Doom scrolling is doomed, if the EU gets its way.
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Smart move, this is great to see! I think it’s pragrmatic on the EU’s part. I think we all know from browsing other platforms with infinite scroll that having to click ‘next’ at the end of the page for the 20th time is enough of a jolt to conclude, “that’s enough of this for now,” and to move on with your day
Good, just don’t demand ID. Let parents parent their kids and limit companies abusing biological weaknesses.
I mean…. What are they gonna kill next, buttons?
The scroll isn’t the problem, it’s the content.
You’re comparing a dark pattern to a basic interface element. It’s not like they’re talking about scrolling itself,
And infinite scrolling absolutely is a problem on its own, regardless of content.
The ability to scroll down forever is not something a government should control.
We need accountability not bullshit laws.
By blaming a user interface, the rich have tricked you into allowing them to keep doing what they are doing. If this passes, you’ll be placated. Something is “being done” but that’s just a lie they told you to believe.
The CONTENT is the problem.
If they really want to stop the doom scrolling, they need to make let’s dance against Algorithms. The algorithms are the addictive part. It’s not the scrolling that’s hurting anyone.
What if I said you’re addicted to the scroll. Your next hit is just one scroll away. Go on, scroll once more!
But Oracle, I’m on Lemmy, If I scroll for more than 45 minutes, I run out of content.
I’m on Voyager
It’s a good feature, Apollo had it too!
Or make the world have no doom.
Dude, if they could pull that off…
Haha right? No profit in utopia.
I would prefer them to go after mechanisms like this over tying all web activity to IDs I guess, but punishing and penalizing companies that have clear ill intent and demonstrate a lack of moral scruples seems the most efficient way to address the issues we’re seeing with social media design.
It’s all bureaucratic nonsense that will get nothing done, and just placates people while the companies continue to do the same thing they always have with a different mechanism.
This is more pathetic than a US democrat offering cheaper health insurance instead of socialized healthcare.
This is the “we need people to drive less to save the environment so let’s block all those new electric cars everyone wants that’ll slow em down” equivalent
The longer your think about it, the worse this idea seems.
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Thanks for your thorough answer. I read your post and the first few links. I don’t disagree with what you write, but wouldn’t it be a start to disallow the algorithmic techniques that maximize the amount of time someone uses the app? The first link talks about a U-shaped curve where there’s a “usage sweet spot” for kids’ wellbeing. Don’t things that work to prevent overuse (i.e. ending up on the far end of the U-curve) help? Stuff like no infinite scroll, limiting the amount of non-subscribed content shown in the feed, etc.?
The concept of banning algorithmic feeds is WAYYY more sensible to me than banning infinite scroll. I don’t consider them part of the same conversation.
An algorithmic feed is a set of choices that can be used to manipulate, infinite scroll is in contrast a trivial detail that entirely misses the point of what drives us to addiction or unhealthy behavior.
Don’t things that work to prevent overuse (i.e. ending up on the far end of the U-curve) help? Stuff like no infinite scroll, limiting the amount of non-subscribed content shown in the feed, etc.?
What is the point of asking these questions if we are unwilling to even define basic things like “overuse” or “attention span” in a scientific framework rigorous enough to build policy choices off of?
This is a moral panic, and justifying a moral panic by saying “but isn’t letting people do lots of a thing bad?” is a thought terminating appeal to moderation that is impossible to meaningfully argue against.
It frames the conversation to suggest that naysayers against this particular instance of limiting people must also disagree fundamentally with the concept that everything is best in moderation while invisibilizing any question about the feasibility and ethics of forcing people to adhere to a particular set of rules meant to moderate.
Who gets to decide limits? Why should we trust their intentions? Who gives the funding for research on these topics and what ideological blindspots do they have? What is the correct limit to set when people are so wildly different? What if the laws only effectively exclude poor people from digital spaces because the laws effectively don’t apply to wealthy people? What if a degree of social media use is correlated with unhealthy people but that simply taking it away with nothing to replace it destroys the one lifeline someone had for holding on? Are you ok with burning the last bridge for that person? What happens if they are trans and are growing up in a toxic town where even their own family will violent betray them if they reveal their true self?
The conversation around mental health and the human mind has degraded so much from refusing to talk about the actual things hurting our mental health that people fundamentally don’t even understand how attention works anymore and have accepted a meaningless, rheified narrative put out by a bunch of computer people who don’t understand the human brain and were never qualified as scientists to set such a narrative.
Do you think in this context going down the road of severely restricting social media based on overhyped fears is going to end well?
My investigation began with tracing the origin of the attention span claim. Every publication seemed to reference a singular source: a 2015 report by the consumer insight team at Microsoft Canada. The report has since been taken down by Microsoft, but a reuploaded copy is available. The report cited a marketing company, Statistics Brain, who claimed that our attention had decreased from 12 seconds in 2000 to just 8 seconds in 2015—conveniently shorter than a goldfish’s supposed 9-second attention span. But there was no peer-reviewed research behind these numbers. No empirical source. Just a claim repeated so often that it eventually became accepted as truth.
