 10+ years ago. They do not intend, not even remotely, to sabotage the profit machines that those companies are, they just want political weapons against the companies. The intention here is not to cure addiction, destroy profits, the intention is to use economic power to achieve political ends. The EU is built on this, it just didn't use to involve that many private companies.
Like most famous EU laws, this is not a law for people. Like the Banking regulations, the DMA, the GPDR, the AI act, this law cannot be used by individuals to achieve their rights against companies and certainly not against EU states, who have repeatedly shown willingness to use AI against individuals, including face recognition (which gets a lot of negative attention and strict rules in the AI act, and EU member states get to ignore both directly, and they get to allow companies to ignore the rules), violate GPDR against their own citizens (e.g. use medical data in divorce cases, or even tax debt collection, and they let private companies ignore the rules for government purposes (e.g. hospitals can be forced report if you paid for treatment rather than pay alimony, rather than pay your back taxes)). The first application of the GPDR was to remove links about Barrosso's personal history from Google.
These laws can only be used by the EU commission against specific companies. Here's how the process works: someone "files a complaint", which is an email to the EU commission (not a complaint in the legal sense, no involvement of prosecutors, or judges, or any part of the justice system of any member state at all). Then an EU commissioner starts a negotiation process and rules on the case, usually imposing billions of euros in fines or providing publicly-backed loans (in the case of banks). The vast, vast, vast majority of these complaints are ignored or "settled in love" (French legal term: the idea is that some commission bureaucrat contacts the company and "arranges things", never involving any kind of enforcement mechanism). Then they become chairman of Goldman Sachs (oops, that just happened once, giving Goldman Sachs it's first communist chairman, yes really. In case you're wondering: Barrosso), or join Uber's and Salesforce's executive teams, paid through Panama paper companies.
In other words: these laws are not at all about addictive design, and saving you from it, they're about going after specific companies for political means. Google, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, ...
Ironically the EU is doing exactly what Trump did with tariffs. It's just that Trump is using a sawed-off shotgun where the EU commission is using a scalpel.
> If the EU had a real problem with addictive designs and social media the time to move against it was of course 10+ years ago.
Addictive designs and social media have changed a lot in the last 10 years, for one. But more importantly, there's no statute of limitation on making laws.
You are in all likelihood correct, it's the more realpolitik reading of it. One other more charitable interpretation would be that the EU was under the US's thumb so they never took action, but now that there is some more separation, they are willing to act against these design patterns. It's probably some combination of both elements, weighting each according to how cynical you are, and high cynicism is justified.
> Like the Banking regulations, the DMA, the GPDR, the AI act, this law cannot be used by individuals to achieve their rights against companies
Of course the GDPR gives individuals rights, counter example:
> The first application of the GPDR was to remove links about Barrosso's personal history from Google.
The GDPR is a joke. Such a law should have prevented companies from collecting data in the first place. All we got are annoying pop-ups that do nothing for our privacy.
Is it really so hard for you people to imagine that MAYBE, there's politicians that see what social media look like these days and think they might want to do something against that?
The fact that all of these companies aren't European certainly doesn't help, but if you think this and GDPR, DMA etc. are purely schemes to milk foreign companies then you've been drinking way too much cynicism juice.
> These laws can only be used by the EU commission against specific companies.
In the UK at least, the GDPR was incorporated into UK law (where it remains, essentially unmodified, even after Brexit). So it is certainly not necessary to get the EU commission involved to enforce the law. In the UK, the ICO is the relevant regulator. There are other national regulators that enforce the GDPR, such as the French CNIL.
One of the best replies on hackernews in years. Hear. Hear.
The EU realized they can extort the US big tech. The EU will now just focus on laws and taxing (the war in Ukraine isn't their problem). And frankly, we should just ignore EU laws in the US.
Companies that exist in the US don't have to obey EU laws. For instance the UK tried to tell 4chan that it needs to obey the UK Online Safety Act, and 4chan replied with, essentially, "fuck off".
Companies that try to do business in the EU have to follow EU laws because the EU has something that can be used as leverage to make them comply. But if a US company doesn't have any EU presence, there's no need to obey EU laws.
And the rest of the world should ignore US laws. Drug law, copyright law and of course, patent law. Let's throw it all in the bin, where it belongs.
> They do not intend, not even remotely, to sabotage the profit machines that those companies are
I think you are projecting values on entities that don't share those values. I don't think they'd have any problem destroying a pile of companies and not enabling replacements; they are not pro-business, and they have not shown a history of regulating in a fashion that's particularly designed to enable home-grown EU businesses. Predictability and consistency of enforcement are not their values, either. They don't seem to have any problem saying "act in what we think the spirit of the law is, and if you think you can just understand and follow the letter of it we'll hurt you until you stop".
