alt Hacker News> Infinite scroll is very obviously unnecessary
All the different flavors of yogurt in the grocery store are unnecessary. We only need 2.
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Nobody has ever been guided down an extremist rabbit hole ending in a misogynist shooting because of yogurt. At least, not to my knowledge.
There is a very real harm to allowing an engagement optimizing algorithm (which, if programmed effectively, almost always ends up a negative emotion firehose).
I don't know if this is the right solution, but I don't see that an extensive yogurt selection is the same thing as whatever the fuck is going on with Facebook feeding an endless stream of corrosive bullshit to users.
This is a false equivalence. I don't use a product _because_ it's got an endless scroll. I use a product and then they add that "feature" without giving me an option. I would, and have, turned it off when possible. But it's not currently possible to do so on apps like Reddit.
In no way is this like yogurt. If I don't like that one yogurt has trace amounts of heroin in it, I can buy a different yogurt. If I don't like that reddit has an infinite scroll, I have to miss out on conversations in communities I like. There simply aren't similar communities I've ever been able to find for certain topics. And anything similar also has an infinite scroll (Facebook, twitter, etc.).
If, in your example, all yogurts had trace amounts of heroin in them, I would agree with the comparison.
I mean, unironically, yeah. If you want flavor, just mix jam in your plain yogurt.