California Law Could End Infinite Scroll for Teenagers on Social Media
The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes
California Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal revised Assembly Bill 1709 to force platforms like Meta and Reddit to remove addictive features such as infinite scroll and autoplay for users under 16. Instead of a total ban, which critics argued would isolate vulnerable teens, the new law mandates that companies create safer, less exploitative feeds by 2028 or face blocking underage accounts entirely.
We're not banning kids from riding skateboards when we tell them to use a helmet.
- 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?
- scoofy
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.
- ulrikrasmussen
Instead of trying to whack a mole on all addictive mechanisms, just ban the business model driving all of them: targeted advertising.
- senorcrab
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).
- petterroea
I've heard a lot of negative talk about Californian politicians, but compared to how the discussion is going on in Norway about the same issue, this is great. It's very refreshing to see politicians actually understand the problem at hand instead of just throwing age checks at it.
For reference, in Norway, you basically have 3 camps:
* Age verification is a detriment to democracy if implemented at a large scale as a requirement to speak in public. Well documented (activists and subject matter experts generally agree on this)
* We will solve the problem of kids online and we will solve it now. The solution must be age verification. Experts loud protest, and even committee findings that warn against are completely ignored (usually people who want a quick and easy solution, politicians who want the bragging rights of having saved the kids)
* We want to solve the problem, but the only obvious solution is age verification so I guess it can't be helped (not really educated on the topic. Just like most of us when it comes to a random political question. Not really a matter of intelligence)
Absolute circus.
I think most people here used the internet as a kid to learn about things and talk to adults in the field there were interested in. For today's kids this happens mostly on the few big sites like twitter and discord.
I'm more than happy to sacrifice endless scroll and recommendation algorithms (at least the type that is thrown at you without consent) to not have to verify my age to […]
- hexage1814
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).
- steve1977
Headline makes it sound like that's a bad thing.
- manoweb
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.
- Varelion
Thank God. We need more legislation against the cognitive poisoning of two generations.
- anderber
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.