"The wording here is fascinating, mainly because they're effectively acting as arbiters of "vibes"."
Wikitionary (2026)
Noun
vibe (plural vibes)
1. (informal, originally New Age jargon, often in the plural) An atmosphere or aura felt to belong to a person, place or thing. [c. 1960s]I hope this goes through. Trillion dollar companies are waging a war on our attention, using everything at their disposal to make these apps addictive. It isn't a fair fight and the existence of infinite feeds is bad both for people and democracy. Regulating consumer products that cause harm to millions is nothing new.
I do so too. Dark patterns should never be acceptable.
The amount of paid shills opposing this is a good indicator that it's the right move.
> Trillion dollar companies are waging a war on our attention, using everything at their disposal to make these apps addictive.
Or you could just shut the phone off and/or not install the app. It's a simple solution, really, and one that is available at your disposal today at no cost.
Just stop using heroin. Just stop eating fast food. Just stop going to the casino. Just don't smoke anymore.
We know plenty of things are quite bad for us, and yet we find them difficult to stop. Somewhat famously difficult to stop.
I think telling people, "just don't..." trivializes how difficult that is.
It's a phone. Put it in the trash. You will not go through physiological withdrawal symptoms.
The amount of people in here right now clamoring for legislation to keep them away from electronics which they themselves purchased is mind-bogglingly insane.
And what about the increasing number of things in society that basically demand you have a phone to participate?
If it's so easy to do this, then it should also be easy to not make addictive apps right? Why are multi billion dollar companies unable to make a compliant app? They clearly have no issues paying for labor and since this is software, the labor is the true cost for compliance. Are they unable to hire devs that are unethical or what?
Shesh, maybe we should start fining individual developers too if companies aren't able to do it themselves.
Oooooof. Can I recommend you spend some time developing some empathy?
The world is complicated. People's lives are complicated (and often meditated by their phones). People's emotional and social wellbeing is complicated, and simply ghosting all your social groups on a random Tuesday is likely to cause significant problems.
It's already annoying to buy drugs just because some % of people get too addicted. Now you also want to forbid doomscrolling?
Yes. To be clear, the implication of this comment is that you would like to deregulate addictive drugs...?
If ~20% of users get an addiction problem I think its not that clear it should be forbidden for everyone.
If basically everyone who takes it for a while gets addicted and dies of course it should be forbidden.
So I would argue that cigaretts should not be allowed but we could discuss cocaine.
Empathy? For the doomscrollers?
Please tell me you're trolling, Mr. 6-day-old Account, I'll feel better.
If "scrolling == heroin" is the comparison we're working with here, then SF, Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver BC are living examples that empathy doesn't work.
Why write like this? This is what sick internet communities look like. Mocking people for their account age, advocating for hating people for the sin of being addicted to social media. This is antisocial behavior, and we should do everything in our power to eject it from the small remaining pockets of sanity on the internet.
If we weren't meant to judge someone for his account age, it wouldn't show up in green.
Social media addiction is a mental illness worthy of public mockery. Imagine if alcoholism could be cured by putting your phone in a drawer.
Next time I see a guy in a doorway with a needle sticking out of his arm I'll be sure to tell him, "I know how you feel man, I can't stop scrolling through Instagram. Sometimes, if I'm lucky, a girl will DM me her boobs. It's tough, these addictions."
Enough with the melodrama. Grow up.
By this logic, you can cure alcoholism by simply not buying alcohol, surely.
I think it's really bigger than that. I'm hooked myself scrolling reels, but I go to the pub after work and see retired or 50-70 year old men (barely know how to work a phone) scrolling through them as well. That's when you know they're addicting as anything. Can't go anywhere nowadays in public without hearing someone scrolling through reels who don't know how to behave themselves in public by turning down the volume or wearing earphones.
The brain is part of your physiology. And people do go through withdrawal symptoms when they stop using social media that’s been designed for addiction.
> It's a phone. Put it in the trash.
Dude, it's 2025.
A few years ago, I accidentally left my phone at home when I went to work, and when I arrived I found that because I no longer had my 2FA device, I couldn't do any work until I went home again and picked it up.
I'm fine without doomscrolling. I've gone from the minimum possible service with internet, to pure PAYG with no internet, and I'm fine with that. But society has moved on, and for a lot of people, phones are no longer an option.
And for a meaningful fraction of people, somehow, I don't get it either, TikTok is the news. Not metaphorically, it's actually where they get news from.
> Dude, it's 2025.
Actually, it's 2026 and has been for six weeks.
> A few years ago, I accidentally left my phone at home when I went to work, and when I arrived I found that because I no longer had my 2FA device, I couldn't do any work until I went home again and picked it up.
