Hacker News Reader

Comment by GhostVII | Hacker News Reader

Things like requiring accept and decline checkboxes to be the same font seem somewhat reasonable, even if I disagree with it, but banning autoplay videos and endless scrolling is insane. There are legitimate uses for autoplay videos (ex. Netflix playing next episode, YouTube playing next song when you are listening to music) which I personally use all the time and appreciate, and endless scrolling is great when you don't need to refer back to previous results, and don't want to keep clicking "next". I think people should have the freedom to consume content how they want, the government shouldn't compensate for their lack of self control.

View on HN

While I agree that it's hard to support legislation that's likely to have a lot of unintended consequences, it's also important to realize what's driving folks to introduce a bill like this. It's also worth pointing out that (in particular with Netflix) your example is its own counter-argument. You can't turn off autoplay, and that's the opposite of letting me make choices for myself.

There's also plenty of other examples of government regulating or banning things which exploit human weakness. Ponzi schemes, meth, gambling, and more are all controlled. It's pretty clear that a lot of tech-company design is (intentionally or not) probably scratching a lot of the same itches. It's reasonable to expect regulation.

You turn off autoplay by exiting netflix.

That makes it a zero sum game--all or nothing. Not good enough.

Or you could just press the "back" button on the remote.

That's not what zero sum game means... you probably meant false dichotomy.

Lol, indeed

I think the choice is to just leave Netflix when you are done an episode. Maybe it's just me but I've never felt like the autoplay makes me much more likely to keep watching, it is just convenient so I don't have to go through all of the menus again.

If we ban autoplay on Netflix, we should also ban cable I suppose (not a big loss, really), since cable will autoplay indefinitely.

I find autoplay on Netflix highly inconvenient. Disable it and you can continue to watch the next episode with just one button press. There is no need for navigating around. Also super useful when you happen to fall asleep in front of the TV so that it doesn't keep pumping all the way through the night. Autoplay on Netflix is IMHO a dark pattern to feed on attention and FOMO.

Is it any different than traditional TV?

I don’t find traditional TV to be any good. Having no autoplay is an improvement.

Traditional TV usually switches shows, indicating I'm done. Netflix skips credits and openers, turning an entire season into one 20 hour episode.

I personally love that about it. I can watch more episodes in less time with Netflix, whereas I have to sit through the openers and credits for TV.

I also like watching shows while doing something else (e.g. folding laundry), so autoplay makes it so I don't have to worry about engaging with the service between episodes.

Afaik, you can disable it in the settings.

I find autoplay on Netflix highly convenient. Enable it and you can choose not to watch the next episode with just one button press.

I strongly disagree. Autoplay does exactly what I want when binging through series. I would watch it either way, but why would I need to click buttons for each episode when it can be automatic.

I support automation, not manual labor.

This would be fine if it were opt-in (and especially, opt-in per session). It's not. It's opt-out, and the opt-out is rather hidden (IIRC you have to use a web browser, you can't even opt out from devices running Netflix).

This kind of sounds to me like "you can stop smoking by not buying anymore cigarettes". True, but glosses over the addictive aspects which led to cigarettes being regulated as they are. And this isn't an accidental property of these apps, they're intentionally engineered features to drive "engagement"/addiction.

That's fair, but personally I am much more comfortable with the government regulating things which actually have chemicals which cause people to be addicted to them (cigarettes, hard drugs, etc.) than services which people can get addicted to. The fact that their is actually a chemical in cigarettes is the critical difference, to me. Maybe psychologically there isn't much difference, but that's where I draw the line personally.

The difference is that actually addictive things, rather than just rewarding stimuli, produce increases in incentive salience regardless of actual reward outcome. In cigarettes this is mediated through nicotinic acetylcholine receptors on cells with inputs to dopaminergic systems that predict reward.

There's a vast distance between directly effecting the substrate of thinking chemically and reactions to rewarding stimuli coming in normally.

And what would that difference be when you are just describing different methods for affecting dopaminergic reward pathways?

If you scan the brain with an fMRI, the reward pathway lights up and suggest over time you will have reinforced that pleasurable activity and have created a strong affinity towards repeated activations, further strengthening those pathways.

