[ticulatedspline]

Curious as to where the line between “addictive feature” and "good UX" is. Is deliberate pagination actual impedance to use or merely an annoyance that's been weeded out with modern UX design?

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?

[fitzroy]

> a feature that simply makes your product easier to use

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.

[victorbjorklund]

You can do permanent urls with infinite scrolling. Nothing that prevents you from putting the page number in the url

[noripcord]

agree. pressing a button to go to next page is like a chore. The scrolling in itself is kind of addictive, you swipe with your finger and everything moves like you're moving a parchment or something.

[Robotbeat]

X posts have a permanent url.

[DaiPlusPlus]

I think they meant how you can’t get a permalink to your feed/timeline view-state[1], so other people can see exactly what you see (not just what’s in the viewport but also the surrounding/offscreen content and broader context).

[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.

[lmz]

Offset / page index is not exactly stable especially for the most common case of newest-first.

[DaiPlusPlus]

“Anchor + Offset” is stable because the anchor param should uniquely identify a specific record from which the offset is applied; a sort-order, direction, and page-size may also be optimally specified.

[Ferret7446]

No it's not stable. You also need the query/filter, and a snapshot of the state of all posts at the exact moment you want to grab the link, since posts can be created/deleted/changed. That's also assuming that your anchor still exists and wasn't deleted or changed.

The only stable way to share what you're seeing is with a screenshot.

[close04]

The reason infinite scroll is bad has nothing to do with the technicalities of the HTML behind it. You could always implement a technical solution for these technical issues but that wouldn't fix the real problem.

It's addictive. There is no "one more page and I'm done" because the page never ends and you're never done. You get to the bottom, more content loads automatically and people say "this looks interesting, let me scroll some more". That's why it's doom scrolling because all you do is scroll, no need for any other input. The bait is always there right in front of you and I'll bet that the algorithm make sure the first couple of posts that load every time you get to the bottom are the "juiciest" ones to make sure you take that bait and keep scrolling.

Pagination hides the juicy bait. It's still there waiting for you but it's hidden until you ask for it. That's a big difference.

[raverbashing]

Actually newest first shouldn't be a problem, you need only to point to "last seen date" (up to ms precision)

An algorithmically "curated" TL, yes that's harder

[crote]

It is when you do "?after=uuid" or "?after=timestamp".

[miki123211]

That's called a screenshot.

Google search or a traditional paginated forum doesn't provide that either. No guarantee that page 15 of thread X will contain the same posts as it does now when the moderators wake up and delete the flame war.

[Robotbeat]

I agree with all that. Many times I see someone Vagueposting about stuff, and I wish I could see their feed.

[nradov]

All Facebook posts have a permanent URL that you can copy.

[swiftcoder]

They do, but if you scroll past a post in your feed, and then try to scroll back to find it, there is very little guarantee that it will still be there.

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)

[blini-kot]

god I hate infinite scrolling so much

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

[newguy1000]

says you

[bcjdjsndon]

> now drowning in an endless morass of lazy-loaded blocks and widgets

> so there is zero accountably if the user was shown something that they need to reference

You just sound angry...

[chillfox]

Infinite scroll is bad UX design and always has been.

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.

[sureMan6]

Also creates a confusion that algorithm profiteers love, where before you could know a post you saw would be page 1 today and page 2 tomorrow now the homepage of every app is absolute chaos so you have to spend hours searching for something specific or you're just always seeing exactly what they want you to see (to increase engagement or whatever instead of any sensible order)

[layman51]

I have always hated infinite scroll because it becomes way more difficult to understand the index of a search result or piece of content. For example, if I know that each page of results contains 25 hits, then it is easy for me to see which one is the 25th hit, and then which one is the 26th one (first one on the next page).

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.

[nijave]

position: fixed has been around a long time

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

[AstroJetson]

You must have spoken to me, I hate it today has as much as I did back then.

[pfg_]

Steam fixes this by having a footer, and putting more content under the footer. Google search also did this on mobile for a little while.

[acchow]

> It makes it impossible to click on any links in the footer of the page

That's a UI bug. Real infinite scroll does not have a footer.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>It makes it impossible to click on any links in the footer of the page or even really reading what's in the footer.

But you can see the links! Maybe if your reflexes were just a little faster, if the mouse didn't lag!!!

