The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes
sfgate.com
sfgate.com
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?
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.
[1]: something like a link specifying the contents of my feed at a specific date+time and scroll-position.
…whereas with old-school SSR paging it’s right there in the querystring paging params (page-size, page-index or item-offset, and an optional results anchor for stability).
I’ll concede that a well-designed infinite-scrolling (or “click to load more inline” button) feature could use history.pushState to dynamically update the browser’s address with new query params but I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen anyone do that - which is a shame.
When I worked at Meta there was a lot of employee pressure to implement a "deterministic feed", where scrolling back-and-forth would produce the same set of posts, but leadership constantly sandbagged the idea (nobody actually wants determinism, people prefer to be surprised/delighted, etc)
you can't jump to the specific place on the website, you can't remember where something has been to have a map in mind, you can't go to "about" section or some sort of site settings
> so there is zero accountably if the user was shown something that they need to reference
You just sound angry...
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.
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.
A lot of implementations also break the back button and "page" or scroll position links (you can link to a singular item but not a spot in the list)
They usually also break psuedo binary search and force linear/sequential search (you can't skip a head to page 10 when you're trying to zero in on a date unless they've added an explicit date filter and you remember the exact date versus the relative position)
Also breaks parallel loading--can't queue up the next few pages of gigantic media in new tabs while finishing the current page
They also tend to break ctrl-f and if they don't they tend to get progressively slower as more crap stays loaded in memory
That's a UI bug. Real infinite scroll does not have a footer.
But you can see the links! Maybe if your reflexes were just a little faster, if the mouse didn't lag!!!
Could be I’m just an old man yelling at clouds though.
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.
There is no allowable constitutional authority for actions like this. CA is literally overstepping the 1A limits of the Constitution here.
• It is content neutral.
• The government can probably show a significant government interest in reducing the harms infinite scroll often leads to.
• It is narrowly tailored. It achieves the goal without burdening more speech than is substantially necessary to achieve the goal. Arguably it doesn't burden any speech since every word you can have on an infinite scroll page you can have on a paginated site.
• There are alternate channels. The speakers still can get their message across. In this case they can get it across to the exact same audience in the exact same place. They just have to stick in page breaks.
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.
That was a little hyperbolic. The government already can regulate "speech" to some extent in limited, targeted ways, as this is. For example: they can (and increasingly will) require ADA accessibility standards on web and mobile sites and apps-- even private sector-- that deal with the public.
And things like image crafting are not even necessarily intentional or malicious. Somebody who posts a pic of their filet mignon dinner probably isn't posting much in the way of their microwaved leftovers mashed up in a bowl. And adults already get mistaken perceptions of others because of this bias, let alone children.
I'd fully support removing infinite scroll or even just banning it from under 18 year olds
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.
If the order changes, all bets are off regardless of pagination or infinite scroll.
Well, that's obviously false. There are two styles of pagination:
https://yourblog.zox/archives?page=4
https://yourblog.zox/archives?before=2019-06-03&count=10
The problem is infinite content.
It is the algorithm they attach to infinite scroll which is problematic. It is not a UI design problem.
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
According to who? US law is established as heading into this absurd notion of subjectivity, so the interpreter and viewer of the law as written is now as important as the law being written in the first place.
Gerrymandering black voters out of being able to elect a black representative? Well as long as the people doing it don't admit being racist, it's all fine! Want to take bribes from foreign governments? Well, if you're the head of the executive branch of government or a close personal friend, you can interpret that better than the bestest out there so those anti-corruption laws clearly don't apply, right?
"That's not a dark pattern, your honour!", Shady McShadeface attests in court, "we're just trying to make offers we think the customer is interested in before they confirm their final and terrible decision with awful consequences for them!". How else would the poor uninformed consumer not be aware of that special deep discount (today only, 4 hours left!), on that pillow set that they absolutely must need to consider on their way out of the door?
Infinite scroll is deemed by many a dark pattern, and by others a particularly clean way of dealing with a UX challenge. Subjective, eye of the beholder, and all that.
