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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 w

• RajT88 3mo ago
  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.
• ls612 3mo ago
  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 3mo ago
    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.
    • inigyou 3mo ago
      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.
    • ethin 2mo ago
      > 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.
• afandian 3mo ago
  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 3mo ago
    On the contrary, pagination makes it impossible to keep your place in the list if it changes between page loads.
    • im3w1l 3mo ago
      Why is the list constantly changing anyway?
      • xigoi 3mo ago
        Because other people keep adding new posts (and upvoting existing posts, which changes their order).
        • im3w1l 3mo ago
          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 3mo ago
            The user expectation is that if you refresh the page, you will see fresh content.
            • alpinisme 3mo ago
              Not if you’re on page 2
• Greenpants 3mo ago
  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 3mo 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
    • Noumenon72 3mo 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.
      • King-Aaron 3mo ago
        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.
• over_bridge 3mo ago
  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
  • deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
• 8note 3mo ago
  infinite scroll breaks the back button and its really annoying
• chillfox 3mo 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.
  • pfg_ 3mo ago
    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.
  • sureMan6 3mo 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)
    • layman51 3mo ago
      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.
  • AstroJetson 3mo ago
    You must have spoken to me, I hate it today has as much as I did back then.
  • burningChrome 3mo ago
• ksymph 3mo ago
  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.
• inigyou 3mo ago
  Do they have to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt? If it was a crime, they would.
• thaumasiotes 3mo 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.
• petra 3mo ago
  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 3mo ago
    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
• 8organicbits 3mo ago
  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
• asdfsa32 3mo ago
  I know it when I see it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
• VladVladikoff 3mo ago
  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).
  • iamnothere 3mo ago
    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!
    • VladVladikoff 3mo ago
      Right because that’s worked so well with gun control too!
      • iamnothere 3mo ago
        It has, I have no problem with my guns!
    • inigyou 2mo ago
      States get to regulate things that happen within the state. That's how it's always worked. They're like mini-countries.
      • iamnothere 2mo ago
        Not if they violate rights as enumerated in the Bill of Rights and later amendments.
  • matt123456789 3mo ago
    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.
• fitzroy 3mo ago
  > 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.
  • Robotbeat 3mo ago
    X posts have a permanent url.
    • deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
    • DaiPlusPlus 3mo ago
      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 3mo ago
        Offset / page index is not exactly stable especially for the most common case of newest-first.
        • DaiPlusPlus 3mo ago
• croes 3mo ago
  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
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• cloudie78 3mo ago
  Good UX for what? Maximising engagement time?
• xg15 2mo ago
  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.
• eviks 2mo ago
  > where the line between “addictive feature” and "good UX" is. At addiction?
• friendzis 2mo 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? 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 2mo ago
    > 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.
• gnoll_of_gozag 2mo ago
  infinite scroll/algorithms don't need to be completely gone - just no longer the default setting
• grayhatter 2mo ago
  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 2mo ago
    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 2mo ago
      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 2mo ago
        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.)
• ozgrakkurt 2mo ago
  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
• KaiserPro 2mo ago
  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.
• Tade0 2mo ago
  > 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.
• PaulRobinson 2mo ago
  > 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...
• oytis 2mo ago
  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
• momojo 2mo ago
  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.
• hoherd 2mo ago
  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.