Have there been any studies to show withdrawals from inhibiting consuming pleasurable visual media?

I mean if you were watching a series on Netflix that really resonates with you and you make a strong connection with the characters and feel as if you are a part of the scenes taking place (game of thrones etc), with characters faces activating your fusiform gyrus and dramatic scenes activating your amygdala making you emotional etc, how is autoplay facilitating the pleasurable dopamine response from imagining/anticipating/looking forward to how great the next episode will be, not as compelling of an issue as consuming exogenous substances that activate similar dopamine release?

Are you implying here that watching TV is not addictive? If this is the case, what do you think about videogames and why?

I realize, I'm not the typical customer (I think autoplaying the next episode was the last feature Netflix introduced that didn't annoy me and made me think about canceling), but for me the only thing that matters when watching TV in the evening is if it's the penultimate episode (because those tend to end with cliffhangers and I'll want to watch the final one as well) and how tired I am/how late it is.

All autoplay does for me is saving me the click on next which I'd click 100% of those times when I don't close Netflix right at the end of the old or start of the next episode.

I can't even understand how it would make people watch more (unless they barely watch and just didn't realize a new one started)

And we'll have to ban Radio.

We'll also need to ban most major highways, as they keep going and going and going. And don't forget to ban unlimited refills at McDonalds, I'm sure those get people into trouble too. How does the fast food industry get such a big free pass on all the trouble it's caused?

Your cup at McDonalds doesn't automatically refill though. It's more like actively clicking next.

It does at many restaurants. The waiter comes by and refills my drink, often without asking if it has unlimited refills. It's kind of like Netflix, which says "next episode starting in 10 seconds", where inaction gets you more content.

And I don't see a problem with that. If you know you'll drink too much with unlimited refills, don't order drinks with unlimited refills.

I really don't think government has any business in this at all, but I guess I could see something where certain classes of product need to support setting limits on use from the customer side (as in, X hours of Netflix per day on this profile). That still sounds like overreach to me, but if it's a real problem for people with addictive personalities, I think it could be a workable solution while avoiding a lot of the unintended consequences.

https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/tools/lp/Bo/LogicalFalla...

Here you go chief.

A good analogue is how certain TV shows (I'm thinking of Househunters, because I'm an addict) run one episode into another without a commercial break. You don't even notice you're on a new episode until you're already 60 seconds into it and hooked.

> You can't turn off autoplay

I'm pretty sure you can turn it off for all devices from desktop Netflix's settings.

I somehow don't have autoplay enabled when I watch any series.

It doesn't work if you're on PS4, which is where I watch. No matter what those settings are it always auto-plays the next episode and also the really annoying trailers. It's actually driven me to consume most of my content from Amazon instead.

Are you watching Netflix on your PS4 in a web browser, or a Netflix app?

Personally, I'd love to ban autoplay videos, but I'm really concerned about web pages here. A custom app, to me, doesn't fall under this purview. Netflix can do just about whatever they want in their own app AFAIC.

For websites that have a legitimate use for autoplay, but are still websites and not custom apps, I would support making it a user-controlled preference that only works for logged-in users. Usually, people view YouTube as a logged-in Google user, so that can be used to allow them to turn on autoplay for that.

> from desktop Netflix's settings

Isn't that an indicator that something's wrong when the company says "technically you can turn this off, it's just buried in the form of the product that people use the least. But technically you can turn it off."

Definitely something is wrong because offering the ability to turn it off seems to be the way to fix the problem.

What do you mean "desktop Netflix"? You mean the web site? Please let me know where this setting is! I would love to turn this off but have never found a way.

Go here: https://www.netflix.com/HdToggle and then read from step 6, or...

go to: https://www.netflix.com/HdToggle#bxid_autoplay_true so you can move straight to step 7, or...

1. Select your profile

2. Hover mouse pointer over your avatar in upper right corner

3. Click "Account"

4. Scroll to "MY PROFILE" section

5. Click "Playback settings"

6. Scroll to "Auto-Play" section

7. Uncheck "Play next episode automatically"

8. Click "Save"

This is it. You want autoplay? Make it opt in. Problem solved. Make more features opt in. I'm not sorry that this makes things harder for companies to make money.

