The EU is planning to put a law in place that prevents unlimited scrolling of media content.
I don't know how they're going to do this.
I don't know whether I support this.
I don't know who recommended this.
But it was favoured by the majority when it went to vote.

Wut..? 😁 got a ref?

They could enforce to display cookie popup after each scroll gesture - that would be the essence of regulations.

edit:

found some post about it lol

https://europarl.europa.eu/news/en/...

I mean good, abolish Social Media completely...

however there's no way to enforce it... people will just make alternative UIs and Apps that use the API that allow infinite scrolling again. It's not gonna work. What we need is to educate people on how social media is destroying their self esteem, locks them in echo chambers, gives them false impressions of everyone else, reduces their attention span, manipulate their opinions and emotions and more... There's no way to protect people from their stupidity other than teaching them in an easy to understand and non-preachy way. Ironically the best way to expose people to the knowledge about harmful social media is social media itself... go figure

Everyone hates infinite scroll from the very beginning.

Simple. Put an end after ten thousand items. There's your end

@netikras https://europarl.europa.eu/news/en/...

When they came with the cookie law, I had it exactly in my mind as they're doing now and thought "Hah, they'll never do it". Damn, that they actually did that. Wtf

@electrineer good job internet Explorer

"- - MEPs believe companies should be obliged to develop ethical and fair digital products and services “by design” without dark patterns, misleading, or addictive design."

This sounds awesome. The EU is awesome.

Will devrant survive until it gets banned by this?

@electrineer because they know what devrant is and they care about people who use it

obviously they are disappointed on their software engineers scrolling devrant instead of inventing and implementing new regulations to fuck up our lives, so they found the way to stop it by removing scroll functionality as a new law of european web browsing

@netikras https://europarl.europa.eu/news/en/...

It get's a little more complicated. They're trying to crack down on the "addictive" behaviour of the way an app or website is designed! This sounds like a future nightmare for developers.

https://europarl.europa.eu/news/en/...

@Hazarth what gets me is they want to tackle addictive design.... but they won't tackle other addictive things like alcohol or smoking...because that brings them money. So it's a case of "let's only ban things that don't cost us money"

@electrineer its not just about scrolling though:

https://europarl.europa.eu/news/en/...

Infinite scrolling should be severely punished. Whoever designed it should be forced to 10 years of community service.

fucking scroll junkies, like crack was not enough

I agree that this shit is addicting. But trying to fight this by banning it is hilariously stupid.

Curious to see if the EU can achieve a better position against distributors in this new market of addiction than contemporary governments could against the established tobacco, gambling and alcohol business when it came into fashion to regulate the exploitation of addiction.

side note - you can still buy as much alcohol and tabacco as you want.Those addictions are fine because it makes them money....

@ojt-rant it's not they, it's we

@jestdotty Europeans overwhelmingly support _some form of_ this. Part of the reason is that although the governments of EU countries take a major role in running the EU, members of the European Pairlament are elected separately, so it's very common for EP representatives and national pairlaments to be on opposing sides of arguments, especially in the presence of regional gerrymandering which doesn't affect the EP elections at all.

This results in a lot of respect and trust granted to the EP, which enables them to tackle difficult topics like tech monopolies.

I'm not sure this will work out, but I'm a huge fan of the gatekeeper concept which is better than anything I could've come up with, so to me the question comes down to whether they learned from the case of the cookie law or they're gonna repeat the same mistakes.

ban on infinite scroll and autoplay? bring it on ... gonna be a freelance snitch reporting any website that won't disable it

on the other hand - "All online services and products must be safe for children to use" ... all = including pornsites? lolwut?

@qwwerty if it just means me clicking a button to accept infinite scrolling then fine. Because I'm an adult and can make my own decisions on how I browse the internet. But if they're just going to stop it (somehow) then no.

This rant rather scrolls for quite a while.

Take a rest, you've scrolled through all interwebz. *fireplace crackling*

Because people in power know better how other people must live their lives. But if they are forced to live lives of ordinary people that they regulated they always find an excuse that it is not what they meant.

