Curious as to where the line between “addictive feature” and "good UX" is. Is deliberate pagination actual impedance to use or merely an annoyance that's been weeded out with modern UX design?
When does a feature that simply makes your product easier to use cross into a territory that it's illegal?
What about media previews, in a platform like reddit if you can preview or expand media directly from the main list is that an “addictive feature” or just convenient design?
also interested in the larger economy, if you create a plugin that restores or adds infinite scroll to a website could you be liable for providing illegal UX?
EDIT: to clarify I'm not really griping on infinite scroll in particular, more the difficulty in regulating postitive UI/UX. Dark patterns are relatively easy to identify. If the unsubscribe button is hidden behind 3 screens and is in 3 point font that's pretty clearly a dark pattern. This seeks to regulate the opposite basically "your platform is, too easy, too good at serving your content"
This is much harder to categorize and has fuzzier boundaries. For example imagine if it applied to remembering your login for more than 24 hours. Certainly people would use your service less if they had to continuously authenticate. Are long-lived sessions good UX or encouraging "addictive" behavior?
> a feature that simply makes your product easier to use
Except it doesn't. You lose context and are now drowning in an endless morass of lazy-loaded blocks and widgets, all hiding under invisible elements. Nothing has a permanent URL, so there is zero accountably if the user was shown something that they need to reference - unless it benefits the platform. And of course, it will eventually all force reload when the page complexity exhausts the available memory, or at least when it becomes too exhausted to reliably serve ads.
Also creates a confusion that algorithm profiteers love, where before you could know a post you saw would be page 1 today and page 2 tomorrow now the homepage of every app is absolute chaos so you have to spend hours searching for something specific or you're just always seeing exactly what they want you to see (to increase engagement or whatever instead of any sensible order)
I have always hated infinite scroll because it becomes way more difficult to understand the index of a search result or piece of content. For example, if I know that each page of results contains 25 hits, then it is easy for me to see which one is the 25th hit, and then which one is the 26th one (first one on the next page).
I don't mind that the order of search results might be shifted around over time, and I understand that there is some profit motive to inserting tangentially relevant or sponsored hits, but I really wish that there were an easy way of knowing what index each result has.
This grew out of a funny little habit I sometimes have where I like to pick a random number and see what search hit that corresponds to. It becomes too tedious with infinite scroll.
The way I see it, it's the incessant stimuli you get through these apps. There's just no point where the screen stays quiet, stimulus free. Moving elements capture our attention naturally, especially when the entire screen keeps moving. The endless scroll element just makes sure that the stimulus keeps getting renewed the moment you're done with it.
Instead, a scroll should give you a break before heading into the next video. I'm willing to bet this would help severely with addiction. People are then forced to reconsider whether they actually want to play the next video. "Done" should not always lead to "here's the next stimulus". That's what's addictive. The brain isn't made to break out of that loop easily.
The problem with using scrolling as a metric is it assumes satisfaction with the content presented and ignores the fact that, on certain apps, many scroll miles go into skipping around articles or ads or reposts to get to the content you want, and imo a punishment for seeking more content while also diluting said content with forced ads at an alarming ratio is not indicative of addiction but scarcity of satisfaction and engaging content
If you continue scrolling, that shows you think that the content presented is valuable enough that scrolling past some misses is worth it. A good scroll like TikTok carefully metes out the ads so that half of them you don't mind and the other half you enjoy. If you find a site whose scroll makes you feel this way, just stop scrolling and don't try to ban the concept for everyone else.
What I'm about to say is going to sound very 'layman', and this is coming from someone who's been building UI's for like, 20 years.
This discussion makes me both laugh and feel sad, because we all know this is bad for us and gives us zero ROI for our time... and yet there's a whole thread developing here to justify the pattern.
I don't think I have a point on that, just that observation.
Hello, what right do you have to regulate the presentation of speech? If you regulate this format because it’s now considered harmful, what stops El Presidente from moving to ban “zines” because the format is “harmful to young minds” and used by “antifa”? What stops CA from moving to ban forums because threaded formats are suddenly considered “too addicting”? Maybe we should ban VR or first person shooter video games?
There is no allowable constitutional authority for actions like this. CA is literally overstepping the 1A limits of the Constitution here.
We already do limit harmful speech, at presence it's limited to speech and will immediately cause harm (the whole "shouting fire" thing) and the demonstrable addiction properties can be reasonably shown as harmful.
It's also telling that only corporations seem to be the ones demanding the right to infinite scroll; what's the scenario where an individual can only express themselves and their ideas through implementing infinite scroll on a social media?
We draw lines in the sand all the time for the sake of public safety, I'd like to hear a specific case of harm here.
“Shouting fire” was a bad decision denying the right to protest the draft, and it’s since been overturned. (Thankfully, as we may need that right soon!)
The First Amendment is clear: there shall be no law abridging freedom of speech. Courts have bent around that in the past, in earlier eras, but they were wrong to do so. Their mistakes have mostly been corrected although there’s still a few left.
The document that governs this country spells it out: it can’t be done. Public safety be damned. There’s no public safety exemption in the Constitution. If you want it done, pass an amendment. There’s a process for it.
I personally dislike infinite scroll, but I dislike the camel’s nose in the tent even more. No speech laws.
Hang on, let's go back - clarify for me how we're calling an addictive feature in a product built by the wealthiest corporations on the planet a matter of individual free speech? Precisely whose free speech would be harmed here?
Seriously, this diffusion of individual liberties into corporations has no presence in the constitution, and courts have fabricated this wholesale. There is no idea, no concept, no notion that infinite scroll provides. We regulate the size, location, and brightness of billboards; is this also a matter of speech?