It reminds me a little of the "I know pornography when I see it" argument, and I think it's fair to call it a dark pattern given the evidence against it, but like pornography, consenting adults should be able to consent to exposure to it for their own "convenience", perhaps. I just personally think the button to turn it on should be hidden behind 3 screens and in a 3 point font...
Neither? Pagination is good UX; infinite scroll is a way to make your usable page unusable instead.
These feeds couple two features together: infinite scroll and automatic refresh. Without "pages" there is no technical way to refer to (and link) to a specific view, it's always generated. The best you have is a link to a particular item. Automatic refresh adds FOMO that you will not see the post again if you stop engagement right now.
Coupled together there is nothing about "product easier to use" and all about addictiion-inducing dark patterns.
Some apps do not tack on the auto refresh, meaning you can close the app at any time, reopen it and keep scrolling from the point you left, eliminating the addictive fomo.
Good question! Maybe when that which makes the application/product easier has more negative side effects than positive or useful intended effects?
There must be ample examples/collections on the net about convenience and/or ease of use doing ugly stuff to body and brain short-, mid-, long-term.
Its all very well saying "we will ban x" but unless you can define "x" reliably in a way that stands up to court arguing, you're not banning it, you're putting a lawyer tax on it.
The issue is, the vauger the terms, or harder it is to prove, the more money can warp the outcome.
There will always been cornercases to all laws, so you need to choose what you are going to hit and why.
Dark UX patterns can be hard to prove, you need to show that a normal person is not reasonably able to understand. That changes with time. (ie in the 90s asking someone to login and press a link would have been onerous, when a phone service/postal/fax was the done thing.)
So you either build in a proof, which can be gamed, or you target a specific action or thing, which will need updating.
the Law is hard, and, increasingly made by people who are not experts.
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.
So to your question about the line between good UX and addictive features, at least in some cases, there is an ocean between them, though to your point, it's hard to find that line in the ocean. "Fallacy of the beard" and whatnot.
I guess I'm agreeing with your point that its hard to pre-emptively define what "bad UI" is when it's often so close to "efficient UX", so just go downstream.
No, it's seeking to ban presenting content at a faster rate than a person can meaningfully digest.
There's a limit to that rate over which the platform doesn't become "too good", it just becomes worse, as it's showing too much too fast and breaking attention.
So if they acted by the spirit of the law, this would be very easy.
Of course they won't as that goes against their core interests, so we will likely have a cat-and-mouse game of definitions and malicious compliance. I'm looking forward to a whole new era of "UI innovation" where companies scramble to think of patterns that are technically not autoscroll or autoplay, but practically have an even worse effect.
(Interestingly, the "have the user opt-in" loophole we had with cookies doesn't seem to exist here, so at least we hopefully won't see any more "consent popups" or deliberately bad alternatives)
As for the law, apparently it has this line:
> ...or “any other feature defined” by the attorney general “as an addictive feature.”
So essentially the attorney general has to guess the intent of a company behind a feature. It's strange that this power lies with the attorney general and not a judge or jury (not an expert on US law though), but in general, "guessing intents" is something the legal system does all the time for obvious reasons.
A soon as you want to revisit a previous post you are lost.
You may remember it‘s ten pages back but with infinite scroll that information is missing
At addiction?
Uh... Have you actually ever read section 230? There is no "exemption" that algorithms get. Like literally none. The section is probably one of the simplest forms of legalese in the entire US code. Please read it before making claims about it.
Infinite scroll doesn't have a positive UX. If it takes an infinite amount of time to use your product, your product is shit.
Unless your product is content, in which case endless scroll encourages thoughtless consumption behavior. That's not a good thing.
We as engineers shouldn't be building stuff that degrades the experience of existence (which is already shit enough), just because you can make money doing so doesn't mean it's not antisocial behavior, and because you can make money by being a really shitty human, it does require some external force to curtail that negative sum behavior.
