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Comment by herval | Hacker News Reader

this would open the possibility for anyone to invalidate any contract by claiming they didn't read or couldn't understand it

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True, but there's an marked difference between signing a traditional contract and clicking a ToS button as far as your upfront involvement is concerned. At least in my experience, there is much more 'back-and-forth' between parties involved in the more traditional case.

There is no such friction when signing on using a ToS button, lowering the amount of time users spent with the contract they are about to sign (and by extension, I would say, their understanding of said agreement).

Most contracts these days are a docusign you click twice to sign. Not much more friction or back and forth than a ToS...

A mechanism that quite possibly exacerbates a lower degree of mutual understanding between the signing parties.

It would be nice to have a 'summary' feature built-into the interface.

Perhaps we could simply start by excluding licenses that have obviously never been read, which is to say those that would take more than (say) an hour for a person to read let alone understand.

How so. You only need to show what the average user does.

Which user is average? The average user is theoretical. Go find a family that has the average 2.3 children.

the Drummonds

You can compare whether a family has < or > than 2.3 children though even though no single family is =

So… an average person has slightly less than a single ovary AND slightly less than a single testicle.

How would your method work on that?

My point being: statistics has developed arcane methods to describe a population. One should not blindly force the most common measure on every case.

Any man you sample most likely has more than the average number of testicles, but fewer than the average number of ovaries. No problem when dealing with individuals.

You can track whether the scrollbar moves.

Some sites won't let you click Accept until you've scrolled all the way down. But you could track how long they spent on the screen, etc. (Some may copy the terms and paste them into a full-screen view elsewhere to review them, I do this, so I don't even scroll it, but I do spend more than a few moments on the screen.)

That aggregate data could then show that the average user spends 2.3 seconds on the screen, just enough to find and click Accept, and has no idea what they're accepting, therefore yadda yadda.

I would love to argue that because the user has no meaningful negotiation power, it's a Hobson's Choice, they can't even submit feedback like "The reason I'm noping out is because you share X and Y data", there's no ability to edit the contract and send it back and see if the other side accepts your modified terms, etc, that it's not an equitable arrangement.

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