When they keep failing at self regulating shit behaviors that consumers don't want, this is what happens.

You can turn off autoplay from the website, under Playback Settings:

https://i.imgur.com/gctaiHK.png

https://www.netflix.com/HdToggle

What's driving bills like this is simple - people need things to campaign on and instead of addressing real problems they're busy trying to 'solve' easy ones.

I was with you until

> the government shouldn't compensate for their lack of self control.

Quite frankly, I don't believe in complete self-autonomy. I think it's a great trait to strive towards, but the rise of behavioral psychology by itself shows that we can be poked, prodded, and nudged to do things that we otherwise wouldn't do, because "what we want to do" is a muddy non-singular fuzzy idea that can be tipped in whatever way the environment happens to be arranged or designed.

It's not about regulating people's lack of self-control, it's about acknowledging there are proven techniques that influence behavior and figuring out when those techniques are being taken advantage of in a socially detrimental way.

We can discuss whether continuous scrolling really is socially detrimental, but calling it "government compensation for lack of an individual's self control" is flat-out dishonest given that half of us here are about to go evaluate our latest adwords optimization spend or look at our next A/B test results.

The text of the bill specifically allows this:

"REFILL.—The use of a process that automatically loads and displays additional content, other than music or video content that the user has prompted to play"

https://www.hawley.senate.gov/sites/default/files/2019-07/So... (pp. 3-4)

I’m torn about endless scrolling. I wholeheartedly agree with a ban on auto playing sound or video. It’s gratingly irritating.

It’s rather anti-human, experience wise.

> It’s gratingly irritating.

Right. But just because something is irritating does that mean it should be illegal? This seems like something that we don't need to waste taxpayer money on IMO. I feel like there's bigger fish to fry so to speak.

It doesn't waste taxpayer money for Congresscritters to write a law and pass it. They're paid a salary anyway, so it's just a bit of their time, and something like this shouldn't take long to debate and pass.

Plus, they could make money on it by levying enormous fines on websites that break the law. I'd love to see various news websites get slapped with $100M fines for having autoplay videos.

>I feel like there's bigger fish to fry so to speak.

Like what? Fixing our utterly broken healthcare system? That isn't realistic at all because they can't get enough agreement in Congress to pass such legislation. So they need to focus on things they can get done, like banning autoplay.

Irritation is not a valid reason for the government to step in and assert their power.

I agree, irritation isn't a valid reason. Addiction, on the other hand, is valid. Endless scrolling is designed to help keep people glued to their phones, continuously triggering a dopamine response that makes them keep scrolling, liking, and following. The purpose of it is to keep you hooked.

So where do we draw the line here? Ive implemented infinite scrolling on various forms of list-views over the years for dashboards here and there.

Do we categorize and label what would or would not be 'intentionally addictive' content and then ban that specifically?

It looks like this bill is targeted towards social media apps, which would be an OK line, at least IMO.

That's not exactly a super well defined line though.

Slack has infinite scrolling and is mostly used for work, but I also use it with friends and you can't deny there's the same social media type feedback loop with Slack reactions.

LinkedIn and Yammer are "professional" social networks. People use them to get "real work" done, but they're absolutely social media too.

But isn't that done all the time? My neighbor blasting their music at 3AM isn't physically hurting anything, but it sure is irritating. And it's also illegal for that reason. Seems fine to me.

No, noise ordinances are in place to prevent people from interrupting each others sleep, which is necessary for maintaining a relative level of sanity. It is not analogous to preventing companies from forcing a specific UI pattern on a website.

I'm not torn at all. I despise it and it's awful. But I don't want to legislate it either.

But autoplay do you mean sounds and videos that autoplay when you go on a website, or sounds and videos which are automatically queued up after something you are already watching? Because I agree that the first is very irritating (there is nothing that I hate more than Netflix autoplaying previews with sound), but I find queuing up the next video very useful.

It seems pretty self-evident that "autoplay" means something that plays automatically. Queuing isn't playing.