What I like about Hacker News is each day I open it up, scan the first three pages, open 2-5 links to read, then close it again. Those pages make it easy to monitor my usage and set limits. I used to do the same with Reddit before that changed
I'd fully support removing infinite scroll or even just banning it from under 18 year olds
Infinite scroll evolved alongside algorithms that incentivise addictive content. So it’s “good” UX in that it’s effective for consuming addictive content…
When I’m trying to do something constructive, like search or browse, infinite scroll is IMHO disastrously bad. You can’t keep your place in the list, or jump ahead/back.
The challenge is to retain an ordering over the result set. How would infinite scroll behave any differently in this case? The changing results seems to be an orthogonal concern to pagination/infinite scroll.
Infinite scroll makes the problem much easier, even if it’s still a problem. The only action you need to support is loading more results, which you can do by loading all results and filtering out those already shown. With pagination, the user may say “give me page 3” and you have no idea what was on pages 1 and 2, if they were even loaded.
But the underlying table changed since. I'm not very familiar with these myself, but it seams to me that the best solution is to keep a session cursor for the user, and these are a lot simpler when you only ever move it forward.
It's slightly different but I don't see why there should be a notable difference in difficulty. You need to somehow represent what you saw so far and act based on that.
IMO "pages of search results" is one of the problems where the closer you look, the more potential problems and inconsistencies you see until you realize it's a leaky abstraction, and sometimes it gets too leaky.
We want visitors to imagine that we just plopped a binder of sorted results down in front of them for their page-by-page perusal, but the suggests permanence and invariants we don't want to provide (because it's harder.) For example, the assurance that page 2 will always have the same items on it unless they "search again", and the last item on page 2 will not not duplicate itself on the top of page 3 as they page forward.
By way of contrast, imagine a system where a result-set was not just a UI metaphor, but real domain concept. Do a search, and you get a Result which is a limited-size listing generated at time X for user Y and will be cached for Z.
You can implement pagination exactly the same way. It's a UX decision that has nothing to do with underlying queries, although it typically maps.
The typical infinite scroll that I've seen implemented does not work the way you describe though, it's just pagination without controls. The reason it works is because it's pushing content you never asked for anyway and it just keeps pushing. Without any sense of pages you'll never know the difference.
I mean sure, if you do it that way. But its easy to encode the page starting index and pagenate from there. Its even exactly the same algorithm as infinite scroll.
Ah yes, let me just look at Instagram for the ideal model of infinite scroll UX. You can't even scroll up to something you've actually subscribed to that you didn't mean to scroll past without it tossing it into the memory hole and replacing it with something you don't care about.
Did you think HN has an unusable and bad interface? It seems to be a remarkably popular website despite having hard pages that change order on every refresh.
That second style will never change (unless you insert entries into the past). The first style will change. But it hardly makes it impossible to keep your place in the list; if you come back three years later, you'll find that that link goes to a random location, but if you come back next week, that link is going to go to a place that is very close to the place you left off, requiring minimal adjustment to find your place again.
While that's true I think that once the feed has been observed in a certain way the advantages of stability outweigh the advantages of showing a tweaked version the second time it is loaded.
if i refresh the page it should be almost the same. maybe a couple new things at the very top, but i should still be able to find the thing i was just looking at.
by comparison, facebook auto-reloads while you're halfway down a page, and wont show you any of the same things. its an incredibly poor experience
I think it's about user agency. When we say that infinite scroll is addictive, we mean that the user keeps on scrolling even when they wish they could stop. It's also about harm. Trapping users on their phones is harmful to their well-being. A person who wants to quit should be able to do so, addictivity that prevents that is harmful.
Reading the bill I see carve-outs for things like "commercial transactions", perhaps allowing Amazon and Temu to use infinite scroll, but not Facebook and TikTok
Infinite scroll is not necessarily a problem in and of itself. If the content is static, no biggie. At some point diminishing returns and you will want to use search for it.
It is the algorithm they attach to infinite scroll which is problematic. It is not a UI design problem.
Exactly correct - there is no way to disable the infinite scrolling reel nonsense in Snapchat while still allowing messaging. So, my son is either cut off from his friends or gets crap shovelled into his eyes. This is a business decision: to leverage their having insinuated themselves between him and his friends against his mental health. Ban it all immediiately
This is the sort of thing that should / will be decided by courts, I think. We have many fuzzy laws where evaluating on a case-by-case basis makes more sense than deciding an arbitrary hard line. In this case, apps and platforms as a whole would be taken into account; infinite scroll alone might not be against this law, but if an app has a consistent pattern of addictive behavior and is harming its users because of it, something like infinite scroll might be forbidden for that app in a lawsuit.
It’s the wrong fix to the problem. The correct fix is enforcing an infinite scroll limit (time), after which the app tells you to take a break (for some amount of time).
Whatever the right “fix” is, why is a US state involved in deciding how my app presents my speech to you? Under what authority?
You know, I hate to give the oppo any decent ideas, but maybe there’s some allowable way to subsidize apps that use “healthy” patterns rather than attempting to “ban” things!
Waah waah speech is cigarettes again. Stale. Why don’t you people address the actual constitutional issues (the ones that will get your law struck down hard)
> Curious as to where the line between “addictive feature” and "good UX" is. Is deliberate pagination actual impedance to use or merely an annoyance that's been weeded out with modern UX design?
Neither? Pagination is good UX; infinite scroll is a way to make your usable page unusable instead.
A lot of this is states trying to figure out a way around the first amendment to regulate social media that the courts will wink and accept. That is why you see so many convoluted laws being drawn up by state legislatures about this.
