The EU Moves To Kill Infinite Scrolling
2 36Doom scrolling is doomed, if the EU gets its way. From a report: The European Commission is for the first time tackling the addictiveness of social media in a fight against TikTok that may set new design standards for the world's most popular apps. Brussels has told the company to change several key features, including disabling infinite scrolling, setting strict screen time breaks and changing its recommender systems. The demand follows the Commission's declaration that TikTok's design is addictive to users -- especially children.
The fact that the Commission said TikTok should change the basic design of its service is "ground-breaking for the business model fueled by surveillance and advertising," said Katarzyna Szymielewicz, president of the Panoptykon Foundation, a Polish civil society group. That doesn't bode well for other platforms, particularly Meta's Facebook and Instagram. The two social media giants are also under investigation over the addictiveness of their design.
2 comments
Europe is going to slowly kick America out (Score: 5, Interesting)
by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday February 14, 2026 @12:42PM (#65988938)
Europe watched Russia basically install a foreign asset as the head of state in America using Facebook and Twitter. They are not going to let that happen to themselves.
So for example they have banned young people from social media. That isn't to protect kids, nobody gives a shit about kids even in Europe. That is to do a roundabout way to gradually wean their population off of american-owned social media.
Killing infinite scrolling is part of that too since it does quite a bit of damage to social media.
You can't just outright ban it their laws aren't set up to do that and it would be too obvious and the billionaires would step in and stop it. So they're going to do it slowly and gradually. Like cutting out an infection that is spread really far.
I'm all for that but not for the reason you think (Score: 5, Interesting)
by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Saturday February 14, 2026 @12:51PM (#65988964)
Infinite scrolling == infinite memory usage.
Whenever I go to some forum that's heavy on pictures and videos that has infinite scrolling, and I'm looking far down the page for something or other, eventually my browser slows to a crawl, or the browser's resource-hungry JS engine crashes, and that's the end of the scrolling.
Certain sites I patronize that have the stupid infinite scrolling also have the classic &page= HTTP GET mechanism. On those sites, every once in a while, I reload the entire page with a &page= corresponding to roughly where I am in the infinite scrolling, just to reset it and free up some memory.
It's not the UI paradigm that bothers me, it's the resource usage insanity.