> 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

> 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...

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

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

> where the line between “addictive feature” and "good UX" is.

At addiction?

I know it when I see it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it

Do they have to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt? If it was a crime, they would.

infinite scroll/algorithms don't need to be completely gone - just no longer the default setting

> 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.

Good UX for what? Maximising engagement time?

infinite scroll breaks the back button and its really annoying

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

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.

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.

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).