Ezra-Oscar Franchi

It’s all too common now for children and adults alike to spend hours awake past their bedtimes using their phones. People are reportedly much lonelier and struggle with real-life social connections. Many people report social media as the leading cause, which isn’t unbelievable. We’ve known for a long time how addictive social media is. 

But doesn’t it feel like, back in the early 2000s, it was much easier to walk away from the internet? You might think phones are the problem—after all, they’ve made the internet easily accessible—but what if I were to tell you that there’s a different, much more pressing problem? I’m talking about the infinite scroll mechanic. This feature is ruining your life. 

The Creation of Endless Scrolling 

The infinite scroll, or endless scroll, was a technique introduced in 2006 that allowed users to scroll down websites to refresh content continuously. This offered an alternative to pagination, which required users to consciously click to the next page via a horizontal numbered list. 

The creator of this feature, Aza Raskin, grew up in Silicon Valley with his father, who worked as a human-computer interface mechanic in the earliest days of Apple, which undoubtedly shaped Aza’s view of the tech industry as a whole. For Raskin, it’s all about efficiency. Raskin developed this project to solve the outdated ‘page-chunking’ problem, which displayed search results on each numbered page, often only loosely related to the inquiry the longer you searched. Why did nothing seem relevant, and why were so many different search engines using the same lousy mechanic? 

In a weblog for his website Get Humanized, found using the Wayback Machine, Raskin said, 

“The problem is that every time a user is required to click to the next page, they are pulled from the world of content to the world of navigation: they are no longer thinking about what they are reading, but about how to get more to read. Because it breaks their train of thought and forces them to stop reading, it gives them the opportunity to leave the site. And a lot of the time, they do.” 

Thus, the infinite scroll was born, and quickly adopted by search engines, other browsers, and social media platforms. It’s hard to find a social platform that doesn’t use this feature, and its widespread popularization has started to concern people – even the creator himself. 

The Growing Impact on Mental Health 

In an interview with The Times, Raskin said infinite scroll “deliberately [kept users] online for as long as possible,” and looking back on its creation, he regrets his lack of critical thinking about the consequences. He largely blames infinite scroll for internet and social media addiction amongst teenagers. 

This is where the scrolling paradox becomes relevant. This phenomenon describes how a user’s brain anticipates a strong dopamine surge when scrolling endlessly through social media, compelling users to keep their phones in hand; however, users simultaneously report feeling increasingly stressed and anxious when faced with the literal inability to stop scrolling. 

In a recent research article from Pew, 48% of teenagers said social media has a mostly adverse effect on their mental health, with 45% admitting they spend too much time on the internet. While it may sometimes have positive effects for teens struggling to stay in touch with their friends, a significant percentage of teenagers are finding that social media has impacted their bedtime routine, memorization skills, and communication skills. 

What Can We Do? 

We shouldn’t do anything—well, besides protest. Why should it be up to the consumer to solve the problem when companies are deliberately using a knowingly harmful mechanic to farm engagement for profit? 

Some people say focus apps and frictions, like screen locks and reminders, could help people stop scrolling. Apps like Focus Friend by popular YouTuber and science communicator Hank Green allow users to ‘gamify’ avoiding social media. By staying off other apps on your phone, your Focus Friend can knit socks, but if you use social media, you’ll ruin his socks, and he’ll have to start over. 

However, experts like Professor Gloria Mark push back against replacing one app with another—you’re just swapping unhealthy habits, she thinks. Even setting app timers can prove useless, since all you have to do to get back on social media is snooze these alerts or turn them off entirely. 

Infinite scroll doesn’t need to go away altogether—educational sites, such as Google Scholar, could benefit from this mechanic, making them less complicated to navigate and furthering the quality of scholarly research as a result, but the impact on youth is too harmful to ignore. 

There is only one foolproof solution for this increasingly harmful problem: Hold social media companies accountable. Since they’re the ones implementing these mechanics, they also need to be the ones to remove them. By forcing users to click to the next page of a site intentionally, they will undoubtedly be more in control of their consumption habits.

So, if you’re ready to make that change, boot up your laptop, and sign some petitions — it’s time to hold companies accountable and remove the infinite scroll.