@vane people in power are ordinary people who were voted in power by ordinary people.

@electrineer ...manipulated by statistics, advertising, friends, coworkers, media, measured and targeted by hundred thousands of servers against text prepared by PR agency. We have no choice, we are presented with already affirmed by media options. Just filling the form once in a while, we can as well fill the same form to say that we are men for this year and woman for next year because of taxes.

@electrineer the average person is a pedophile with a pathological lying reflex and always posturing fakely to present to you something and actually knows nothing about physics or how the real world works?

This feels like a nightmare

@jestdotty that's why there's opposition

@jestdotty So what's congnition ? If you're able to see that 99.999999% of world is repeating same things over and over you're able to ignore those and create new things from used parts. Create your own world that noone have access to if you don't let them in.

More likely we live in global consciousness than we are machine learning algorithm. 100% simulation and one shared quantum computer under God's desk. That's what we are. The most lucky of us are running on separate thread.

Google used to be on infinite scroll then some studies came out and some helicopter parents with no life started suing more... so they switched back to pages.

Imo people need to stop coddling lazy, whiny, children who are legally adults.
Why/how is it this fucked up nowadays?
Simple, people who have a life, real world obligations, arent on government assistance for bs like obesity and general anxiety(both tending to be from not having a life/working/being active irl) are working and busy most hours of the day. The more people get rewarded for not pulling their weight, the more people join in not working cuz the ratio of people working to people living free(to them) keeps getting worse. So anyone left working gives more % to gov/paying for the others to *not work*.

Eventually, what's the point of working/striving when youd make more by doing the same lazy shit that others are???

The issue is the culture/allowance/entitlement, not the laws.

@aviophille eh?. Not at all. smoking and alcohol is way worse than being allowed to scroll through a website

@scor it's ok, soon this won't be allowed :) Back to pagination for you.

@ojt-rant I think the point was that bringing in alcohol & tobacco is whataboutism because even though the regulations of those is quite lackluster in most places, it is a completely different topic and not relevant.

It's not like anyone is saying "we can either deal with infinite scrolling OR with alcohol", but you make it sound like that's the case.

@aviophille as far as I'm aware those things are illegal, so add nothing to what was being discussed.

@saucyatom they CAN deal with alcohol and tobacco by making it illegal. But then they would lose a tonne of money via tax. That was my point. They only really do something if it doesn't cost them.

@ojt-rant It's not like tax money is "their money".

Yes regulation is lacking in many places, no a blanket ban doesn't work, no current drug policies are not evidence based at all, yes there's likely some corruption involved (but also stupidity, populism and egocentrism).

But this has nothing to do with the OP topic. Judge a proposal by what it is.

(It is reasonable to ask for other things that you might consider more important, but that's not an argument for/against this and "but what about <completely different topic>" has been used often enough to derail discussions.)

@aviophille you'e got it a bit mixed up there:

smoking a cigarette - this is the action and choice of an individual = victimless crime

Scrolling through a website - this is the action and choice of an individual = victimless crime

The government has not banned smoking (eg enforced fully and completely a resolution to help prevent my addiction). and yet it wants to ban unlimited scrolling.

Again, what's the difference? One will coset them. The other won't. That is EXACTLY my point. It's hypocritical.

@jestdotty with those like @aviophille i always, by default, think back on something einstein wrote... unfortunately i dont think it's in one of the published/easily available writings (could be wrong(about if its published not if it's einstein's)... long story)... and hes known as one of the difficult/most debated authors to translate of all time (i reeeeally could go on)...

Anyways... his personal journals on relativity were far beyond the 'theory of relativity'(which people omit that its specifically "...general relativity").
He saw relativity everywhere, nothing is random...

This post, is much more likely to be relatively esoteric to a relatively larger percentile of people...

Just dont forget, people with such little substance, easily frightened, such poor social skill that they have a cache of relatively generic use memes at hand to compensate ...there's a good chance that most things ARE esoteric to them...

I'm with einstein's lesser known scope, everything is relative.

@aviophille there are taxes in the UE ;)?

Also it is still hypocritical of them though.