Comment by amadeuspagel
18 hours ago
Banning infinite scroll comes close to banning good design. If removing pointless interruptions is illegal, we might as well throw every designer in prison. And why stop there? Why not force TikTok to add other pointless barriers, like making the user solve a puzzle before watching another video? What about other uninterrupted experiences, like watching TV?
I find twitter more addictive then TikTok. Should it be forced to make me click "next" before seeing another tweet?
Banning recommendation engines is also incredible. Is it really the EU's case that they're all illegal, from the youtube recommendation engine to amazon's "people who bought this also bought" to twitter's "who to follow"? Is TikTok's just too good?
I agree that endless scrolling can be a good UX paradigm, but really only in certain situations, like if I'm looking at my bank account it sure is nice to just keep scrolling to find a payment from 3 months ago rather than having to click a "next" button every 10 transactions.
But when it comes to these algorithmic feeds I think the endless scrolling becomes a dark pattern since it encourages that "one more swipe" headspace that gets people stuck scrolling for literal hours at a time. The platforms engineered their apps this way because they have a monetary incentive to get people sucked in, they even hire psychologists to target people as effectively as possible and I think it's pretty undeniable they've engineered quite an impressive dopamine harvesting engine in the worst way possible.
I do agree that banning recommendation algos is quite dumb, especially since they seem to be specifically singling out TikTok rather than all the apps with similar feeds, and I believe the problems are on a societal level and not necessarily something that can be smoothed over by laws banning predictive algorithms. Realistically if people had time and freedom for their hobbies and loved ones rather than wasting away at jobs that suck all motivation out of you, we'd have a lot less people addicted to this type of content.
Though I suspect there have to be some rules here regardless because even though we're working with incomprehensibly complicated hardware in our noggins the brain is also lazy, and in modern times it's proven quite easy to trap a brain with flashy lights and loud noises that would've been unimaginable a few decades ago.
Really it's just these business models encouraging such antisocial behaviour from the psychotic C-suite in charge that needs to die a violent death, but how we get there is a question I'm not sure I have the answer to.
> Banning infinite scroll comes close to banning good design.
If infinite scroll is good design.
> we might as well throw every designer in prison
No, we might as well convict every manager/boss that assign those goals to the designers.
Designers don't dream these patterns out of thin air, they have incentives to.