Sounds like a personal problem. There are many other 2FA authenticators available. Yubikey, TOTP tokens, smart cards, etc. Using a smartphone (which can lose power at any time) for critical authentication was a silly idea to begin with. I would refuse anything work-related on my personal phone.
> Actually, it's 2026 and has been for six weeks.
D'oh. But fair.
> There are many other 2FA authenticators available.
Specified by job, so no choice in this matter.
> I would refuse anything work-related on my personal phone.
Quite reasonable as a general rule, though my then-employer only required the 2FA app and nothing else, and in this case it would've just meant "get an additional phone".
We were literally not given the choice in the matter, in the case of $JOB. Plenty of people complained about having to use their phones to access the buildings, but that was the policy.
I suspect the next thing you're going to say is along the lines of "then just switch jobs", though.
> I suspect the next thing you're going to say is along the lines of "then just switch jobs", though.
I mean even that might not work out. We just switched to MS Teams last year and Microsoft uses a push-based app, not TOTP or other offline keys like we'd used before. And Teams just seems to be getting more popular...
> I would refuse anything work-related on my personal phone.
What a wonderful privileged position you hold. If only everyone could afford to tell their employer to pound sand in the same heroic manner you have undertaken.
So brave.
This is unrealistic.
It's unrealistic to not install TikTok?
Laws are not created to be malleable about the population's trivial mental illnesses.
We don't need new laws on the books because some people are incapable of turning their phones off. They have addictive personalities and will fulfill this by other means, while everyone high-fives claiming success.
For many people, it is unrealistic to uninstall Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Instagram, Bluesky, whatever the fuck else all at the same time.
I'm proud of you that you are as disconnected as you are. I'm the same -- ditched my addictive social media accounts back in like 2011 -- but not everyone is like us.
> but not everyone is like us
There will never be anything close to uniformity, so we must decide if we cripple freedom to protect the weak while increasing bureaucracy and authoritarianism, or allow natural selection to take its course while improving treatment of symptoms.
I'm empathetic to the struggle of addiction, which is a real and terrible thing, but I don't think we should create vague nanny laws as a solution. Even if you're an addict, personal responsibility is still a thing.
> allow natural selection to take its course while improving treatment of symptoms.
I have a feeling natural selection will take its course at the level of nations, with nations that do protect their weak surviving and the ones that let profit extractors exploit and abuse theirs dying off.
Darwinism exists at the level of nations, but I think you may have the outcome exactly backwards.
>cripple freedom to protect the weak
This is an exaggeration intended to provoke.
>allow natural selection to take its course
This is hideous.
>I'm empathetic to the struggle of addiction
You are very strongly implying that this is untrue.
> we must decide if we cripple freedom to protect the weak
Well, we do want to protect the weak (that's a function of society, after all), and I'm totally okay with removing infinite scrolling from social media apps (or "crippling freedom" as you put it). I don't see any significant benefit it provides to individuals or society. Indeed, it has a negative impact on both. So it sounds like a win/win.
Don't put words in my mouth. I called your comment unrealistic, holistically.
Engineering addiction should be a punishable offense. It already is if you’re a chemist.
"Just" is the all time champion weight lifter of the English language.
You could say that about literally every single type of addictive behavior present on the face of the planet. You could just stop smoking and/or not buying cigarettes. You could just stop drinking and/or stop buying alcohol. It's a completely pointless observation. There's a reason why these are addictions.
Drug stores should stock morphine available without age restriction and if you don't want it, just don't buy it.
The whole point is that these companies are spending a lot of cash making sure that their products are as addicting as possible to as many people as possible, so "just" shutting the phone off isn't a viable strategy.
It's as idiotic a statement as saying "Just stop smoking" around the time when big tobacco was lobbying politicians and bribing scientists and doctors to straight up lie about the deleterious effects of tobacco. It's engineered in such a way as to make it basically impossible for a large swathe of the population to "just not use" the apps.
Or the people can decide how their society functions.
This learned (or lobbied) helplessness of never changing any laws and we are just stuck with this way of life is silly.
Given how badly scrolling has cooked the brain of the average American, seems like a smart thing for the EU to ban.
And based on some of the replies in this thread we better act fast before it's too late.
This comes from the same EU that's wholeheartedly embracing gambling across their member states, gambling mind you that children can just as easily jump into with their phones and some will, but devastating for grown-ups just as much.
They're not alone in this by any means, America has also opened their doors for all forms of gambling like Kalshi which now even sponsors news networks of all things.
The EU has this disconnect with the things they push, which makes sense considering their size and the speed at which it moves. One example that comes to mind is how they're both pushing for more privacy online while also pushing for things such as chat control which is antithetical to privacy.
Does social media need regulating? Yeah. Is infinite scrolling where they should be focusing? Probably not, there's more important aspects that should be tackled and are seemingly ignored.
