Comment by _dczq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _dczq | Hacker News Reader

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==The parent was suggesting to regulate first==

The assumption is that introducing a bill to regulate dark patterns is the same as "moving fast". This bill hasn't even made it to committee [1] and darkpatterns.org was started in 2010 [2]. I think an argument could be made that the US government is actually moving pretty slowly on this topic. GDPR has been in place for over a year, so there is significant data to understand the implications of this type of regulation.

==and fix broken regulations later.==

How is this different from a software product releasing an updated version? Microsoft Excel is on v16 and I don't think anyone is accusing that product of moving fast and breaking things. I wish we spent more time adding features and fixing bugs from past legislation.

[1] https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/116/s1084

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern

To clarify, I wasn't really commenting on the validity on any particular regulation so much as on the idea that "it's time for the pendulum to swing the other way." which seemed to imply (to me, anyway) that it's better to do something, anything, rather than doing what we're doing. I agree that doing effective things is better than nothing, but I think doing ineffective things is worse than nothing.

As to your second point, I also wish we spent more time adding features and fixing bugs from past legislation. I don't think that happens nearly enough, which is a major reason I don't trust our ability to just fix shoddy regulation after the fact.

I took the argument to mean that it is better to regulate bad things in a way that might be ham-fisted, but allow for future improvements than to do nothing about a known problem.

The idea people seem to be repeating is that this will be ineffective. It seems to me that GDPR provides a pretty strong framework to learn from and build off. Europe effectively launched version 1.0, so now we can implement the best parts and eliminate or improve the weakest parts. We aren't starting from scratch or searching in the dark.

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