Sometimes it is the right and appropriate thing to do, but I'd hardly call it "first response". The Snowdrop Petition circulated after Dunblane, but not Hungerford. It took the repeated failure of government to actually do anything useful that caused society to demand a ban.

After the Traveller threre-day festival in a farmer's field, the UK government tried to ban going places for a common purpose. A man claiming to be the reincarnation of King Arthur sued on the grounds that he couldn't join up with his kn

> The UK's first response always seems to ban things.

In what way? The UK has thousands of pages of law regulating addictive behaviour, especially when its directed at under 16s. Additionally the UK has enacted and threatened to expand regulations on social media platforms to such an extent that Zuckerberg has repeatedly and publicly complained.

It very much seems like this is the *last* response from the UK, not the first.

> The addictive nature of social media is a serious problem, but it is not the fault of social media companies.

A lot of it really is the social media companies' fault. When I look at Facebook, my feed used to be 99% stuff posted by my friends and family. Now, it is only about 20% stuff posted by my friends and family. The rest is a combination of groups that I'm in (20%), random influencers and groups and pages that are being promoted (50%), and straight-up ads (10%). There is more garbage than content. And there's no good way to get the trash out, no matter how hard you try.

And yet, that steaming pile of garbage is being shown because for some subset of the population, seeing things that drive interactions, rather than things that genuinely deeply interest the user, causes those users to come to the site more and stay on the site more.

Meta, realizing that they have hit peak user count and can't realistically grow much bigger, have to find a way to keep the stock price from cratering because of zero growth potential, so they are abusing users to try to gain more eyeball time instead. They deliberately feed the addiction of those who have short attention spans and need continuous input to stimulate them.

The moment they started chasing engagement instead of users was the point when they became a net harm to society. And all of this social media addiction stems from that. Very nearly all of the harm that they cause stems from that. It stems from sites designed to continuously route you towards content that will be more engaging to keep you on the site longer. This is not to say that there is not room for some of that on a broad scale, but doing it too narrowly leads to rabbit holes, which are a net negative.

Fixing this requires keeping companies small, and requiring that big social media companies make their networks available to smaller companies (federation) so that there is actual competition in the marketplace. But the fact that governments should have intervened decades ago doesn't mean that it isn't still the fault of the companies. They had a choice. They could have continued to do business the way they did before, knowing that their stock price would never grow. They chose to seek revenue over user happiness.

> Can we quit trying to attack UIs?

> I understand that an infinite scroll can be addictive. It's also an incredibly simple UI feature that has plenty of viable use-cases.

No, it really doesn't. What it does is:

makes it impossible to click the links at the bottom of the page (e.g. terms of service)

forces the company to ensure that there will always be more to see by cramming in more and more padding to stretch out the limited useful data

hides the fact that there's nothing left to see, making you waste more time on the site

There is literally never a situation where this is inherently the right thing to do (except for the company's ad-driven bottom line), because the quanti

> It's also an incredibly simple UI feature that has plenty of viable use-cases.

Name some. As you do think about how that use case is impacted by an ever changing content display, inability to search, being temporarily unstable and being generally uncountable, unprintable, unsavable, having no clearly defined count to the end showing no indication of progress within the content. etc.

I'm genuinely curious as to what you think is a good use-case for this, because I'm struggling to name even one.

> I understand that an infinite scroll can be addictive. It's also an incredibly simple UI feature that has plenty of viable use-cases.

> As long as we look at these companies in terms of what they *do*, rather than what they *are*, we're never going to actually solve any problems.

That's likely exactly how it will work. Infinite scroll itself won't be banned, just infinite scroll intended to be addictive. If a social media company wants to argue it in court, they can try to convince a judge that their implemented it for some reason other than to keep people on the site.

There's no need for a refresh button. If the page wasn't correct the first time around, that's on you.

Because the government looks after the everyone by setting minimum obligations , you life is surrounded by it, unit standards so you know how much a lb/kg actually is vs some random measurement that you have to take responsibility and work out yourself.

In better countries the price you see on the shelf is what you pay, not just a figure that looks low that you can then add on a whole pile of taxes etc on top of knowing the majority will never be able to work out the real price.

AND, the US does NOT set th