In Spain I can’t even have a meal at a restaurant, get groceries or go to IKEA without someone trying to sell me lottery tickets. They really need to regulate that.
Is your country allowed to ban it even if the EU in general allows it?
The hunt has started: EU burocracy vs TK. In the past EU has rarely directly attacked a single company with so specific points. But anytime they remained consistent and dedicaded to their target and usually won. It just took a long time (from a few years till decades). The only time they lost a policy was at stopping summer-time switch which was cancelled when Covid started.
They avoid to mention the rest of social media platforms, which happen to be US based. It seems they choose a single quick and easy China-based target more like an experiment to decide for the rest. The key point is when: either the current kids will experience it or those that are not yet born.
They should move to kill the cookie popup
You don't have to have a cookie popup if you don't do stupid stuff. Don't use anything other than strictly necessary cookies and you are good to go.
Disclaimer: I anal and this is not legal advice.
Having worked at multiple companies and talked to multiple legal teams about this, they tend to be very conservative. So the guidance I've gotten is that if we store any information at all on the person's computer, even to know whether they've visited the site before, we still need a cookie banner.
Basically, the law created enough fear among the lawyers that software developers are being advised to include the cookie banner in cases where it isn't strictly needed.
But it should not be obnoxious, look at steam how is a small banner with two simple actions, vs all other cookie banners.
You literally just described something obnoxious
Agreed! Many sites don't actually comply with the GDPR because they don't provide simple tools to control the cookies and instead force you through a flow. Part of my gripe with the law is the way those violations are not being systematically cited.
If I see a cookie banner I often bounce.
You'd have much better retention rates if you don't cover up the content the viewer is trying to view.
How would you like it if I shoved a banner in your face the moment you walked into a store and forced you to punch a hole in it in order to view items on the shelves?
There is a push for something like that: https://www.adweek.com/commerce/cooler-screens-rolls-out-to-...
So? You're not arguing that we should get rid of 'reasonable' laws out of misinterpretations of them, are you?
Laws should be evaluated on the effect they actually have on society, rather than the effect that we wish they had on society. I am very critical of laws that fail this test, and I think they should be updated to improve their performance. We want the right outcome, not the right rules.
> even to know whether they've visited the site before
So uh, don't do that.
You don't need to notify if you use cookies for required functionality like login sessions or remembering a functional setting.
If you're tracking whether they're returning or not your activity is exactly the kind of behaviour the rule is covering because, in legal terms, it's skeezy as fuck.
It's a site where they log in and we store a cookie.
"Strictly necessary cookies — These cookies are essential for you to browse the website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas of the site. Cookies that allow web shops to hold your items in your cart while you are shopping online are an example of strictly necessary cookies. These cookies will generally be first-party session cookies. While it is not required to obtain consent for these cookies, what they do and why they are necessary should be explained to the user."
Right, and then the legal teams tell me they don't care, and we should put up the cookie banner anyway. I feel like you didn't read my original comment.
That just means your legal team is lazy or incompetent. I work for a massive company that handles extremely sensitive PII and we don't have a cookie banner, because we don't need to have a cookie banner. GitHub doesn't have one, Gitlab doesn't have one.
> You don't need to notify if you use cookies for required functionality like login sessions or remembering a functional setting
Nobody wants to be the EU test case on precisely how "required functionality" is defined. Regardless of what the plaintext of the law says, it should be self-evident that companies will be more conservative than that, especially when the cost is as low as adding one cooke banner and tracking one preference.
Yep. GitHub wrote a blog post on removing their cookie banner years ago.
https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/no-cookie-for...
>At GitHub, we want to protect developer privacy, and we find cookie banners quite irritating, so we decided to look for a solution. After a brief search, we found one: just don’t use any non-essential cookies. Pretty simple, really.
Go to that link, these are the cookies it writes (at least for me):
* _ga
* _gcl_au
* octo
* ai_session
* cfz_adobe
* cfz_google-analytics_v4
* GHCC
* kndctr_
*_AdobeOrg_identity
* MicrosoftApplicationsTelemtryDeviceId
* OptanonConsent
* zaraz-consent
Sounds like the marketing team finally won.
I get a cookie banner accessing that page.
Don't several of the EU's own government information websites use cookie popups?
if you don't track users you don't need GDPR consent dialogs
I think in the past you still needed some info box in the corner with a link to the data policy. But I think that isn't needed anymore (to be clear not a consent dialog, a informational only thing). Also you can without additional consent store a same site/domain cookie remembering you dismissing or clicking on it and not showing it again (btw. same for opting out of being tracked).
But there are some old pre-GDPR laws in some countries (not EU wide AFIK) which do require actual cookie banners (in difference to GDPR consent dialogs or informational things). EU want them removed, but politic moves slow AF so not sure what the sate of this is.