What should be changed is the exemption algorithmically curated feeds still get under section 230. This has always seemed like a huge loophole. Once social media feeds are picking and choosing what to show users based on opaque criteria they are no longer neutral carriers of information but more like newspaper editors. They should be liable for what the users see.
In theory they are already exempt. YouTube is not liable for hosting a Nazi video but section 230 doesn't prevent it being liable for the choice to algorithmically show that video.
We can all agree that the internet was great and now it is less great, but the second someone articulates a very, very simple rule, the "well ackchyually" crew comes out of the woodwork.
Infinite scroll is very obviously unnecessary. It is very obviously intended to keep people on an app longer than they would otherwise use it. You can lazy load into a finite scroll. Just make people click something every once in a while.
What's very obviously unnecessary is the need for a law to police this. You can just not use things you don't like. This need to project one's own morality upon others will be the source of endless conflict.
"Some lawmaker" is democracy. The point is that people are pissed off about the addictive UX, same as cigarettes, and candy. If you want to make a serious argument, just argue that you should be able to opt out, which is an entirely reasonable position.
it's basically malicious compliance. They're supposed to be super annoying ... Instead of complying, they choose this obnoxious practice so they could continue ... monitoring every action a visitor does.
You don't need a cookie banner to be allowed to create Cookies. You only need them if you're using them for something like tracking. [1]
Regulators didn't enforce cookie banners. Cookie banners are a form of malicious compliance. When you complain about them, you are doing the lobbying work of ad companies for free. The correct solution is to just not spy on people, and the problem is that the EU didn't go far enough and just ban the behavior altogether. [2]
Cookie pops are malicious compliance to regulations that legitimately protect consumers. You’ve cherry picked one bad side effect to throw out all the ways the EU is way ahead of anyone else in protecting consumers [3]
Those cookie banners are not because some lawmaker didn't like something. Those banners are malicious compliance with democratically created rules. You can certainly not like those rules, even be vehemetly opposed to them, without resorting to child-like claims while completely failing to learn why these banners even exist.
Argue like an adult. You're better than that childish nonsense.
When it came time for website owners to decide whether they (1) would remove unnecessary cookies, (2) receive consent from their users for extra cookies via reasonable banners, or (3) circumvent consent from their users for extra cookies via dark-patterned banners...
... virtually no website owners opted for (1), a minority opted for (2), and most opted for (3). Yet every technolibertarian thinks (3) is the law's doing and not the consequence of other technolibertarians.
I’m not sure that suffices. If a site has a very “good” (at keeping people glued to the screen) content ranking algorithm, they can still make money, albeit less, serving non-targeted ads. Longer engagement time by viewers = more ad impressions, targeted or not.
In fact, it would almost certainly encourage them to keep you engaged even longer in an attempt to make up some of the money lost with the end of targeted advertising.
This is exactly why I force my kids to always create accounts as 30-years old (by specifying a birth data in the 90s), to avoid as much State interference as possible.
Did you know that if your child has a "kid" account you cannot follow him on google maps? We had to make one for "adults" in order to be able to do so.
It should just be universally required to give an option to disable addictive features. Should prevent age verification, and giving users optionality is always a good thing (for them).
While I’m uncomfortable with any legislation regarding the presentation of speech, in fact it’s definitely unconstitutional, this isn’t bad if you ignore the 1A issues. Hard to ignore that though
I think the most frustrating thing for me is when a website has infinite scroll, but also a footer with links that you want to access. I end up going to the dev tools to look at the code.
It was a good UX in FriendFeed as it was still a chronological feed. However once it was mixed with algorithmic feed it shifted from better UX to keep em' hooked.
The problem with infinity scroll is the lack of "pagination", which essentialy make most of content to get hidden away. For instance. Let assume you have 3000 comments on a YouTube video, your browser will crash way before it "infinite scroll" to the end (I know that that are tools to bypass this, but I'm talking about the default experience).
Let's bring back child labor and asbestos and leaded gasoline and banks discriminating against women and all manner of businesses discriminating against Blacks, because banning those was terrible and should never have been done.
Banning anything is always bad. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
You never had an option to have Google show a list of curated links or Yahoo show a simple search bar. You chose to go to the site you liked better and in aggregate the market chose the simple search. I could still be going to Slashdot or Things You Wouldn't Know Unless We Blogged It, but I and the content creators found that we preferred infinite scroll instead.
You could say the same thing about nutritional facts being printed on foods. The entire point is externalities that favor the company. These things are never going to be on products unless they are regulated. If you're going to make an argument for "choice" at least argue for opt out rather than "fuck it, let them put trans fats in the food and if you don't like it eat broccoli."
it doesn't remove any choice for users. users don't get a choice on the offending sites currently. they only get infinite scroll. so the eventual infinite scroll replacement will be just that, the replacement.
on removing possible UI design choices for social media companies -- i have a very small violin on hand.
Any discussion on this topic within hacker news is pretty silly. To much financial incentive to keep the status quo, and to many bots pushing narratives.
It’s like listening to the lawyers at a cigarette manufacturer, car manufacturers fight seat belts or gun manufacturers in kindergartens. The change is coming because real people are pissed.
The real people who are pissed are the same minority of novelty-haters who were pissed about Wal-Mart, fracking, and Facebook. They're outnumbered by the real people who think infinite scroll is great and use it every day.
