▲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?
chillfox30 minutes ago
[-] 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.
sureMan623 minutes ago
[-] 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)
reply▲AstroJetson18 minutes ago
[-] You must have spoken to me, I hate it today has as much as I did back then.
reply▲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.
TripleFFF38 minutes ago
[-] 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
reply▲Noumenon7217 minutes ago
[-] 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.
reply▲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
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.
reply▲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.
On the contrary, pagination makes it impossible to keep your place in the list if it changes between page loads.
reply▲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.
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.
reply▲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.
reply▲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.
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.
reply▲Dylan1680738 minutes ago
[-] It's slightly different but I don't see why there should be a notable difference in difficulty. You need to somehow represent what you saw so far and act based on that.
reply▲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.
reply▲vitally364328 minutes ago
[-] 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.
reply▲bigbuppo36 minutes ago
[-] 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.
reply▲Why is the list constantly changing anyway?
reply▲Because other people keep adding new posts (and upvoting existing posts, which changes their order).
reply▲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.
reply▲The user expectation is that if you refresh the page, you will see fresh content.
reply▲mine isnt?
if i refresh the page it should be almost the same. maybe a couple new things at the very top, but i should still be able to find the thing i was just looking at.
by comparison, facebook auto-reloads while you're halfway down a page, and wont show you any of the same things. its an incredibly poor experience
So you'd rather something like Slack was paginated? I think that would be disastrously bad.
reply▲Do they have to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt? If it was a crime, they would.
reply▲thaumasiotes3 minutes ago
[-] > 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.
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.
infinite scroll breaks the back button and its really annoying
reply▲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.
reply▲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.
reply▲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.
reply▲This is exactly why I force my kids to always create accounts as 30-years old (by specifying a birth data in the 90s), to avoid as much State interference as possible.
Did you know that if your child has a "kid" account you cannot follow him on google maps? We had to make one for "adults" in order to be able to do so.
reply▲Varelion38 minutes ago
[-] Thank God. We need more legislation against the cognitive poisoning of two generations.
reply▲iamnothere19 minutes ago
[-] Hopefully they can take down TV next. And the damn radio!
reply▲Both of those are already dead.
reply▲iamnothere3 minutes ago
[-] Then let’s get the video games and the comic books! Take it all down!
reply▲We can all agree that the internet was great and now it is less great, but the second someone articulates a very, very simple rule, the "well ackchyually" crew comes out of the woodwork.
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.
> Just make people click something every once in a while
But why? This is EU Cookies Banner level of state interference making UX worse for everyone just because some lawmaker doesn't like something.
chupchap45 minutes ago
[-] It was a good UX in FriendFeed as it was still a chronological feed. However once it was mixed with algorithmic feed it shifted from better UX to keep em' hooked.
reply▲I think the most frustrating thing for me is when a website has infinite scroll, but also a footer with links that you want to access. I end up going to the dev tools to look at the code.
reply▲ulrikrasmussen4 hours ago
[-] Instead of trying to whack a mole on all addictive mechanisms, just ban the business model driving all of them: targeted advertising.
reply▲I’m not sure that suffices. If a site has a very “good” (at keeping people glued to the screen) content ranking algorithm, they can still make money, albeit less, serving non-targeted ads. Longer engagement time by viewers = more ad impressions, targeted or not.
reply▲"they can still make money, albeit less, serving non-targeted ads."
- would they be able to make as much as they do now? I think it would be significantly less.
From Meta's official Financial Report for 2025 [0]:
Total Revenue: $200,966 Million
-Advertising: $196,175 million (97.6%)
-Other rev: $ 4,791 Million ( 2.4%)
[0] https://investor.atmeta.com/investor-news/press-release-deta...
It should just be universally required to give an option to disable addictive features. Should prevent age verification, and giving users optionality is always a good thing (for them).
reply▲>
Should prevent age verificationIt won't, become some parties are proposing a narrative of "shielding the innocent from harmful content" (such as themselves).
keir starmer seems to suppose nudity would be indecent, against an implicitly stated decent itself and british politics.
Yeah I meant it would avoid the necessity of age verification to solve this problem.
Age verification and how enthusiastic gov'ts are about it is concerning.
The problem with infinity scroll is the lack of "pagination", which essentialy make most of content to get hidden away. For instance. Let assume you have 3000 comments on a YouTube video, your browser will crash way before it "infinite scroll" to the end (I know that that are tools to bypass this, but I'm talking about the default experience).
reply▲pinkmuffinere1 hour ago
[-] As somebody with not-enough self control, I would love this for myself. Self-locks help, but the temptation is always there.
reply▲pillmillipedes4 hours ago
[-] note that this is going after "psychologically exploitative features intended to maximize engagement" of all kinds, not just infinite feeds. it also poses an ultimatum banning people under 16 from websites that provide such addictive features to anyone.
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.
same as alcohol, we've decided adults are fair prey
reply▲I (personally) think this is the wrong kind of solution.
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.
