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TikTok's 'Addictive Design' Found to Be Illegal in Europe in breach of the Digital Services Act
(digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu)
this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2026
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Lemmy has infinite scrolling too so if lemmy get big it will have the same legal issue
It can be turned off
There's a big difference between infinite scrolling content that's using algorithms to specifically keep you scrolling and how Lemmy does it. On Lemmy that's a you problem not a capitalism problem.
It is subjective. I personally spend more time on non algorithmic feed than algorithm one. It is boring to keep seeing the same time of content most of the time
A social media's algorithm would optimize for engagement not content similarity.
So why when i interact with only niche content, the algotithms still show me only popular content?
On lemmy do you mean? It doesn't have personalized recommendation algorithms as far as I know or any content similarity algorithms. I think it's just a simple popularity by newness algorithm.
To clarify, I meant corporate social media companies will target engagement, and they will use personalized algos (not necessarily down to a user, could be group of similar users).
So for example if a user looks at some niche wood working content for example, they may mix in popular content that drives emotional response or is entertaining if that keeps people on the platform longer.
That's what I'm saying, it's not about content similarity necessarily, it's about showing whatever drives engagement / time on platform.
When you have a lot of user data, and a lot of content meta data, you can do that very well. To the point where you can trigger addictive behaviors. That's the issue with tiktok - but also other social media companies to lesser degrees
I mean on Instagram and Facebook . The algorithm is very static and hard to change
There is a strong correlation between similarity and engagement though. No matter how much engaging the content it there is a point where fatigue happen and I am fed up with the topic . The algorithm mare hard to modify like I used to care about video games and then I got fatigue , recommendation algorithm are still suggesting content I am no longer interesting it which make me bored and close the app.
Non-algorithmic feeds can facilitate a cycle of addiction through manual variety. By following diverse communities, I can rotate through interests switching from music to politics to sport which reset my attention span and prolonging my total time on the platform.
Non-algorithmic feeds are not free of rage baiting either. There is ton of fights in the comment of certain posts that are very time consuming and very unhealthy and I fall into it
Got it. My understanding is tiktok is on another level but have never used it.
It would surprise me if no one was doing content rotation strategies for specific user segments. similarity is a signal so is dissimilarity.
then, there will be spots that the algorithms fall apart.
But, I see what you are saying and yeah I've experienced similar, and agreed, even something simple like 'popular' has issues when driven by a score, as it can just maximize broad emotional response.
"This made me angry", does better than "this made me satisfied in life"
I don't think Lemmy (or any text based platform) really fits the bill
Lemmy has a ton of media tho, its not entirely text based.
But the algorithm isn't extremely personalized or optimized towards "engagement". In fact the only fediverse platform that comes close is Loops, and even that is light-years away from the psychological manipulation that goes into Tiktok algorithms.
100% agreed, my only quibble was calling Lemmy a text based site.
It can be text based and still contain images and video, no?
When its spread between all of them pretty evenly, is it still text based?
Wait your app isn't like this?
Nope. I turned off infinite scroll in the settings. I use the Voyager app, which paginates the feed when configured to do so.
Did you miss the "autoplay and highly personalised recommender system"? Those are the two big major differences and what makes people so addicted to tiktok etc. in a much worse way than forums in all forms (like reddit and lemmy). Reddit and Lemmy doesn't have any thing that curates what you see based on your habits, that's done by yourself or not at all.
I’m pretty sure Reddit curates the content of r/popular based on your browser history.
It has infinite scroll. It's not highly personalized like tiktok, it has auto play but there's FAR more text posts than videos, and the push notifications are far less extreme (is there even a setting to get push notifications for every upvote, like tiktok enables automatically?). Lemmy really isn't anything like tiktok.
I don't think the EU would ignore it if it was only infinite scroll
Are you sure? They have been ignoring virtually everything with infinite scrolling. TikTok is the extremely rare exception where they actually address it.
Not always infinite. If you set it to be the top posts for the last 12 hours for example, it isn’t that hard to get to the end, not like automatically chosen posts follow on or are inserted into that feed.
Not really, i have hit the limit 2 3 times. Maybe its a voyager feature but it definitely has a limit
Nonsense.
Well crafted counter argument
Just some guis/apps, and it's mostly optional