What Is Infinite Scroll? The UX Pattern That Removed Your Off-Ramp

Infinite scroll is the UX pattern that replaced pagination with endless automatic content loading — removing the natural stopping point that "click to see the next page" once provided. Its inventor, Aza Raskin, has publicly called it one of his greatest regrets and estimates it consumes roughly 200,000 hours of collective human attention per day.

Last verified: May 27, 2026 · Reading time: 5 min · Cluster: Concepts

TL;DR

• Definition: content loads continuously as you scroll, removing pagination-based stopping points.
• Invented: 2006, by Aza Raskin. He regrets it.
• Why platforms use it: longer sessions, more ad impressions, more data.
• Fix: feed removers like News Feed Eradicator or Unhook restore the concept of an end.

The design decision

Before infinite scroll, social feeds were paginated. You’d reach the bottom of a page and see “Next →.” That click was a tiny decision point: do I actually want to keep going? Most people, at that moment of minimal friction, would stop.

Infinite scroll removed that friction entirely. New content appears before you consciously decide to request it. The platform made the decision for you: yes, keep going.

The result is sessions that have no natural internal end state. You can always scroll further. The only stopping signal comes from you — which means you must summon the will to stop while simultaneously receiving a stream of stimulation designed to prevent it.

The inventor’s verdict

Aza Raskin built infinite scroll while working on a social media product in 2006. In 2018 he told the BBC: “It’s as if they took behavioral cocaine and sprinkled it all over your interface.” He estimates the pattern wastes approximately 200,000 hours of collective human attention every day and has advocated for design regulations that would restrict its use on platforms used by minors.

His regret is significant precisely because infinite scroll wasn’t designed to be predatory. It was designed to be convenient. The attention cost was a discovered consequence, not a planned feature.

Why platforms kept it

Once one platform adopted infinite scroll and saw session-time increases, the competitive pressure to adopt it was structural. Longer sessions mean:

• More ad impressions.
• More behavioral data (which posts produce engagement, which trigger purchases).
• Higher “daily active user” metrics, which drive valuation.

A platform that switched back to pagination would see session times drop immediately. No publicly traded social company is going to do that voluntarily.

What it costs you

• Stopping cost. You must generate your own stopping signal, every session, against a system designed to prevent it.
• Time underestimation. Research on scrolling behavior finds users consistently underestimate session length when there are no pagination breaks — in some studies by more than 50%.
• Compulsion amplification. Infinite scroll works synergistically with intermittent variable reward — the occasional interesting post becomes the reason to keep going even when most content is forgettable.

How to remove it

You cannot turn off infinite scroll through any major platform’s settings (as of May 2026). Your options:

News Feed Eradicator — removes the infinite-scroll feed entirely from Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Replaces it with a blank space or an inspirational quote. Doesn’t touch the rest of the platform — search, direct messages, profile pages all work.

Unhook — YouTube-specific. Removes the homepage feed, sidebar recommendations, and Shorts independently. You can keep subscriptions while losing the infinite-scroll discovery feed.

Both tools restore the concept of “I opened this with a purpose, I found it, now I’m done” that pagination once enforced.

Related concepts

• Doomscrolling — the behavior infinite scroll was built to enable.
• Intermittent reinforcement — why the scroll continues even when most content is unrewarding.
• Attention economy — the business model that makes infinite scroll rational for platforms.
• FeedCutter — the directory of tools that reimpose stopping points.

Browse every defined term in the FeedCutter glossary.