Considering other discussions in adjacent threads, it's quite clearly not uniformly self evident whether auto-play does or does not include continuing an existing "play" session with new media.

I do not think it is self evident. In the article (and bill), queuing is considered autoplay if you do not explicitly select playlist of things to play. The definition in the bill is:

AUTOPLAY — The use of a process that automatically plays music or videos (other than advertisements) without an express, separate prompt by the user (such as pushing a button or clicking an icon), unless

(A) before any content is loaded to the user’s display, that user or a different use compiled a playlist of multiple music videos or audio files that the user designated should be played without interruption, and the immediate user selected one of the videos or files in that precompiled playlist; or

(B) the predominant purpose of the social media platform is to allow users to stream music, but only if the only files the platform automatically plays are audio files or advertisements

Endless scrolling is bad pattern. Things should have a natural stop, some sort of effort to move forward.

It's not because of irritation but rather to protect easy preys from getting stuck.

Once the regulate everything people aggressively invited the government in, there was no going back. It's going to get extremely bad over the coming decade. Laughably bad. Politicians will regulate every possible inch of the Internet. And they rarely remove stupid regulations, so it will all pile-up deep. It will mirror the physical world, every click and every feature will involve breaking numerous laws. There is nothing that can stop this outcome now, the fox is in the hen house. The result will inevitably be stagnation, as creating anything online will be very burdensome in all possible regards. Most simply won't do it, they'll just work for a bigger corporation that can deal with the regulatory mess. Want to launch a simple service? Hire a lawyer, do a six month review before you write the first line of code, spend tens of thousands of dollars, and you're still going to be breaking some stray law if you dare to launch. Compliance requirements stacked up to your ears, placating every special interest group that wants their cause accounted for in regulations. And that's before we get deep into the big corporations buying/bribing/lobbying thousands of new regulations for their own protection.

The bill as written[0] is limited to social media sites and has an exception for music playlists, so both your examples would be allowed.

[0]https://www.hawley.senate.gov/sites/default/files/2019-07/So...

For YouTube I don't use a playlist, I just let it pick the next recommendation, so that would still be banned.

They added an exception for advertisements, which is too bad since that is the only kind of autoplay video I would really be excited about getting rid of. The definition of autoplay in the bill is "The use of a process that automatically plays music or videos (other than advertisements) without an express, separate prompt by the user." If you are going to get rid of autoplay videos, don't have exceptions for advertisers, that just gives them more power.

Autoplaying advertisements are one of the main reason autoplay is so annoying. WhyTF would they make an exception for this? This seems like obvious corruption.

Yeah, but they kind of have to autoplay ads. Would you find it less annoying to (1) manually click to start playing an ad, and then (2) manually click after the ad is done to play the video? I hope it would be violation of the regulation to play ads ad infinitum after playing a video.

Yes, I'd find it much less annoying to have to manually click to play an ad, because then I can just not click at all, and read the article without having to listen to some stupid video.

Ah I see. This bill seems to only deal with social media / entertainment though (Facebook, YouTube), (unfortunately) not with those super-annoying autoplaying videos on news websites.

Yeah, those are the things I really hate. An ad on YouTube I'm not worried about, because I'm already there to view a video, and at least they have a "click to skip" button that shows up after a certain amount of time.

Its possible to me the auto-play setting something that is enabled voluntarily by the user. This would solve your problem.

I can't think of a single situation where autoplay is remotely acceptable for anything but opt in.

I guess endless scrolling doesn't have to be bad. But I've yet to experience an implementation that isn't awful.

I don't think legislation is a good way to make developers behave. But I also don't know how to break the mess we are in.

> legitimate uses for autoplay videos

also saving bandwidth on gifs

Yes!

Instead of coming up with insane laws, the government can point people towards tools that will help them. For example, the govt could simply point people towards a chrome plugin that prevents those features from working, or a plugin that removes the links of any sites that have those features.

Your examples are from video sites. So having an autoplay there makes sense. There is no need for it to be the default setting.

> I think people should have the freedom to consume content how they want

Absolutely! That doesn't mean corporations should have a right to decide for people how they should consume their content.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com