[kentm]

Yeah I hate infinite scroll. I have no idea what actual common sentiment is because you’d have to do broad polling to find that out. I always wonder if UI designers fall into the “everyone i talked loved it” where everyone consists of “other designers and developers who have a stake in making this a common feature” or “user surveys that are heavily loaded to arrive at the conclusion I want “

Could be I’m just an old man yelling at clouds though.

[watwut]

I am pretty sure of that. Mostly because they always do the same impractical thing at the same time. And they discover it is bad few years later, also all at exactly the same time.

[burningChrome]

Its also horrendous for accessibility and screen reader users.

[Greenpants]

The way I see it, it's the incessant stimuli you get through these apps. There's just no point where the screen stays quiet, stimulus free. Moving elements capture our attention naturally, especially when the entire screen keeps moving. The endless scroll element just makes sure that the stimulus keeps getting renewed the moment you're done with it.

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.

[TripleFFF]

The problem with using scrolling as a metric is it assumes satisfaction with the content presented and ignores the fact that, on certain apps, many scroll miles go into skipping around articles or ads or reposts to get to the content you want, and imo a punishment for seeking more content while also diluting said content with forced ads at an alarming ratio is not indicative of addiction but scarcity of satisfaction and engaging content

[Noumenon72]

If you continue scrolling, that shows you think that the content presented is valuable enough that scrolling past some misses is worth it. A good scroll like TikTok carefully metes out the ads so that half of them you don't mind and the other half you enjoy. If you find a site whose scroll makes you feel this way, just stop scrolling and don't try to ban the concept for everyone else.

[King-Aaron]

What I'm about to say is going to sound very 'layman', and this is coming from someone who's been building UI's for like, 20 years.

This discussion makes me both laugh and feel sad, because we all know this is bad for us and gives us zero ROI for our time... and yet there's a whole thread developing here to justify the pattern.

I don't think I have a point on that, just that observation.

[iamnothere]

Hello, what right do you have to regulate the presentation of speech? If you regulate this format because it’s now considered harmful, what stops El Presidente from moving to ban “zines” because the format is “harmful to young minds” and used by “antifa”? What stops CA from moving to ban forums because threaded formats are suddenly considered “too addicting”? Maybe we should ban VR or first person shooter video games?

There is no allowable constitutional authority for actions like this. CA is literally overstepping the 1A limits of the Constitution here.

[tzs]

I doubt that this will run into any 1A issues. It will probably pass the test for allowable time/place/manner restrictions.

• 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.

[iamnothere]

Time/place/manner restrictions typically apply to public property. These are private websites.

While the court has once or twice extended protections to people using private property as a public forum, to my knowledge they have never done so with time/place/manner restrictions.

[7402]

"No loud music between 10pm and 7am." That's on private property when it can be heard by others. Laws have all kind of restrictions on the time/place/manner of self-expression when what is being expressed has a negative effect on others. What you can't do is have laws that would say loud opera after 10pm is OK but loud Country & Western isn't.

[iamnothere]

“No writing at home between 10pm and 7am.” Would that be allowed? I imagine you agree the answer is “no”. What, specifically, is the difference? Because the answer lies there.

Hint: the physical world is very different from the virtual world, and has different limitations.

Hint #2: if I crank up the amp to 1000db and shout into it, it’s obviously not a question of speech anymore. This is obviously an extreme example (the energetic release just destroyed the planet), so dial it back to where it’s reasonable and concerns are balanced. Are you still facing actual physical discomfort? Did you dial it back enough?

Hint #3: is my nighttime writing keeping you awake in your home?

[tpdly]

These are private websites accessible over the public internet, to be clear. Also, there are known relationships between the intelligence community and the big platforms, lets not pretend they have free reign.

Should/do we allow foreign propaganda radio stations? If we accept that the government can (and very much does) impose itself on content platforms for "national security", what exactly is the difference between deliberately insidious information warfare, and collateral damage from market incentives?

I agree that its better to find solutions that involve protections instead of restrictions though. I think it means forced decoupling of indices/curation from advertising. This would make advertising funded addiction feeds compete with paid feed applications.

[iamnothere]

> Should/do we allow foreign propaganda radio stations?

How do you define this? Is it foreign owned? Noncitizens are not guaranteed the same rights, especially citizens of hostile foreign powers.

> If we accept that the government can (and very much does) impose itself on content platforms for "national security"

Why should we accept this?

> what exactly is the difference between deliberately insidious information warfare, and collateral damage from market incentives?

None, both are concepts not found in the Constitution (if you’re talking about domestic speech by citizens) and both are protected by 1A.