So yes without checking if all the older misguided laws have been dismissed, you probably should have a small banner at the bottom telling people "we don't track you but for ... reasons .. [link] [ok]" even if you don't track people :(. But also if they haven't gotten dismissed they should be dismissed very soon.
Still such a banner is non obnoxious, little annoying (on PC, Tablet, a bit more annoying on Phone). And isn't that harass people to allow you to spy on them nonsense we have everywhere.
It is up to the websites to do that, and to the users to boycott those websites showing cookie popups.
The regulatory body could clarify that a DO NOT TRACK header should be interpreted as a "functional/necessary cookies only" request, so sites may not interrupt visitors with a popup modal/banner if it's set.
The do not track header was good enough in this German case: https://dig.watch/updates/german-court-affirms-legal-signifi...
Having the EU decide on a technical implementation is more of a last ditch effort, like what happened with more than a decade of the EU telling the industry to get its shit together and unify under a common charging port.
Just so long as that means killing all the tracking, not just going back to hiding it.
ahhhh, every time the same discussion
1. GDPR consent dialogs are not cookie popups, most things you see are GDPR consent dialogs
2. GDPR consent dialogs are only required if you share data, i.e. spy on the user
3. GDPR had from the get to go a bunch of exceptions, e.g. you don't need permission to store a same site cookie indicating that you opted out of tracking _iff_ you don't use it for tracking. Same for a lot of other things where the data is needed for operation as long as the data is only used with that thing and not given away. (E.g. DDOS protection, bot detection, etc.)
4. You still had to inform the user but this doesn't need any user interacting, accepting anything nor does it need to be a popup blocking the view. A small information in the corner of the screen with a link to the data policy is good enough. But only if all what you do falls under 3. or non personal information. Furthermore I think they recently have updated it to not even require that, just having a privacy policy in a well know place is good enough but I have to double check. (And to be clear this is for data you don't need permission to collect, but like any data you collect it's strictly use case bound and you still have to list how its used, how long stored etc. even if you don't need permissions). Also to be clear if you accept the base premise of GDPR it's pretty intuitive to judge if it's an exception or not.
5. in some countries, there are highly misguided "cookie popup" laws predating GDPR (they are actually about cookies, not data collection in general). This are national laws and such the EU would prefer to have removed. Work on it is in process but takes way to long. I'm also not fully sure about the sate of that. So in that context, yes they should and want to kill "cookie popups". That just doesn't mean what most people think it does (as it has nothing to do with GDPR).
Kill cookie pop up dark patterns*
But that would require directing the anger at specific companies (and their 2137 ad partners) rather than at an easy target of the banana-regulating evil authority.
Sadly whenever this kind of discussion pops up it's usually a very unpopular take.
Simply banning most forms of advertising would be extremely welcome and might largely solve the cookie-popup issue, too.
Note that, back when it started (pre-GDPR cookie banners), this was pure malicious compliance in 90% of cases.
Most sites didn't need a banner. Even post-GDPR, many use-cases don't need one.
Well then where would be the incentive to download apps/not clear your cookies...? :-)
and then the inventor should go to prison along with the guys who design the UI of microwave ovens (joke)
The EU's mission statement seems to be to make the internet as difficult to legally utilize as possible.
I'm interested to see what measures people will use to get around the increasingly bizarre restrictions. Perhaps an official browser extension for each platform that reimplements bureaucrat-banned features?
This sounds like a type of insanity. Why would anyone care about something like this to the degree they feel like expressing the opinion publicly let alone in a political regulatory body is beyond me.
Whatever happened to freedom?
Maybe you're not the type of person who's struggled with addiction, but it can do awful things to you. Yes, including being addicted to scrolling social media. It screws with your head to the point where you don't know how to live in the moment anymore.
IMO it's a feature that's not valuable enough to justify the fact that it contributes to poor quality of life for people who can't put it down.
The first step to get on track in life is to stop blaming the outside for all problems. Yes some people had really bad luck but in the end you can only change yourself.
I suspect there's not a huge amount of overlap between those who would like this banned and those who are targeted by it.
> Why would anyone care about something like this ...
Because it is a dangerous addiction [1] with recognised adverse effects on human health. Like sugar, tobacco, or drugs.
While I agree it's not a net positive, I find it dangerous to equate all addictions.
He’s not equating all addictions beyond saying they are all addictions and should be treated as such.
But that's the problem - different substances require different solutions.
You reduce sugar intake, not eliminate it.
You eliminate cocaine intake, not just reduce it.
Treating social media design as equal to something that can kill people in excess unnerves me.
> Treating social media design as equal to something that can kill people in excess unnerves me.
As it should, because there's a really obvious "slippery slope" argument right there.