The only substantive research I found came from Gloria Mark, who studied digital screen use and multitasking. Her work suggested that people today switch between screens more rapidly (see her studies on attention to screens in 2004, 2012, and 2016), but this hardly proves a universal decline in human attention. The notion that attention can be measured in simple “spans” is itself questionable: as Yoo et al. (2022) state, “there is no singular neural measure of a person’s overall attentional functioning across tasks,” adding, “attention is not a unitary construct but rather multi-faceted” (p. 782).
The next problem with the goldfish claim is that is begs the question of what “attention” means. In the Microsoft research, that word is defined as “The allocation of mental resources to visual or conceptual objects.” It is not clear to me whether or how this applies to the task of being a juror, as at least part of the Microsoft study focuses on attention in an arena with “distracting or competing stimuli.” REPORT, 26. Indeed, there are multiple forms of attention – there can be selective attention, alternating attention, and sustained attention.
https://law.temple.edu/aer/2024/01/06/are-we-no-better-than-goldfish/
Why’s that? I’m curious to hear the counter-arguments
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Nobody gives a shit about kids, this has nothing to do with kids.
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It is a distraction to point to infinite scrolling, and it makes people dumber when they nod their heads and say “yeah that is the problem!” because the oxygen goes out of the room to have a serious conversation about collective ownership of digital platforms, the violence inherent to rightwing ideology and the extreme damage wealth inequality and the globally collapsing social safety net does to us all.
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These laws WILL be used by wealthy corporations to shut out smaller competition/social networks.
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Infinite scroll? Really? We are gonna compare swiping over and over again to physically giving someone drugs? I am not debating the reality of addiction, I am saying that there really isn’t any actually solid evidence we are making rational scientific decisions here. Whenever we talk about addiction people turn their brain off and everything becomes a slippery slope, it is a logic that only ever works when applied in a monomanical way that excludes the obvious fallacies that comes from expanding the logic outside of the moral panic zone… but a moral panic demands you be shamed if you aren’t hyperfocusing on it and thus it can propagate even though the broader implications of its logic are destructive and regressive.
https://www.platformer.news/social-media-screen-time-manchester-study-haidt/
https://news.ucsb.edu/2025/022293/brain-science-social-media-and-modern-moral-panic
https://www.usermag.co/p/can-you-sue-for-social-media-addiction
https://petergray.substack.com/p/63-more-on-moral-panics-and-thoughts
Will restricting social media or other uses of technology reverse the current mental health crisis among kids?
I am convinced that the answer is no. I have written about this before. The mental health crisis preceded smartphones and social media. It even preceded public access to the Internet. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide among teens increased continuously and dramatically between 1950 and 1990. In previous writings (e.g. here and here) I have described some of the societal changes that gradually restricted children’s freedom to play and explore independently and thereby deprived them of their greatest sources of joy and the kinds of activities that provide the opportunity to acquire a sense of agency and build the skills that underlie emotional resilience (see here).
Then, from 1990 to about 2010, the mental health of kids in the US improved. Rates of anxiety, depression and suicide declined about a third of the way back toward 1950s levels. Why? We don’t know for sure, but I have presented—with evidence (e.g. here)—the hypothesis that computers, computer games, and the Internet itself became a saving grace. Already by 1990 we had taken away most of kids’ opportunities to play, explore, and communicate with one another independently of adult control in the real world, but now they could do those things in the virtual world. They regained some of the sense of autonomy, competence, and relatedness to peers that psychologists have long known are essential for mental wellbeing.
Beginning around 2011 rates of anxiety, depression and suicide among teens began to increase again, reaching by 2019 a peak about the same as that in 1990 before leveling off again after 2019. What happened? Jonathan Haidt, in The Anxious Generation, wants us to believe that the crucial social change was availability of smartphones and social media platforms, but most social scientists who have long been immersed in testing that theory disagree. Again, see my critique of Haidt’s book here and the previous posts I link to in that critique. I elaborated (here) on another theory about what changed around 2011 to increase kids’ anxiety, depression, and suicide, which is far better supported by evidence than the smartphone/social media theory, but relatively few people are willing to consider it. It’s easier to blame media companies than to blame what was viewed as “reform” of our public school system.
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kek. What will threadiverse, Fediverse, and NaziSky do then?
threadiverse
- Piefed already uses paging
- Lemmy already uses paging
- Mbin already uses paging
- NodeBB already has opt-in paging
The only threadiverse software that does not support paging is Discourse. Considering most people aren’t even aware that one is federated to begin with, I doubt the threadiverse in particular is going to have any problem at all.
for posts, you’re correct. for loading comments in a post, all these paginate?
why would it? There are limited replies to a single post, but there are potentially unlimited posts to doomscroll