I agree it's difficult to categorize, the solution is rapid iteration, not allowing the asshattery until the entirety of society figures out it's bad for your brain. Someone should probably fix the political system in the US so we can have rapid iteration on problems again.
I meant rapid as in rapid for the legislative context too. I don't mind slow (expected) speed, or laws that have a delay before they take effect. I do have a problem with how political points can and are won not by finding solutions, but exclusively by obstructing the process. I don't mind an imperfect solution that moves the needle into a new better local maximum.
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!
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 an absurd and pointless precedent to set.
edit: I get that you're trying to provide counterexamples to be able to say "here's something that _could_ be construed as coercive/addictive design, so the law is going to end up banning those" - but that's the whole reason we have courts to interpret these laws. If you can reasonably conclude that a 100ms delay is helpful for user input - then it's probably not addictive design! That's the whole reason courts exist, because there is always going to be ambiguity; laws are not algorithms.
Web developers are already hard at work on this.
But in general, yes, having a confirmation dialog on important buttons is good UX; similarly as to setting minimum/maximum saturation will increase accessibility by visually impaired people, epileptic people etc.
That seems rather accident prone.
It's easy to say that it's absurd, but what would you do?
My suggestion would be to look at something like the rat park studies. When mice lived in a nice communal space with other mice, they preferred regular ware over drug laced addictive water. I suspect people are similar, they’re not intrinsically prone to addiction, they’re just trying to treat psychological problems like fear, loneliness, insecurity. We need to attack this root of the problem, but there’s so much money in ensuring that people feel empty so they’ll buy shit to fulfill themselves that there’s no actual motivation from anyone with power to do anything. That’s why you get these dumb ideas for laws, they’re not enough to impact the businesses (who are the real constituents) but politicians can still say they’re doing something and something is better than nothing.
It simply isn't true a) that businesses are all as unscrupulous as digital media platforms and b) that most products even have potential to be addictive.
It's certainly true that most companies would like you to be a loyal repeat customer, but that falls a long way short of addiction.
Infinite scroll is immediately evident. Just don’t use it if you don’t like it
What are your thoughts on introducing a law that requires social media sites with infinite scroll to feature an addiction warning, something like: "Using this platform may cause addiction in some users."?
... Prop 65 is dumb though. Kind of a trend in California law.
I would support a law that enforces a "This product may cause addiction in some users" warning on social media sites with infinite scroll.
The entire point of talking about addiction (or even harmless things like FOMO, network effect, etc) is that this is not true.
Does nicotine have some beneficial health effects? Yeah, it actually does. But do they outweigh the downsides (and societal costs)? Absolutely not.
I do believe strongly in individual freedom of choice, but only under a paradigm of informed consent, and companies like Meta have never allowed that to happen and they never will, because the truth getting out could destroy their bottom line.
But why? This is EU Cookies Banner level of state interference making UX worse for everyone just because some lawmaker doesn't like something.
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]
No they did absolutely not say that! They said I need informed consent before I collect your personal identifiable information. Nothing prevents me from instead of using a banner, for example having a small widget in the footer or elsewhere on my site if I were to want to collect it (I have no analytics or cookies on my site at all).
... 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.
With pagination you could say return to IG after a week, go through 5 pages of whoever you're following, check out a post, go back knowing you stopped at 5th, and continue from there. You can also set a limit (I'll check 10 pages tops and then go to sleep), which is helpful even with algorithmic feed.
I'm sure they can screw up pagination too if they wanted, but typical implementations don't have this issue
All the different flavors of yogurt in the grocery store are unnecessary. We only need 2.
There is a very real harm to allowing an engagement optimizing algorithm (which, if programmed effectively, almost always ends up a negative emotion firehose).
I don't know if this is the right solution, but I don't see that an extensive yogurt selection is the same thing as whatever the fuck is going on with Facebook feeding an endless stream of corrosive bullshit to users.