But… it can kill people.
There is a certain fraction of the population who, for whatever reason, can be manipulated, to the point of becoming killers or of causing injury to themselves. Social media… actually, worse than that, all A/B testing everywhere, can stumble upon this even when it isn't trying to (I would like to believe that OpenAI's experience with 4o-induced psychosis was unintentional).
When we know which tools can be used for manipulation, it's bad to keep allowing it to run unchecked. Unchecked, they are the tool of propagandists.
But… I see that slippery slope, I know that any government which successfully argues itself the power to regulate this, even for good, is one bad election away from a dictatorship that will abuse the same reasoning and powers to evil ends.
There's literally a name for using this on purpose: stochastic terrorism.
There's also a very good TED talk on this topic from 8 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFTWM7HV2UI
It looks to me like you're adding the conflation to "all addictions" because you can clearly distinguish between "sugar" and "cocaine" as both forms of addictions.
Why would you not be willing to include "scrolling" as another form of addiction? Just because it's labeled the same way you yourself are demonstrating that we handle that in different ways.
Social Media is being treated as "sugar" in this instance instead of as "cocaine".
Lets do the nanny state!
(As I get older, unironically. I want my productive worker bees to be drug free, addiction free, enjoying simple pleasures that do not put me at risk. They pay Social Security. Everything is nice and safe. Freedom? Yeah no thanks, get to work and pay your taxes.)
The thing is, why do you care? We like it this way. These companies are a cancer and they should be erradicated.
You think that attacking these horrible companies is bad for our freedoms, we think our freedoms are fine with it.
I mean, lets do the opposite where a large corporation gets people intentionally addicted to drugs and then bilks them for every penny they have until they are husks. Remember, free market comes first!
Thank you from talking about the Holy Freedom, my brother. Looking forward to enjoying further freedoms thanks to laws that protect me from behavior that makes me unfree and in need to constantly control me and my surroundings!
> Whatever happened to freedom?
Freedom from, or freedom to?
‘Freedom does not consist in doing what we want, but in overcoming what we have for an open future; the existence of others defines my situation and is the condition of my freedom. They oppress me if they take me to prison, but they are not oppressing me if they prevent me from taking my neighbour to prison.’ -- Simone de Beauvoir>Why would anyone care about something like this to the degree they feel like expressing the opinion publicly
Why would anyone publicly express any negative opinion about the effects of doomscrolling? I don't think I'm uncharitably paraphrasing, right?
We live in a society. We chose rules that we think will make society better. Freedom is meaningless without context. Freedom to doomscroll or freedom from doomscrolling. American propaganda really likes to divorce the concept from reality.
Social Media companies have actively and intentionally tried to make their products more addicting... now they have to face the very obvious consequences of that decision.
Out of curiosity, do you or have you ever worked for one of the FAANGs?
We have great freedoms in Europe. We just need to apply in advance with our detailed plan, in three copies and the Commission will decide whether to deny our application or to deny it and fine us for unhealthy thoughts, too.
Sarcasm now, but maybe what the near future will look like...
More to the point: this is indeed a massive overreach with the Commission being the police, judge, jury, and executioner... what could go wrong? Exactly what we are seeing is taking shape, precedent by precedent.
Why would someone care about a destructive addiction that's plaguing the lives of the majority of the planet, leading to mental health issues and proliferating massive levels of misinformation. I wonder. Freedom to be manipulated by algorithms, yay!
it turns out that all those jokes about EU regulating the curvature of the cucumber were on to something
>Whatever happened to freedom?
Turns out it was a big lie you've told yourself so you can let the rich and powerful get away with atrocities.
Hey, we all have free speech, it's just that I can buy a whole lot more of it than you can.
Forcing designs on companies... wtf is going on here
Companies are part of society and we have a rule-based society.
Imagine a society that had rules on the designs of haircuts, and punishments to enforce those rules.
Except people aren’t addicted to haircuts and presumably don’t spend 8 hours a day staring at their hair in the mirror.
I should be able to stare at my phone 8 hours a day without government interference if I want to. No one is holding me at gunpoint. It's my phone and it doesn't hurt anyone else.
Nobody is holding you or other addicts at gunpoint to stop that, so what are you complaining about?
This is pretty normal? I work for a company that develops lab machines and we have a bunch of designs we have to follow:
ISO 12100 (Safety of Machinery): Sets general, fundamental principles for design, risk assessment, and reduction (Type A standard).
ISO 13849-1 (Safety-Related Parts of Control Systems): Defines performance levels and categories for safety-related components (Type B standard).
ISO 13850 Safety of machinery – Emergency stop function – Principles for design
And that's just some of them.
I mean, clearly the companies at the top can't be trusted to do what's in the best interests of the users. So at some point someone has to do something. If this is the correct something that remains to be seen.
is this your first year on the internet?