(Actually, sometimes the "paged" interface in "infinite scrolling" systems is available, only hidden. There for the benefit of people like us, those who would find it and exploit it.)
i originally wrote users from the wider public or something but then decided to edit the comment down. fair point i suppose for the ~1% of users of these sites that are super tech nerds
That seems like cute libertarian nonsense. The key word is choice. People have less free will than you think. Every time a teen goes to insta/facebook/tiktok etc they are an individual up against a huge corporation of thousands of people and ML whose job it is to hijack their dopamine circuit. Usage of these apps decreases attention span which effectively means other activities become boring so the users experience a withdrawal symptom like a drug addict.
And it doesn't just affect them. I think most of us would rather live in a society where 50% of the population isn't brain-rotted.
note that this is going after "psychologically exploitative features intended to maximize engagement" of all kinds, not just infinite feeds. it also poses an ultimatum banning people under 16 from websites that provide such addictive features to anyone.
personally I am against internet identification, and I think teenagers should be allowed on social media, so I have to ask: why only children? if these features are so bad, ban them outright.
Adults are supposed to have acquired enough life experience to make more reasonable decisions than children.
Having said that, we also expect adults to make all kinds of bad decisions so they too are prohibited from many things, like shooting smack or freebasing meth.
I think there's a good case to be made not for banning kids from social media, but for banning everyone. In that case, it'd be easier to do it from the supply side than the demand side.
Whack-a-mole lawmaking solves nothing. All this law does is ask social media companies to find another way for their platform to be addictive to children.
Here's how to solve this ...
Social media companies measure engagement. Decide what the safe metric is, pass laws that hold social media companies to that metric for whatever age or demographic. Apply fines proportional to revenue when they are found to exceed the metric. Fines can't be reasonable to the cost of doing business.
That stops any social media company from incentivizing employees to increase engagement for that demographic.
There is no way to enforce any of these types of laws without an iron curtain that clearly violates the first amendment. If you have free speech infront of children in public I don't see how having infinite scroll on your website or app is any different. Parents should parent their children instead of the state. Its crazy how avoident California is of solving actually important problems like homelessness, mental health resources, housing crisis, yet infinite scrolling somehow is a priority.
Pretty sure most parents care about their kids more than nearly any other issue you mention. Social media excess has pushed to far and become less well liked than lawyers at this point. Thats only going to end one way.
Parents certainly care about all the things I mentioned, it even impacts their kids. This approach to safeguard kids online is completely impractical and utterly unenforceable and seems like a total waste of time.
I’m going to be honest, this kind of regulation would make me disable the site(s) for the state (if there are fines, etc). I don’t have the time to play these games for my tiny projects
If you don't have an agent swarm that's already trained to re-scroll all the unscrolled feeds and translate them to binaural beats during your micronaps you're ngmi
I agree, I don't think an "infinite refresh" like if YouTube had a limited homepage and changed on each refresh, would be much better. But infinite scroll is likely the most addictive.
> The investigation focuses on features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and the platforms' highly personalised recommender systems.
I honestly think that this may have some benefit as the infinite scroll has made our attention spans incredibly short. Although, I'm sure people will find there way around it.
Curious as to where the line between “addictive feature” and "good UX" is. Is deliberate pagination actual impedance to use or merely an annoyance that's been weeded out with modern UX design?
When does a feature that simply makes your product easier to use cross into a territory that it's illegal?
What about media previews, in a platform like reddit if you can preview or expand media directly from the main list is that an “addictive feature” or just convenient design?
also interested in the larger economy, if you create a plugin that restores or adds infinite scroll to a website could you be liable for providing illegal UX?
EDIT: to clarify I'm not really griping on infinite scroll in particular, more the difficulty in regulating postitive UI/UX. Dark patterns are relatively easy to identify. If the unsubscribe button is hidden behind 3 screens and is in 3 point font that's pretty clearly a dark pattern. This seeks to regulate the opposite basically "your platform is, too easy, too good at serving your content"
This is much harder to categorize and has fuzzier boundaries. For example imagine if it applied to remembering your login for more than 24 hours. Certainly people would use your service less if they had to continuously authenticate. Are long-lived sessions good UX or encouraging "addictive" behavior?
> a feature that simply makes your product easier to use
Except it doesn't. You lose context and are now drowning in an endless morass of lazy-loaded blocks and widgets, all hiding under invisible elements. Nothing has a permanent URL, so there is zero accountably if the user was shown something that they need to reference - unless it benefits the platform. And of course, it will eventually all force reload when the page complexity exhausts the available memory, or at least when it becomes too exhausted to reliably serve ads.
X posts have a permanent url.
Infinite scroll is bad UX design and always has been.
It makes it impossible to click on any links in the footer of the page or even really reading what's in the footer.
I remember when it was initially introduced, everyone I spoke to about it hated it.
Also creates a confusion that algorithm profiteers love, where before you could know a post you saw would be page 1 today and page 2 tomorrow now the homepage of every app is absolute chaos so you have to spend hours searching for something specific or you're just always seeing exactly what they want you to see (to increase engagement or whatever instead of any sensible order)
I have always hated infinite scroll because it becomes way more difficult to understand the index of a search result or piece of content. For example, if I know that each page of results contains 25 hits, then it is easy for me to see which one is the 25th hit, and then which one is the 26th one (first one on the next page).
I don't mind that the order of search results might be shifted around over time, and I understand that there is some profit motive to inserting tangentially relevant or sponsored hits, but I really wish that there were an easy way of knowing what index each result has.
This grew out of a funny little habit I sometimes have where I like to pick a random number and see what search hit that corresponds to. It becomes too tedious with infinite scroll.
You must have spoken to me, I hate it today has as much as I did back then.
The way I see it, it's the incessant stimuli you get through these apps. There's just no point where the screen stays quiet, stimulus free. Moving elements capture our attention naturally, especially when the entire screen keeps moving. The endless scroll element just makes sure that the stimulus keeps getting renewed the moment you're done with it.
