Australia’s Labor governments are a mixed bag when it comes to digital infrastructure and legislation. They introduced the teen “social media” ban that experts warned them would be ineffective and easy to circumvent. They also introduced the National Broadband Network which was a net positive, and floated the idea of mandatory internet filtering by ISPs. It’s hard to keep track of, honestly.
Today’s news seems broadly like a good idea:
[This legislation] will require social media platforms to provide user empowerment tools that give people over the age of 16 genuine and enduring choice about what they see in their feeds.
The reason social media companies don’t do this currently is obvious: people would always choose seeing what their friends post, not what an algorithm wants to throw at them. Consent is something the Valley has wilfully misunderstood for a long time, because we can’t let it get in the way of line going up. I can’t stop thinking about someone’s comment recently that algorithmic feeds are this generation’s leaded petrol.
Still though, while I think the intentions here are good, it’s also overcomplicating the issue. What we need to do is ban infinite scrolling.
Infinite scrolling was a bad idea from the outset. It was a fun demo when AJAX was still the new hotness, but it breaks the very structure of the web. Pages weren’t accessible endpoints you could reference with a permalink, they were amorphous blobs of random injected state. They had the potential to take up more system resources too, because the page only gets bigger. I theorised on Twitter at the time that infinite scrolling was a way to keep people on a page, so you could serve them more ads. I got pushback for this, mostly from web designers who said it was the future. How right they were.
Infinite scrolling taps into our lizard brain’s desire for just one more thing. Entire social media platforms now wouldn’t exist without these hits of dopamine. We now talk about people stuck doomscrolling, or endlessly scrolling, to the point where they acknowledge it’s bad. But they can’t stop. There’s a word for that.
Get rid of it, I say. I’ll bet reintroducing just that little bit of extra friction would offer an immediate improvement!