How many days before the only legal social media in the EU is the official government run platform?
Facinating that they landed on infinite scrolling as the problem to spend time and energy on instead of all the other things happening online that have an impact on society.
Genuinely curious about the actual data on this.
Does anyone have a link to a reputable, sizable study?
I see some synergy between this and the "iOS keyboard sucks" thread. Maybe they can regulate that next.
I'm curious how they plan to pretend to enforce this. Will you need a loisence to implement infinite scroll?
Looks like the EU can just get a feature flag to use pagination or a "Load More" button? Doesn't seem as big of a deal as enforcing USB-C.
Though if it applies to the YouTube, seems annoying when trying to find a video to watch. I usually trigger a few infinite scrolling loads to look for videos.
And I assume they'd have to specify a maximum number of items per page, or else devs could just load a huge number of items up front which would technically not be infinite scrolling but enough content to keep someone occupied for a long time.
Early on in the internet age it somewhat bothered me that every page on the www either acts like it is the first thing one reads on a topic or assumes great knowledge of the subject. With nothing in between.
Wondering about a technical solution I couldn't find anything besides fold out explanations and links to explain jargon. Neither would really bridge the gap.
One obvious theory was to keep track of what the user knows and hide things they don't need or unhide things they do. This is of course was not acceptable from a privacy perspective.
Today however you could forge a curriculum for countless topics and [artificially] promote a great diversity of entry level videos. If the user is into something they can be made to watch more entry level videos until they are ready for slightly more advanced things. You can reward creators for filling gaps between novice and expert level regardless of view count.
Almost like Khan academy but much slower, more playful and less linear.
Imagine programming videos that assume the reader knows everything about each and every tool involved. The algorithm could seek out the missing parts and feed them directly into your addiction or put bounties on the scope.
Next: Gaming company sued because a game is fun to play.
Here here. Nothing is infinite except for God, I say.
Its addictive design in general, but only for Tik-tok. If it works and is applied to others it will be the best thing the EU has ever done.
Good. Infinite scrolling is a scourge. Give me back my time ordered feed that if I navigate away stays on the page where I left off.
I admire the EU's attempts at things like the cookie law, age verification, and tackling the addictiveness of infinite scrolling, but the implementation is pure theater.
Trackers have much more effective techniques than "cookies", kids trivially bypass verification, and designers will make a joke of tell me you have infinite scrolling without telling me you have infinite scrolling. When you are facing trillions of dollars of competition to your law, what do you think is going to happen?
Maybe if there was an independent commission that had the authority to rapidly investigate and punish (i.e. within weeks) big tech for attempting engagement engineering practices it might actually have some effect. But trying to mandate end user interfaces is wasting everyone's time putting lipstick on a pig.
This was long overdue. I hope killing other dark patterns that feast on attention or hunt on flaws in human psychology follow. However, my only concern is how this will be taken care of. I hope they learned something from the GDPR fiasco.
As long as this doesn't create yet another cookie popup UX nonsense we've ended up with...
Oh, no, this will kill all slop innovation!
Dunno about using legislative moves, but yes please. The stupidest solution to a problem no one had. Moving layouts, unreachable footers, no or unsatisfactory indication of one's position.
All just to remove navigation clicks no one minded and reduce server loads, in exchange for users suffering laggy lazy loading (or, what a hate-inducing pattern!) inability to preload, print, search or link.
> We value your privacy
> We use cookies and other technologies to store and access personal data on your device
Evidently you don't value privacy.
Infinite scrolling combined with the algorithmic feed is the real nasty.
Feeds should be heavily regulated, effectively they are a (personalized!) broadcast, and maybe the same strictures should apply. Definitely they should be transparent (e.g. chronological from subscribed topics), and things like veering more extreme in order to drive engagement should be outlawed.
Would it affect HackerNews? The list of topics on the main page is a form of infinite scroll.
No it's not? It's paged.
From another article:
>"Social media app TikTok has been accused of purposefully designing its app to be “addictive” by the European Commission, citing its infinite scroll, autoplay, push notification, and recommendation features."
All of these have immediate and easy replacements or workarounds. Nothing will substantially change (for the better; maybe it does for the worse, even).
Moreover, "purposefully designing something to be addictive" (and cheap to make) is the fundamental basis of late stage capitalism.
Technically this is about Tiktok's "addictive design", and their examples include "infinite scroll over time". It's totally unclear what they mean by that, or what Tiktok would have to change it to in order to be in compliance. The whole thing seems like it was written by a boomer bureaucrat who has never used Tiktok, let alone a computer.
I don't know how the EU has time for this kind of thing right now. Honestly
Yes they should be banning the political propaganda instead.
another cookie warning disaster incoming
hopefully AI will wake them up and save us from all this nonsense
Jesus the EU is becoming a dystopian nightmare.