I don’t care in the slightest about your fearmongering national security nonsense.

[seanhunter]

Courts already do lawfully regulate the “presentation of speech” as you’re calling it. Say facebook was to present each post surrounded by pornography for example. That’s clearly a “presentation of speech” in your framing. However courts have decided that it is possible to regulate the circumstances under which that would or would not be ok and 1A arguments have not prevailed in that case.

[iamnothere]

That’s more likely to be publication in itself, not presentation, but regardless porn is one of the very few areas where the courts still listen to speech arguments. However, the remaining decisions allowing (limited) regulation of porn rely on complicated, twisted reasoning—it’s clear that the justices don’t like touching this subject and feel that there are still constitutional issues here that may eventually need to be resolved via amendment. Usually this involves classifying porn in some other context, so it’s no longer “just” speech. Then the non-speech part can be regulated. Whenever they do this, they like to draw a very tight line biased towards favoring speech wherever possible, and they have consistently made it clear that they are not looking for more areas to do this kind of tightrope walking.

[coldbrewed]

We already do limit harmful speech, at presence it's limited to speech and will immediately cause harm (the whole "shouting fire" thing) and the demonstrable addiction properties can be reasonably shown as harmful.

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.

[iamnothere]

“Shouting fire” was a bad decision denying the right to protest the draft, and it’s since been overturned. (Thankfully, as we may need that right soon!)

The First Amendment is clear: there shall be no law abridging freedom of speech. Courts have bent around that in the past, in earlier eras, but they were wrong to do so. Their mistakes have mostly been corrected although there’s still a few left.

The document that governs this country spells it out: it can’t be done. Public safety be damned. There’s no public safety exemption in the Constitution. If you want it done, pass an amendment. There’s a process for it.

I personally dislike infinite scroll, but I dislike the camel’s nose in the tent even more. No speech laws.

[coldbrewed]

Hang on, let's go back - clarify for me how we're calling an addictive feature in a product built by the wealthiest corporations on the planet a matter of individual free speech? Precisely whose free speech would be harmed here?

Seriously, this diffusion of individual liberties into corporations has no presence in the constitution, and courts have fabricated this wholesale. There is no idea, no concept, no notion that infinite scroll provides. We regulate the size, location, and brightness of billboards; is this also a matter of speech?

[iamnothere]

Oh is this law’s scope limited to only the world’s largest corporations, and not smaller competitors, new entrants, individual developers, or nonprofits? I didn’t realize that.

Oh is the presentation of text and images not “speech” because it’s “addictive”? I didn’t realize that.

Your strategy with billboards is more clever than I’ve usually seen from you lot; I’ll give you credit for that. A billboard is actually a physical structure. The message on the billboard is the speech. If I stopped here you’d have a “gotcha”; the software must be like the billboard! But no, because first of all, code is speech, and secondly, the layout of items on the screen and how they interact is also just speech. It’s just graphic and UX design! There is no physical structure here. You’re attempting to regulate the presentation of information—design.

[inigyou]

There's the constitution (basically a piece of toilet paper with scribbles on it) and then there's the actual reality of how the country operates, and the actual reality is that speech is restricted in many ways.

I must also mention that courts are not Congress and states are not Congress. The first amendment does not say "there shall be no law" - that is your poor paraphrasing - it says "Congress shall make no law"

[iamnothere]

Well just throw it all out the window then, if we’re not going to pay attention to the constitution. First things first, let’s make a law to ban you.

If you’re just going to pick and choose what rights you apply, then it’s not much of a governing document, is it? Is this just “Parliament is Sovereign” with extra fluff? Might makes right?

[inigyou]

btw zines are already illegal in the USA. 30 year sentence. https://culture.org/art-and-culture/thirty-years-for-a-box-o...

[initatus]

Funny. You're citation never says what he was sentenced for, specifically.

[iamnothere]

That specific case is why I brought this up, no they aren’t illegal, this is Making Shit Up and exaggerating beyond what actually happened. But if people like you got your way, they could be made illegal.

[post-it]

I disagree. Looking forward to reading your amicus brief.

[htek]

First they came for the infinite scroll, and I said nothing...

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.

[iamnothere]

Can they? Why haven’t they enforced this yet?

It may be that this isn’t as settled as you think when speech concerns are present. The existence of alternative accessible formats, or sufficient assistive technology in the marketplace, may be just as compliant. It’s likely that these will be favored over mandating changes that affect design or presentation, given the Court’s prior decisions on balancing speech concerns in other areas.