Instead, a scroll should give you a break before heading into the next video. I'm willing to bet this would help severely with addiction. People are then forced to reconsider whether they actually want to play the next video. "Done" should not always lead to "here's the next stimulus". That's what's addictive. The brain isn't made to break out of that loop easily.
The problem with using scrolling as a metric is it assumes satisfaction with the content presented and ignores the fact that, on certain apps, many scroll miles go into skipping around articles or ads or reposts to get to the content you want, and imo a punishment for seeking more content while also diluting said content with forced ads at an alarming ratio is not indicative of addiction but scarcity of satisfaction and engaging content
If you continue scrolling, that shows you think that the content presented is valuable enough that scrolling past some misses is worth it. A good scroll like TikTok carefully metes out the ads so that half of them you don't mind and the other half you enjoy. If you find a site whose scroll makes you feel this way, just stop scrolling and don't try to ban the concept for everyone else.
What I'm about to say is going to sound very 'layman', and this is coming from someone who's been building UI's for like, 20 years.
This discussion makes me both laugh and feel sad, because we all know this is bad for us and gives us zero ROI for our time... and yet there's a whole thread developing here to justify the pattern.
I don't think I have a point on that, just that observation.
Hello, what right do you have to regulate the presentation of speech? If you regulate this format because it’s now considered harmful, what stops El Presidente from moving to ban “zines” because the format is “harmful to young minds” and used by “antifa”? What stops CA from moving to ban forums because threaded formats are suddenly considered “too addicting”? Maybe we should ban VR or first person shooter video games?
There is no allowable constitutional authority for actions like this. CA is literally overstepping the 1A limits of the Constitution here.
We already do limit harmful speech, at presence it's limited to speech and will immediately cause harm (the whole "shouting fire" thing) and the demonstrable addiction properties can be reasonably shown as harmful.
It's also telling that only corporations seem to be the ones demanding the right to infinite scroll; what's the scenario where an individual can only express themselves and their ideas through implementing infinite scroll on a social media?
We draw lines in the sand all the time for the sake of public safety, I'd like to hear a specific case of harm here.
“Shouting fire” was a bad decision denying the right to protest the draft, and it’s since been overturned. (Thankfully, as we may need that right soon!)
The First Amendment is clear: there shall be no law abridging freedom of speech. Courts have bent around that in the past, in earlier eras, but they were wrong to do so. Their mistakes have mostly been corrected although there’s still a few left.
The document that governs this country spells it out: it can’t be done. Public safety be damned. There’s no public safety exemption in the Constitution. If you want it done, pass an amendment. There’s a process for it.
I personally dislike infinite scroll, but I dislike the camel’s nose in the tent even more. No speech laws.
Hang on, let's go back - clarify for me how we're calling an addictive feature in a product built by the wealthiest corporations on the planet a matter of individual free speech? Precisely whose free speech would be harmed here?
Seriously, this diffusion of individual liberties into corporations has no presence in the constitution, and courts have fabricated this wholesale. There is no idea, no concept, no notion that infinite scroll provides. We regulate the size, location, and brightness of billboards; is this also a matter of speech?
I disagree. Looking forward to reading your amicus brief.
Here’s hoping they ban your speech first
What I like about Hacker News is each day I open it up, scan the first three pages, open 2-5 links to read, then close it again. Those pages make it easy to monitor my usage and set limits. I used to do the same with Reddit before that changed
I'd fully support removing infinite scroll or even just banning it from under 18 year olds
Users should be allowed the decision for themselves. Make it opt-in and be done w/it; I personally believe it has valid use-cases.
Infinite scroll evolved alongside algorithms that incentivise addictive content. So it’s “good” UX in that it’s effective for consuming addictive content…
When I’m trying to do something constructive, like search or browse, infinite scroll is IMHO disastrously bad. You can’t keep your place in the list, or jump ahead/back.
On the contrary, pagination makes it impossible to keep your place in the list if it changes between page loads.
How are you going to keep your place if the order changes anyway? What is your place if the order has changed?
If the order changes, all bets are off regardless of pagination or infinite scroll.
The challenge is to retain an ordering over the result set. How would infinite scroll behave any differently in this case? The changing results seems to be an orthogonal concern to pagination/infinite scroll.
Infinite scroll makes the problem much easier, even if it’s still a problem. The only action you need to support is loading more results, which you can do by loading all results and filtering out those already shown. With pagination, the user may say “give me page 3” and you have no idea what was on pages 1 and 2, if they were even loaded.
If page 1 and 2 were 10 each you load results 21-30
Same as if you are scrolling and have reached result 20 And want to load more.
But the underlying table changed since. I'm not very familiar with these myself, but it seams to me that the best solution is to keep a session cursor for the user, and these are a lot simpler when you only ever move it forward.
It's slightly different but I don't see why there should be a notable difference in difficulty. You need to somehow represent what you saw so far and act based on that.
IMO "pages of search results" is one of the problems where the closer you look, the more potential problems and inconsistencies you see until you realize it's a leaky abstraction, and sometimes it gets too leaky.
We want visitors to imagine that we just plopped a binder of sorted results down in front of them for their page-by-page perusal, but the suggests permanence and invariants we don't want to provide (because it's harder.) For example, the assurance that page 2 will always have the same items on it unless they "search again", and the last item on page 2 will not not duplicate itself on the top of page 3 as they page forward.
By way of contrast, imagine a system where a result-set was not just a UI metaphor, but real domain concept. Do a search, and you get a Result which is a limited-size listing generated at time X for user Y and will be cached for Z.
