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Comment by watwut | Hacker News Reader

> There should be a law that forces social media companies to use a different algorithm for anyone under a certain age and be required to disclose it to the public. Possibly different algorithm depending on age group.

Frankly, in that case I want the kids algorithm. It is preferable for me as an adult, I do not want the intentionally harmful one either.

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This. Just give me the option to have pagination. Sweet, old, pagination. Like here on Hacker News. I can then review one or maybe 2 pages, and that is all. Like a physical magazine where there's a clear end.

I have the firm belief that infinite scrolling is one of the darkest pattern that was ever invented.

Hang on... Hacker News very clearly has a complex, opaque [1] algorithm that orders stuff. Maybe it's not user-specific, and maybe that's a good dividing line, but these are the kinds of factors we're going to have to think about if we want to introduce regulation around 'algorithms'.

Infinite scrolling is a very different issue (although it's definitely a contributor to the harm, I agree).

([1] Unless I'm being unfair here; maybe the algorithm is available somewhere, I just don't see it obviously linked anywhere)

Yeah, seriously, New York just passed law that makes it illegal to show engagement-driven feeds to kids.

I can’t wait to not age verify on instagram and permanently get back a feed that’s only people I follow.

You know you can also just not use Instagram...

I used to quite like instagram when it was a good way to keep up with a well curated group of friends who would share occasional interesting photos (though even then it could end up being performative).

But you’re right, these days I’ve largely stopped using after i realized every time I opened it, I was looking at a stream of drivel designed to keep me scrolling.

It just seems dumb to me. These companies don't have any power, if people simply exercised their free will and stopped using the platforms they would die off.

You can often do that via settings. But we could do with a law that makes it a crime to override a user setting that has been explicitly set, without notifying the user.

Oh but you enabled the setting "don't use infinite scroll" and we've deprecated infinite scroll so that isn't a setting anymore. While improving service for our customers we have introduced "unrolling pages" which prefetches the next page and attaches it to the end of the previous page to provide a smooth reading experience, and of course we've given that its own setting which you haven't set, and it defaults to enabled to provide the best seamless reading experience for most people.

Next we're thinking about spatial pages, an innovation which considers the app as a viewport flying over the pages laid out in a line. In consideration we have database-views which presents the unpaged tables of content in the database directly to the end user, completely bypassing outdated 'page' skeuomorphisms from the olden days of printers and books. Further out, our researchers are working on Shepherd Tone-inspired viewing, where technically legally it is paged, but it looks and feels like it isn't!

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