[inigyou]

Someone would have to sue the website to get the ADA enforced

[somenameforme]

While I would agree, I think many are missing the even more fundamental issue. Even if you get rid of every single predatory thing imaginable, social media itself is full of incessant stimuli, FOMO and other features that make it destructive for everybody, but especially young people. For instance image crafting is going to harmful for everybody, because many adults have a tendency to engage in keeping up with the Joneses, but for children it's especially harmful because of much greater personal insecurities and proclivities towards envy.

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.

[iamnothere]

Don’t give them any ideas or they’ll start working to outlaw “inducing envy in others”

[over_bridge]

What I like about Hacker News is each day I open it up, scan the first three pages, open 2-5 links to read, then close it again. Those pages make it easy to monitor my usage and set limits. I used to do the same with Reddit before that changed

I'd fully support removing infinite scroll or even just banning it from under 18 year olds

[afandian]

Infinite scroll evolved alongside algorithms that incentivise addictive content. So it’s “good” UX in that it’s effective for consuming addictive content…

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.

[xigoi]

On the contrary, pagination makes it impossible to keep your place in the list if it changes between page loads.

[nkrisc]

How are you going to keep your place if the order changes anyway? What is your place if the order has changed?

If the order changes, all bets are off regardless of pagination or infinite scroll.

[xigoi]

When asked to load more items, simply take the entire list (which may have changed) and remove the items already shown on the screen.

[tmtvl]

How does that differ from 'when asked to load more items, simply take the entire list (which may have changed) and remove the items already shown on previous pages'?

[xigoi]

The fact that, in general, you don’t know what was on the previous pages, if anything. The user may just randomly decide to open page 3 without having visited the previous two pages. Or they clicked “next” after having page 2 open on their computer for several days and meanwhile they used your website on a different device.

[nkrisc]

That’s not “keeping your place” in an ordered list if the order has changed between the requests for pages 3 and 4.

[afandian]

The challenge is to retain an ordering over the result set. How would infinite scroll behave any differently in this case? The changing results seems to be an orthogonal concern to pagination/infinite scroll.

[xigoi]

Infinite scroll makes the problem much easier, even if it’s still a problem. The only action you need to support is loading more results, which you can do by loading all results and filtering out those already shown. With pagination, the user may say “give me page 3” and you have no idea what was on pages 1 and 2, if they were even loaded.

[hdgvhicv]

If page 1 and 2 were 10 each you load results 21-30

Same as if you are scrolling and have reached result 20 And want to load more.

[falcor84]

But the underlying table changed since. I'm not very familiar with these myself, but it seams to me that the best solution is to keep a session cursor for the user, and these are a lot simpler when you only ever move it forward.

[svachalek]

You can implement pagination exactly the same way. It's a UX decision that has nothing to do with underlying queries, although it typically maps.

The typical infinite scroll that I've seen implemented does not work the way you describe though, it's just pagination without controls. The reason it works is because it's pushing content you never asked for anyway and it just keeps pushing. Without any sense of pages you'll never know the difference.

[iamnothere]

Just use really long pages and require them to hit next page after viewing 100 items, then start showing the next batch of feedslop. How is that changing anything?

Users know that they are scrolling endlessly, they just don’t care. Adding a “more” button every now and then isn’t going to change that.

[bigmadshoe]

Just use cursor based pagination. How is this any different whether it’s infinite scroll or separate pages?

[xigoi]

Cursor based pagination only works if the items are sorted in strict chronological order. Otherwise, the problem remains. Consider the list

  [A B C] D E F G H …

where the brackets represent the first page. If the user clicks the next page button (asking for the next page after C), but meanwhile the order changed, they get this:

  A D C [B F E] G H …

Notice how they now see B twice and completely miss out on D. In constrast, infinite scroll will take the new infinite list and remove A B C, leaving D F E …

[contextfree]

I guess the argument is that, while it's the same whether the user asks for "give me page 3" or "give me scrollbar Y coordinate 2160", the user is more likely to do the first or at least to care about the correctness of its result?

[malfist]

I mean sure, if you do it that way. But its easy to encode the page starting index and pagenate from there. Its even exactly the same algorithm as infinite scroll.

[thaumasiotes]

> On the contrary, pagination makes it impossible to keep your place in the list if it changes between page loads.