Online radicalization is a documented issue. Engagement optimizing algorithms pushing extreme and polarizing content is also well documented. Even the excess screen time on algorithmic feeds is well documented as harmful in young populations even if the radical content issues are ignored.
So while we did have shootings before, we did not have incels, groypers, ISIS sleepers and other weird people encouraging and glorifying them. If we can stop one at the cost of eliminating endless scrolling on Facebook, I think it’s a fair trade.
Well, one thing that definitely changed everywhere in a way well-correlated with local access to smartphones, is reduced fertility, so something definitely happened, but was that something infinite scroll, or something else?
In no way is this like yogurt. If I don't like that one yogurt has trace amounts of heroin in it, I can buy a different yogurt. If I don't like that reddit has an infinite scroll, I have to miss out on conversations in communities I like. There simply aren't similar communities I've ever been able to find for certain topics. And anything similar also has an infinite scroll (Facebook, twitter, etc.).
If, in your example, all yogurts had trace amounts of heroin in them, I would agree with the comparison.
On HN definitely, if half of the people here are really invested in that stuff themselves.
Give me a break
What are you, protoplasm with eyes? Exert some willpower and get a grip. I've never known such a wimpy whining generation as this one
People exert willpower through the democratically elected legislature
"No not like that!"
- 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...
That said, I like the idea of an option. Options are good!
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.
Age verification and how enthusiastic gov'ts are about it is concerning.
For reference, in Norway, you basically have 3 camps:
* Age verification is a detriment to democracy if implemented at a large scale as a requirement to speak in public. Well documented (activists and subject matter experts generally agree on this)
* We will solve the problem of kids online and we will solve it now. The solution must be age verification. Experts loud protest, and even committee findings that warn against are completely ignored (usually people who want a quick and easy solution, politicians who want the bragging rights of having saved the kids)
* We want to solve the problem, but the only obvious solution is age verification so I guess it can't be helped (not really educated on the topic. Just like most of us when it comes to a random political question. Not really a matter of intelligence)
Absolute circus.
I think most people here used the internet as a kid to learn about things and talk to adults in the field there were interested in. For today's kids this happens mostly on the few big sites like twitter and discord.
I'm more than happy to sacrifice endless scroll and recommendation algorithms (at least the type that is thrown at you without consent) to not have to verify my age to speak online.
https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-should-stand-up-to-bi...
on removing possible UI design choices for social media companies -- i have a very small violin on hand.
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.
(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.)
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.
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.
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.
I wrote an infinite-scroll implementation for my blog. Infinite scrolling through a static bank of content (even with some randomized elements) is not engaging. You eventually make it to the bottom and think "that's it?"
There are other types of Internet communities where people can connect with each other, that do not involve infinite scrolling, algorithmic curation, and using your collected interests for targeted advertising. I would love to see regulation, just to see the value of Meta's user-profiling-data-assets shrink.
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.
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.
The tech giants have flown to close to the sun, real people are pissed.
Call it the "pagination law" and combine it with banning personalized feeds as a whole, apart from fully transparent choices made by the user (e.g. follows).
One can dream...
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.
Goal achieved: media centralized.
Have you seen many people mindlessly watching people talk in public for hours on end? When a plane lands, people aren't zombified listening to another passenger talk, they're zombified doom scrolling on tic-tok etc.
the most enforceable way to do this is making open apis mandatory. any user should be able to get api keys that let them do all the basic operations like view posts for a user, consume the firehose, read their own likes and follows, you get the idea. your api is incomplete? you get fined. needs a paid subscription or signing a contract? all views go through the recommender system? straight to jail.
we need to play hard with platforms but let users do what they want, at least if its not disruptive to other users.
but it's not the actual problem, but it's a part of the problem, and it's also something really easy to identify.
on the contrary, infinite scrolls are impossible to get back to after some time away and eventually start lagging
and the technology marches onward
Ubiquitous infinite scroll is one of the things I hate most about "modern" UI design.
I know I spend more time on Reddit than I should, so... Oh well.