You can implement pagination exactly the same way. It's a UX decision that has nothing to do with underlying queries, although it typically maps.
The typical infinite scroll that I've seen implemented does not work the way you describe though, it's just pagination without controls. The reason it works is because it's pushing content you never asked for anyway and it just keeps pushing. Without any sense of pages you'll never know the difference.
I mean sure, if you do it that way. But its easy to encode the page starting index and pagenate from there. Its even exactly the same algorithm as infinite scroll.
Ah yes, let me just look at Instagram for the ideal model of infinite scroll UX. You can't even scroll up to something you've actually subscribed to that you didn't mean to scroll past without it tossing it into the memory hole and replacing it with something you don't care about.
Did you think HN has an unusable and bad interface? It seems to be a remarkably popular website despite having hard pages that change order on every refresh.
‹looks at hn›
> On the contrary, pagination makes it impossible to keep your place in the list if it changes between page loads.
Well, that's obviously false. There are two styles of pagination:
That second style will never change (unless you insert entries into the past). The first style will change. But it hardly makes it impossible to keep your place in the list; if you come back three years later, you'll find that that link goes to a random location, but if you come back next week, that link is going to go to a place that is very close to the place you left off, requiring minimal adjustment to find your place again.Why is the list constantly changing anyway?
Because other people keep adding new posts (and upvoting existing posts, which changes their order).
While that's true I think that once the feed has been observed in a certain way the advantages of stability outweigh the advantages of showing a tweaked version the second time it is loaded.
The user expectation is that if you refresh the page, you will see fresh content.
mine isnt?
if i refresh the page it should be almost the same. maybe a couple new things at the very top, but i should still be able to find the thing i was just looking at.
by comparison, facebook auto-reloads while you're halfway down a page, and wont show you any of the same things. its an incredibly poor experience
Not if you’re on page 2
So you'd rather something like Slack was paginated? I think that would be disastrously bad.
I think it's about user agency. When we say that infinite scroll is addictive, we mean that the user keeps on scrolling even when they wish they could stop. It's also about harm. Trapping users on their phones is harmful to their well-being. A person who wants to quit should be able to do so, addictivity that prevents that is harmful.
Reading the bill I see carve-outs for things like "commercial transactions", perhaps allowing Amazon and Temu to use infinite scroll, but not Facebook and TikTok
Infinite scroll is not necessarily a problem in and of itself. If the content is static, no biggie. At some point diminishing returns and you will want to use search for it.
It is the algorithm they attach to infinite scroll which is problematic. It is not a UI design problem.
We know there's a big problem with addictive ux in general.
And of course we know that small changes increase engagement/addictiveness.
Html interfaces are easily configurable, technically.
The fact companies at least don't offer easy ways to configure websites to be less addicting, and some even block those, does tell us something.
Exactly correct - there is no way to disable the infinite scrolling reel nonsense in Snapchat while still allowing messaging. So, my son is either cut off from his friends or gets crap shovelled into his eyes. This is a business decision: to leverage their having insinuated themselves between him and his friends against his mental health. Ban it all immediiately
This is the sort of thing that should / will be decided by courts, I think. We have many fuzzy laws where evaluating on a case-by-case basis makes more sense than deciding an arbitrary hard line. In this case, apps and platforms as a whole would be taken into account; infinite scroll alone might not be against this law, but if an app has a consistent pattern of addictive behavior and is harming its users because of it, something like infinite scroll might be forbidden for that app in a lawsuit.
It’s the wrong fix to the problem. The correct fix is enforcing an infinite scroll limit (time), after which the app tells you to take a break (for some amount of time).
Whatever the right “fix” is, why is a US state involved in deciding how my app presents my speech to you? Under what authority?
You know, I hate to give the oppo any decent ideas, but maybe there’s some allowable way to subsidize apps that use “healthy” patterns rather than attempting to “ban” things!
Get your nanny state out of my free market. I suppose next you will want some kind of warning label on my asbestos filter cigarettes.
Waah waah speech is cigarettes again. Stale. Why don’t you people address the actual constitutional issues (the ones that will get your law struck down hard)
I know it when I see it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
Do they have to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt? If it was a crime, they would.
infinite scroll breaks the back button and its really annoying
> Curious as to where the line between “addictive feature” and "good UX" is. Is deliberate pagination actual impedance to use or merely an annoyance that's been weeded out with modern UX design?
Neither? Pagination is good UX; infinite scroll is a way to make your usable page unusable instead.
A lot of this is states trying to figure out a way around the first amendment to regulate social media that the courts will wink and accept. That is why you see so many convoluted laws being drawn up by state legislatures about this.
What should be changed is the exemption algorithmically curated feeds still get under section 230. This has always seemed like a huge loophole. Once social media feeds are picking and choosing what to show users based on opaque criteria they are no longer neutral carriers of information but more like newspaper editors. They should be liable for what the users see.
In theory they are already exempt. YouTube is not liable for hosting a Nazi video but section 230 doesn't prevent it being liable for the choice to algorithmically show that video.
We can all agree that the internet was great and now it is less great, but the second someone articulates a very, very simple rule, the "well ackchyually" crew comes out of the woodwork.
Infinite scroll is very obviously unnecessary. It is very obviously intended to keep people on an app longer than they would otherwise use it. You can lazy load into a finite scroll. Just make people click something every once in a while.
What's very obviously unnecessary is the need for a law to police this. You can just not use things you don't like. This need to project one's own morality upon others will be the source of endless conflict.
> Infinite scroll is very obviously unnecessary
All the different flavors of yogurt in the grocery store are unnecessary. We only need 2.