Headline makes it sound like that's a bad thing.
reply▲Removing choice is generally a bad thing, IMO.
reply▲What choice? When did I ever choose infinite scroll?
reply▲Noumenon7213 minutes ago
[-] You never had an option to have Google show a list of curated links or Yahoo show a simple search bar. You chose to go to the site you liked better and in aggregate the market chose the simple search. I could still be going to Slashdot or Things You Wouldn't Know Unless We Blogged It, but I and the content creators found that we preferred infinite scroll instead.
reply▲dijksterhuis5 hours ago
[-] it doesn't remove any choice for
users. users don't get a choice on the offending sites currently. they only get infinite scroll. so the eventual infinite scroll replacement will be just that, the replacement.
on removing possible UI design choices for social media companies -- i have a very small violin on hand.
Any discussion on this topic within hacker news is pretty silly. To much financial incentive to keep the status quo, and to many bots pushing narratives.
It’s like listening to the lawyers at a cigarette manufacturer, car manufacturers fight seat belts or gun manufacturers in kindergartens. The change is coming because real people are pissed.
Noumenon729 minutes ago
[-] The real people who are pissed are the same minority of novelty-haters who were pissed about Wal-Mart, fracking, and Facebook. They're outnumbered by the real people who think infinite scroll is great and use it every day.
reply▲>
they only get infinite scroll(Actually, sometimes the "paged" interface in "infinite scrolling" systems is available, only hidden. There for the benefit of people like us, those who would find it and exploit it.)
dijksterhuis4 hours ago
[-] i originally wrote users from the wider public or something but then decided to edit the comment down. fair point i suppose for the ~1% of users of these sites that are super tech nerds
reply▲That seems like cute libertarian nonsense. The key word is choice. People have less free will than you think. Every time a teen goes to insta/facebook/tiktok etc they are an individual up against a huge corporation of thousands of people and ML whose job it is to hijack their dopamine circuit. Usage of these apps decreases attention span which effectively means other activities become boring so the users experience a withdrawal symptom like a drug addict.
And it doesn't just affect them. I think most of us would rather live in a society where 50% of the population isn't brain-rotted.
Laws are pretty much always about removing choice.
reply▲We also removed choices to drive without a seat belt or sell lead paint. Was that a bad thing?
reply▲I should have a choice between leaded and unleaded paint and gasoline
reply▲ratelimitsteve5 hours ago
[-] it's based on age and I think that the age verification it would require is pretty universally reviled, at least here on HN
reply▲I want it to be forbidden for anybody. They have stolen our attention for years
reply▲nickthegreek1 hour ago
[-] How about you just petition for an option to chose. That way you get yours and I get mine. You don’t need to make that decision for me.
reply▲Robdel1245 minutes ago
[-] I’m going to be honest, this kind of regulation would make me disable the site(s) for the state (if there are fines, etc). I don’t have the time to play these games for my tiny projects
reply▲Whack-a-mole lawmaking solves nothing. All this law does is ask social media companies to find another way for their platform to be addictive to children.
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.
Or just stop social media below a certain age and enact that policy for older adults.
The tech giants have flown to close to the sun, real people are pissed.
There is no way to enforce any of these types of laws without an iron curtain that clearly violates the first amendment. If you have free speech infront of children in public I don't see how having infinite scroll on your website or app is any different. Parents should parent their children instead of the state. Its crazy how avoident California is of solving actually important problems like homelessness, mental health resources, housing crisis, yet infinite scrolling somehow is a priority.
reply▲Pretty sure most parents care about their kids more than nearly any other issue you mention. Social media excess has pushed to far and become less well liked than lawyers at this point. Thats only going to end one way.
reply▲puppycodes14 minutes ago
[-] Parents certainly care about all the things I mentioned, it even impacts their kids. This approach to safeguard kids online is completely impractical and utterly unenforceable and seems like a total waste of time.
reply▲AmazingEveryDay52 minutes ago
[-] Don't most people have AI agent that consumes the infinite scroll and then presents a custom summarization? I don't see how this ban is a good idea.
reply▲letmeinhere39 minutes ago
[-] If you don't have an agent swarm that's already trained to re-scroll all the unscrolled feeds and translate them to binaural beats during your micronaps you're ngmi
reply▲Old people who think that the "scrolling" part of Doom Scrolling is literal. Ugh, I'm sorry for California.
reply▲Is infinite scroll really the problem or is it really the whole malicious toolbox and intention of "maximizing engagement"?
reply▲I agree, I don't think an "infinite refresh" like if YouTube had a limited homepage and changed on each refresh, would be much better. But infinite scroll is likely the most addictive.
reply▲Regulate the business model, not the interface.
reply▲micromacrofoot49 minutes ago
[-] misses the mark, it's not about the functionality it's about the algorithm populating it
reply▲kiaansaraiya4 hours ago
[-] I honestly think that this may have some benefit as the infinite scroll has made our attention spans incredibly short. Although, I'm sure people will find there way around it.
reply▲The law should force social media to be subscription-only.
reply▲lucasrufkahr1 hour ago
[-] I hate infinite scroll. Also how do you really prohibit a software feature? Seriously..
reply▲this is a ridiculous proposal
reply▲What does this mean for a large Word document? Will people using OpenOffice.org get arrested for loading a novel?
reply▲That's not infinite. There is an end to the novel.
reply