> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.