> Just make people click something every once in a while
But why? This is EU Cookies Banner level of state interference making UX worse for everyone just because some lawmaker doesn't like something.
"Some lawmaker" is democracy. The point is that people are pissed off about the addictive UX, same as cigarettes, and candy. If you want to make a serious argument, just argue that you should be able to opt out, which is an entirely reasonable position.
As many have said before:
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29529148[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38299135
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46552795
Those cookie banners are not because some lawmaker didn't like something. Those banners are malicious compliance with democratically created rules. You can certainly not like those rules, even be vehemetly opposed to them, without resorting to child-like claims while completely failing to learn why these banners even exist.
Argue like an adult. You're better than that childish nonsense.
When it came time for website owners to decide whether they (1) would remove unnecessary cookies, (2) receive consent from their users for extra cookies via reasonable banners, or (3) circumvent consent from their users for extra cookies via dark-patterned banners...
... virtually no website owners opted for (1), a minority opted for (2), and most opted for (3). Yet every technolibertarian thinks (3) is the law's doing and not the consequence of other technolibertarians.
Well if it’s unnecessary, by all means it should be banned. Unnecessary things should all be banned. CA legislators first!
Instead of trying to whack a mole on all addictive mechanisms, just ban the business model driving all of them: targeted advertising.
I’m not sure that suffices. If a site has a very “good” (at keeping people glued to the screen) content ranking algorithm, they can still make money, albeit less, serving non-targeted ads. Longer engagement time by viewers = more ad impressions, targeted or not.
"they can still make money, albeit less, serving non-targeted ads."
- would they be able to make as much as they do now? I think it would be significantly less.
From Meta's official Financial Report for 2025 [0]:
Total Revenue: $200,966 Million
-Advertising: $196,175 million (97.6%)
-Other rev: $ 4,791 Million ( 2.4%)
[0] https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...
Presumably significantly less. But GP's point is that reducing advertising revenue doesn't remove the incentive to maximize engagement.
In fact, it would almost certainly encourage them to keep you engaged even longer in an attempt to make up some of the money lost with the end of targeted advertising.
s/targeted //
I think Tristan from The Social Dilemma documentary - his co-founder's dad - was the one who invented the infinite scroll and he deeply regretted it.
This is exactly why I force my kids to always create accounts as 30-years old (by specifying a birth data in the 90s), to avoid as much State interference as possible. Did you know that if your child has a "kid" account you cannot follow him on google maps? We had to make one for "adults" in order to be able to do so.
How about OwnTracks?
Thank God. We need more legislation against the cognitive poisoning of two generations.
Hopefully they can take down TV next. And the damn radio!
Both of those are already dead.
r/whoosh...
As somebody with not-enough self control, I would love this for myself. Self-locks help, but the temptation is always there.
It should just be universally required to give an option to disable addictive features. Should prevent age verification, and giving users optionality is always a good thing (for them).
How will you measure purely psychological addiction using a neutral process that can’t be easily captured by political interests?
That said, I like the idea of an option. Options are good!
Clearly there is a fuzzy line of demarcation. I was thinking for a simple opt-out of any rec-sys
While I’m uncomfortable with any legislation regarding the presentation of speech, in fact it’s definitely unconstitutional, this isn’t bad if you ignore the 1A issues. Hard to ignore that though
> Should prevent age verification
It won't, become some parties are proposing a narrative of "shielding the innocent from harmful content" (such as themselves).
keir starmer seems to suppose nudity would be indecent, against an implicitly stated decent itself and british politics.
Yeah I meant it would avoid the necessity of age verification to solve this problem.
Age verification and how enthusiastic gov'ts are about it is concerning.
I think the most frustrating thing for me is when a website has infinite scroll, but also a footer with links that you want to access. I end up going to the dev tools to look at the code.
It was a good UX in FriendFeed as it was still a chronological feed. However once it was mixed with algorithmic feed it shifted from better UX to keep em' hooked.
The problem with infinity scroll is the lack of "pagination", which essentialy make most of content to get hidden away. For instance. Let assume you have 3000 comments on a YouTube video, your browser will crash way before it "infinite scroll" to the end (I know that that are tools to bypass this, but I'm talking about the default experience).
I propose we simply ban all of those in favor of banning, minus the potentially recursive ban for this proposal.
Parents demand it! Protect the children! Ban the banners!
In principle, do you support uniform packaging with warnings for cigarettes? Do you support ban on selling flavored cigarettes/vapes to children?
I have always been in favor of mandatory cigarettes for every child, starting from age three
Let's bring back child labor and asbestos and leaded gasoline and banks discriminating against women and all manner of businesses discriminating against Blacks, because banning those was terrible and should never have been done.
Banning anything is always bad. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Fantastic, I’m a big fan of all of these. (Heavily invested in a promising child labor startup.)
Headline makes it sound like that's a bad thing.
it's based on age and I think that the age verification it would require is pretty universally reviled, at least here on HN
I want it to be forbidden for anybody. They have stolen our attention for years
How about you just petition for an option to chose. That way you get yours and I get mine. You don’t need to make that decision for me.
Removing choice is generally a bad thing, IMO.
What choice? When did I ever choose infinite scroll?
You never had an option to have Google show a list of curated links or Yahoo show a simple search bar. You chose to go to the site you liked better and in aggregate the market chose the simple search. I could still be going to Slashdot or Things You Wouldn't Know Unless We Blogged It, but I and the content creators found that we preferred infinite scroll instead.