What exactly is dystopian about protecting developing minds of children and teens from detrimental effects and social media addiction caused by companies like Meta and Bytedance. These companies profit immensely from being quasi unregulated.
Where are you suggest we move to escape this dystopian nightmare?
To Muskland where corporations own everything including the infinite scroll feeds.
You can buy as much freedom as you want there.
Yeah exactly, right? Europe is the dystopian nightmare, sure.
How low do you have to sink to defend a legislature attacking the privacy of the sovereign again and again? Pathetic.
Von der Leyen, who illegally deleted her SMS and is being investigated for corruption, conflict of interest and destruction of evidence, must be glad she can count on you to defend spying on every citizen via "Chat Control" and forcing browser developers to accept any state-mandated root certificates via eIDAS.
Watch what governments do, not what they say.
This isn’t about addiction, it’s about censorship. If you limit the amount of time someone can spend getting information, and make it inconvenient with UI changes, it’s much harder to have embarrassing information spread to the masses.
Amazingly, the public will generally nod along anyway when they read governmental press releases and say “yes, yes, it’s for my safety.”
Scrolling through an infinity of AI slop videos can't really be classified as "getting information". If you want to read the news and stay up to date with the "embarrassing information" there's plenty of news websites out there.
I have a proud European coworker trying to get their H1B...
They talk about how great Europe is, how they like their 1-2 hour coffee/smoke breaks... These kind of moves give me that same vibe.
But why are so many Europeans trying to move to the US? Why isn't the opposite happening?
My hypothesis is that these kind of popular policies are short sighted. They are super popular, they use intuition and feeling. But maybe there is something missing. The unadulterated freedom has led people to enjoy these platforms. Obviously it affects the economy. So much so, even the US military has moved from Europe to Asia.
I don't typically like fiction, but it seems "I, Robot" was spot on about Europe. (Maybe mistaking new Africa for Asia)
Well, your freeeeedooooms include having to pay taxes when living outside of the US. I'd say that's a pretty big factor in deciding if it's worth it to leave the country.
Jobs in the EU don’t even pay enough to require paying taxes in the US lol. Nice try though.
They aren’t trying to move to the US? At least in western/Northern Europe.
Curious where you got your statistics?
If anything it’s probably the opposite, with more Americans wanting to move to Europe than the reverse.
Why are so many Americans trying to move to the EU? Turns out people have different wants and needs in life, and so they move to where they like best. I for one would never set foot in USA in fear of being shot, kidnapped by ICE (or shot by ICE), fear of being bankrupt by the healthcare options there if something happens to me, fear of the poison you call food, and the absolutely ignorant populace that seems to roam the streets there. I swear half the times I can't even tell if USA is a real place or some really bizarre reality TV show.
> But why are so many Europeans trying to move to the US? Why isn't the opposite happening?
Citation needed.
I took some minutes to try and find statistics, and also ChatGPT claims that the EU simply doesn't collect or publish that kind of data, so I'm wondering how you think you know.
> But why are so many Europeans trying to move to the US?
All I see in my circle is people refusing to even go on vacation in the US, let alone move there.
And in two of my circles there is concern about people who do live in the US but are not citizens. Both married US citizens, both have clean paperwork, but whereas normally it'd take considerable paranoia to expect any trouble today it seems entirely on brand. One of the US citizens is angry because of course her rural hospital is going bankrupt and she'll be left in the middle of nowhere with her foreign-born sick and gradually dying husband and somehow that's not even near the top of the agenda. The other is just keeping her head down, crossing fingers, maybe in all the excitement they won't get around to undoing Obergefell and she can stay married to the love of her life?
I do know people who've gone, only on vacation and they were exactly the sort of unthreatening rich white folks that you'd expect to have least trouble. Oh, and some US citizens who went "home" to see family at Xmas but work here.
Same here, to the point I would even avoid layovers in the US and take a more expensive flight instead. I don't want to deal with some power tripping immigration officer insisting to search my phone and social media to send me to some camp because I wrote critical comments about the current administration.
Irrational fear. So who do you think funds this propaganda? Russia or China?
Irrational fear in whose opinion?
Does this only apply to companies the commission doesn't like or will it apply to the hn app I use, my email clients, shopping sites, etc? Because it seems like the actual concern how good the algorithms are and not the UI.
This is a finding of a violation of the DSA, which only applies to services (not local reader apps), and only if they have a lot of users.
Like, a significant fraction of the country level of usage. You don't need to worry about the EU coming and taking away your HN client APK. You do need to be worried about Google doing that, though.
I bet 100$ the good intention will outcome as a terrible joke, EU dumb bureaucrats are famous for.