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

That second style will never change (unless you insert entries into the past). The first style will change. But it hardly makes it impossible to keep your place in the list; if you come back three years later, you'll find that that link goes to a random location, but if you come back next week, that link is going to go to a place that is very close to the place you left off, requiring minimal adjustment to find your place again.

[xigoi]

The second style makes it impossible to sort by anything other than time.

[masfuerte]

If it's the only thing you make available. If you want other options you can add other options.

[gnoll_of_gozag]

and places other than reddit dont need it

[bigbuppo]

Ah yes, let me just look at Instagram for the ideal model of infinite scroll UX. You can't even scroll up to something you've actually subscribed to that you didn't mean to scroll past without it tossing it into the memory hole and replacing it with something you don't care about.

[cwillu]

‹looks at hn›

[vitally3643]

Did you think HN has an unusable and bad interface? It seems to be a remarkably popular website despite having hard pages that change order on every refresh.

[xigoi]

> Did you think HN has an unusable and bad interface?

In thems of pagination, yes, which is why I prefer to use https://hckrnews.com/.

[im3w1l]

Why is the list constantly changing anyway?

[xigoi]

Because other people keep adding new posts (and upvoting existing posts, which changes their order).

[im3w1l]

While that's true I think that once the feed has been observed in a certain way the advantages of stability outweigh the advantages of showing a tweaked version the second time it is loaded.

[xigoi]

The user expectation is that if you refresh the page, you will see fresh content.

[esafak]

So you'd rather something like Slack was paginated? I think that would be disastrously bad.

[drdexebtjl]

Slack isn’t infinite. At some point there are no more old messages or no more new messages depending on which way you’re scrolling.

The problem is infinite content.

[iamnothere]

Pagination works just as well with infinite content.

[drdexebtjl]

Good. Use pagination instead.

[esafak]

What good does it serve to have to constantly hit 'next page' in the middle of a real-time conversation? That's a bad UX.

[RajT88]

Infinite scroll is not necessarily a problem in and of itself. If the content is static, no biggie. At some point diminishing returns and you will want to use search for it.

It is the algorithm they attach to infinite scroll which is problematic. It is not a UI design problem.

[8organicbits]

I think it's about user agency. When we say that infinite scroll is addictive, we mean that the user keeps on scrolling even when they wish they could stop. It's also about harm. Trapping users on their phones is harmful to their well-being. A person who wants to quit should be able to do so, addictivity that prevents that is harmful.

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

[oytis]

Good UX makes you achieve your goals on a website faster. It implies that the website has a purpose apart from spending your time on it. If it has no such purpose, and yet people are spending a lot of time there, it's probably addictive

[PaulRobinson]

> If the unsubscribe button is hidden behind 3 screens and is in 3 point font that's pretty clearly a dark pattern.

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...

[thaumasiotes]

> Curious as to where the line between “addictive feature” and "good UX" is. Is deliberate pagination actual impedance to use or merely an annoyance that's been weeded out with modern UX design?

Neither? Pagination is good UX; infinite scroll is a way to make your usable page unusable instead.

[friendzis]

> Curious as to where the line between “addictive feature” and "good UX" is. Is deliberate pagination actual impedance to use or merely an annoyance that's been weeded out with modern UX design? When does a feature that simply makes your product easier to use cross into a territory that it's illegal?

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.

[reformd]

> When does a feature that simply makes your product easier to use cross into a territory that it's illegal?

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.

[KaiserPro]

Your edit is actually the nub of the matter.

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.

[petra]

We know there's a big problem with addictive ux in general.

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.

[dayglo]

Exactly correct - there is no way to disable the infinite scrolling reel nonsense in Snapchat while still allowing messaging. So, my son is either cut off from his friends or gets crap shovelled into his eyes. This is a business decision: to leverage their having insinuated themselves between him and his friends against his mental health. Ban it all immediiately

[hoherd]

One of my favorite UX stories is about my first Mac, a 12" g4 mbp. One of the best things about it was that I could open the lid and it would immediately be awake and ready to use. I would use it, do what I needed to do, then close it and put it away. It was great because it consumed so little of my time.

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.

[ksymph]

This is the sort of thing that should / will be decided by courts, I think. We have many fuzzy laws where evaluating on a case-by-case basis makes more sense than deciding an arbitrary hard line. In this case, apps and platforms as a whole would be taken into account; infinite scroll alone might not be against this law, but if an app has a consistent pattern of addictive behavior and is harming its users because of it, something like infinite scroll might be forbidden for that app in a lawsuit.

