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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

on the contrary, infinite scrolls are impossible to get back to after some time away and eventually start lagging

Ubiquitous infinite scroll is one of the things I hate most about "modern" UI design.

and the technology marches onward

I know I spend more time on Reddit than I should, so... Oh well.