You could say the same thing about nutritional facts being printed on foods. The entire point is externalities that favor the company. These things are never going to be on products unless they are regulated. If you're going to make an argument for "choice" at least argue for opt out rather than "fuck it, let them put trans fats in the food and if you don't like it eat broccoli."
it doesn't remove any choice for users. users don't get a choice on the offending sites currently. they only get infinite scroll. so the eventual infinite scroll replacement will be just that, the replacement.
on removing possible UI design choices for social media companies -- i have a very small violin on hand.
Any discussion on this topic within hacker news is pretty silly. To much financial incentive to keep the status quo, and to many bots pushing narratives.
It’s like listening to the lawyers at a cigarette manufacturer, car manufacturers fight seat belts or gun manufacturers in kindergartens. The change is coming because real people are pissed.
Yes the “change” of a dumb unconstitutional law that’s going to get struck down on the first challenge. Would-be speech regulators can get bent.
The real people who are pissed are the same minority of novelty-haters who were pissed about Wal-Mart, fracking, and Facebook. They're outnumbered by the real people who think infinite scroll is great and use it every day.
> they only get infinite scroll
(Actually, sometimes the "paged" interface in "infinite scrolling" systems is available, only hidden. There for the benefit of people like us, those who would find it and exploit it.)
i originally wrote users from the wider public or something but then decided to edit the comment down. fair point i suppose for the ~1% of users of these sites that are super tech nerds
Laws are pretty much always about removing choice.
That seems like cute libertarian nonsense. The key word is choice. People have less free will than you think. Every time a teen goes to insta/facebook/tiktok etc they are an individual up against a huge corporation of thousands of people and ML whose job it is to hijack their dopamine circuit. Usage of these apps decreases attention span which effectively means other activities become boring so the users experience a withdrawal symptom like a drug addict.
And it doesn't just affect them. I think most of us would rather live in a society where 50% of the population isn't brain-rotted.
We also removed choices to drive without a seat belt or sell lead paint. Was that a bad thing?
I should have a choice between leaded and unleaded paint and gasoline
note that this is going after "psychologically exploitative features intended to maximize engagement" of all kinds, not just infinite feeds. it also poses an ultimatum banning people under 16 from websites that provide such addictive features to anyone.
personally I am against internet identification, and I think teenagers should be allowed on social media, so I have to ask: why only children? if these features are so bad, ban them outright.
Adults are supposed to have acquired enough life experience to make more reasonable decisions than children.
Having said that, we also expect adults to make all kinds of bad decisions so they too are prohibited from many things, like shooting smack or freebasing meth.
I think there's a good case to be made not for banning kids from social media, but for banning everyone. In that case, it'd be easier to do it from the supply side than the demand side.
same as alcohol, we've decided adults are fair prey
I (personally) think this is the wrong kind of solution.
I think a better solution would to mandate that platforms offer a ranked feed and a chronological feed and make the setting sticky for users.
I think giving users the agency over how much they consume is good but mandating a “UX” pattern feels too specific.
This will accomplish nothing.
Whack-a-mole lawmaking solves nothing. All this law does is ask social media companies to find another way for their platform to be addictive to children.
Here's how to solve this ...
Social media companies measure engagement. Decide what the safe metric is, pass laws that hold social media companies to that metric for whatever age or demographic. Apply fines proportional to revenue when they are found to exceed the metric. Fines can't be reasonable to the cost of doing business.
That stops any social media company from incentivizing employees to increase engagement for that demographic.
Or just stop social media below a certain age and enact that policy for older adults.
The tech giants have flown to close to the sun, real people are pissed.
There is no way to enforce any of these types of laws without an iron curtain that clearly violates the first amendment. If you have free speech infront of children in public I don't see how having infinite scroll on your website or app is any different. Parents should parent their children instead of the state. Its crazy how avoident California is of solving actually important problems like homelessness, mental health resources, housing crisis, yet infinite scrolling somehow is a priority.
Pretty sure most parents care about their kids more than nearly any other issue you mention. Social media excess has pushed to far and become less well liked than lawyers at this point. Thats only going to end one way.
Parents certainly care about all the things I mentioned, it even impacts their kids. This approach to safeguard kids online is completely impractical and utterly unenforceable and seems like a total waste of time.
why are we making laws about how scrolling works this is crazy
I’m going to be honest, this kind of regulation would make me disable the site(s) for the state (if there are fines, etc). I don’t have the time to play these games for my tiny projects
Old people who think that the "scrolling" part of Doom Scrolling is literal. Ugh, I'm sorry for California.
Don't most people have AI agent that consumes the infinite scroll and then presents a custom summarization? I don't see how this ban is a good idea.
If you don't have an agent swarm that's already trained to re-scroll all the unscrolled feeds and translate them to binaural beats during your micronaps you're ngmi
Is infinite scroll really the problem or is it really the whole malicious toolbox and intention of "maximizing engagement"?
I agree, I don't think an "infinite refresh" like if YouTube had a limited homepage and changed on each refresh, would be much better. But infinite scroll is likely the most addictive.
Regulate the business model, not the interface.
Good
Bad
Good riddance
The law should force social media to be subscription-only.
Related:
EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48858292)
> The investigation focuses on features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and the platforms' highly personalised recommender systems.
misses the mark, it's not about the functionality it's about the algorithm populating it
State-approved UI components lmao
I honestly think that this may have some benefit as the infinite scroll has made our attention spans incredibly short. Although, I'm sure people will find there way around it.
I hate infinite scroll. Also how do you really prohibit a software feature? Seriously..
this is a ridiculous proposal
What does this mean for a large Word document? Will people using OpenOffice.org get arrested for loading a novel?
That's not infinite. There is an end to the novel.