[momojo]

Seems like one of those situations where the outcomes should be measured, not the implementation. If you've created a product that is leading to hundreds of hours of wasted time (and the users themselves are sick of the amount of time they spend) maybe its time to investigate?

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.

[Tade0]

> This seeks to regulate the opposite basically "your platform is, too easy, too good at serving your content"

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.

[xg15]

First, I believe the companies would have a very easy time to distinguish those features, as they know which feature was developed with the intent of keeping users in the app.

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.

[croes]

Infinite scroll makes it only easier to use when your consumption only has one way.

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

[eviks]

> where the line between “addictive feature” and "good UX" is.

At addiction?

[asdfsa32]

I know it when I see it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

[ozgrakkurt]

This is a question that needs to be answered empirically. It should be forced to a point where it is not obviously addictive and then stay there imo

[inigyou]

Do they have to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt? If it was a crime, they would.

[8note]

infinite scroll breaks the back button and its really annoying

[ls612]

A lot of this is states trying to figure out a way around the first amendment to regulate social media that the courts will wink and accept. That is why you see so many convoluted laws being drawn up by state legislatures about this.

[AlexandrB]

What should be changed is the exemption algorithmically curated feeds still get under section 230. This has always seemed like a huge loophole. Once social media feeds are picking and choosing what to show users based on opaque criteria they are no longer neutral carriers of information but more like newspaper editors. They should be liable for what the users see.

[ethin]

> What should be changed is the exemption algorithmically curated feeds still get under section 230.

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.

[inigyou]

In theory they are already exempt. YouTube is not liable for hosting a Nazi video but section 230 doesn't prevent it being liable for the choice to algorithmically show that video.

[cloudie78]

Good UX for what? Maximising engagement time?

[gnoll_of_gozag]

infinite scroll/algorithms don't need to be completely gone - just no longer the default setting

[grayhatter]

coke cola used to have cocaine in it, it doesn't anymore, people in taste tests prefer the taste of Pepsi... Coke is still the leader in sales.

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.

[iamnothere]

Rapid iteration on political issues is how you end up with oppression and legal terrorism. The brakes are there for a reason. But so is the valid process for changing the fundamental system (amendments).

[grayhatter]

I don't think rapid iteration causes legal terrorism. Do you have an example, or just vibes?

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.

[iamnothere]

Perhaps I should clarify, I am using “legal terrorism” as a term of art for legislative terror, such as that inflicted during the French Revolution or the reign of Oliver Cromwell, or Germany’s Enabling Act. Without strong checks, which slow down the process, legislative bodies can get caught up in a frenzy of passing laws in order to address “urgent” problems.

Our problem is that a majority of legislators want to pass laws that they aren’t allowed to pass, although at cross purposes from each other, but they don’t want to go through the process for changing what they’re allowed to do. (Which may simply be evidence that the system is working as expected.)

We also have a problem with general legislative gridlock, entirely due to self-imposed rules that Congress isn’t willing to change. (Interestingly enough, however, the people could force a change through an amendment here too.)

[inigyou]

Another alternative to avoid legal terrorism is low penalties. If the law would rapidly shift to say infinite scroll is illegal, but the only penalty is being ordered to remove it (and then penalised more if you fail to do so after being notified) I don't think that's really that bad?

[iamnothere]

You’d need a Constitution that allows laws regarding speech. And probably a mechanism to prevent legislators from assigning excessive penalties.

It’s not about whether the law meets some abstract notion of good or bad, it’s about whether it is even possible to enact under the framework that governs us. Under the Constitution as it stands, it wouldn’t be possible.

[VladVladikoff]

It’s the wrong fix to the problem. The correct fix is enforcing an infinite scroll limit (time), after which the app tells you to take a break (for some amount of time).

[matt123456789]

Get your nanny state out of my free market. I suppose next you will want some kind of warning label on my asbestos filter cigarettes.

[iamnothere]

Waah waah speech is cigarettes again. Stale. Why don’t you people address the actual constitutional issues (the ones that will get your law struck down hard)

[iamnothere]

Whatever the right “fix” is, why is a US state involved in deciding how my app presents my speech to you? Under what authority?

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!

[inigyou]

States get to regulate things that happen within the state. That's how it's always worked. They're like mini-countries.

[iamnothere]

Not if they violate rights as enumerated in the Bill of Rights and later amendments.

[VladVladikoff]

Right because that’s worked so well with gun control too!

[iamnothere]

It has, I have no problem with my guns!