Infinite scroll was built in 2006 to solve a real usability problem: never letting a feed end. It worked. In 2026, its inventor testified in court that even he can't reliably resist it.
Infinite scroll is the design pattern where a feed keeps loading new content automatically as you near the bottom, so there's never a page to click to and never a point where it visibly ends. It was built to fix a specific, legitimate usability complaint. It also removed the one structural feature, an actual ending, that used to give people a natural moment to stop.
This page traces the exact invention, the inventor's own public reckoning with it two decades later, what researchers say it does to attention, and where lawmakers have started drawing lines around it by name. All four parts are unusually well documented for a single UI pattern.
Aza Raskin built infinite scroll on Friday, April 28, 2006, for an app called Humanized Reader at his design firm, Humanized. The problem he was solving was specific: paginated results forced a reader to click to a "next page" repeatedly, and every one of those clicks pulled them out of the content and into navigation. In his own words, that moment of navigation "breaks their train of thought and forces them to stop reading," which also happened to be exactly the moment someone might decide to leave the site.
His fix was to remove that moment entirely. New content would simply appear as you neared the bottom of the page, no click, no load screen, no interruption. He pitched the idea early to Google Blogger and the New York Times. Neither adopted it right away. Infinite scroll didn't really take off until the early 2010s, when Twitter and Facebook built it into their feeds, and Instagram, under co-founder Kevin Systrom, refined it into something close to the version that's now standard across nearly every social app.
In 2026, Raskin testified in a New Mexico trial against Meta, part of a broader case centered on addictive platform design and child safety, and the jury ultimately found Meta liable, awarding $375 million under New Mexico law. Raskin's own testimony was the more striking part. He described understanding exactly how infinite scroll works, the psychology behind it, why it removes a stopping point, and admitted that knowledge didn't protect him: he'd catch himself disappearing to the bathroom mid-dinner just to scroll, and eventually had to write his own software specifically to break the habit he'd built into the product in the first place. To reinforce that boundary with a tool, see our app blockers for interrupting the habit.
He's also described the pattern more bluntly elsewhere, calling it a "slot machine" for the mind. That's not an outside critic's framing. That's the person who built it, saying so under oath, after spending years unable to reliably out-resist a feature he understood better than almost anyone alive.
Researchers studying scrolling behavior describe something they call a "time blackhole" or "wormhole" effect, where the amount of time someone thinks they spent scrolling is far shorter than the time that actually passed. The feed itself provides no landmark to measure against, so the usual sense of "that took a while" simply doesn't fire the way it would with a defined task.
A related state researchers call normative dissociation shows up alongside it, an absorbed, low-awareness state associated with genuine difficulty remembering what was even scrolled past. Layered on top of both is continuous partial attention, a fragmented kind of focus that keeps a person from fully engaging with any single piece of content, or with whatever they were supposed to be doing before they picked up the phone.
Infinite scroll has moved from design critique to actual statutory language. California's Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, signed in 2022, specifically prohibits infinite scroll, autoplay, and streak mechanics for users under 18, alongside other engagement-maximizing features. Its path hasn't been simple: the law was enjoined shortly after taking effect, and a March 2026 Ninth Circuit ruling vacated much of the lower court's preliminary injunction, so its enforcement status has shifted more than once.
Other states have written it in even more explicitly. South Carolina's law lists infinite scroll by name among its "covered design features," alongside autoplay, gamification mechanics, and push notifications. New York's SAFE for Kids Act restricts algorithmic feeds for minors without parental consent and specifically calls out infinite scroll and autoplay as features requiring restriction or warning labels.
None of this makes infinite scroll illegal for adults, and it isn't trying to. What it shows is that the pattern has moved well past a design-blog talking point. It's now specific enough, and its effects on minors concerning enough, that multiple state legislatures have written its name directly into law.
Raskin's courtroom testimony is close to the strongest possible argument against relying on willpower here. He didn't lack information. He built the thing, understood its mechanics from the inside, and still needed external software to break his own habit. If full technical understanding of the trick isn't enough to reliably beat it, a general intention to "scroll less" isn't likely to fare better.
Fella addresses the actual structural gap infinite scroll created: the missing stopping point. The design removed the natural ending a paginated feed used to have. Fella puts a stopping point back, not inside the feed, but at the app level. Apps stay blocked by default, so there's no feed to fall into to begin with, and the one 5-minute unlock per session is a fixed, deliberate boundary instead of a hope that the scrolling will end on its own, which by design, it never will.
Infinite scroll is a design pattern where new content loads automatically as a user nears the bottom of a page, removing the need to click to a next page and eliminating any natural point where the feed ends.
Aza Raskin built it on April 28, 2006, for an app called Humanized Reader at his design firm Humanized. He designed it to solve "page-chunking," where clicking to a next page pulls a reader out of content and into navigation, giving them a natural moment to leave the site.
Raskin pitched the idea to Google Blogger and the New York Times early on, but it didn't take off widely until the early 2010s, when Twitter and Facebook adopted it, and Instagram, under co-founder Kevin Systrom, refined it into the version that became standard across social feeds.
Yes, publicly and specifically. Raskin has called it a "slot machine" for the mind, and testified in a 2026 New Mexico trial against Meta that even with full knowledge of how it works, he found himself sneaking off mid-dinner to scroll, and had to write his own software just to break the habit.
Researchers describe a "time blackhole" effect, where perceived time spent scrolling is far shorter than actual time elapsed, along with a state called normative dissociation, an absorbed, low-awareness state linked to difficulty remembering what was even seen, and continuous partial attention, a broken form of focus that prevents full engagement with any single task.
It's starting to be, by name. California's Age-Appropriate Design Code specifically prohibits infinite scroll, autoplay, and streak mechanics for users under 18, though it's been through ongoing legal challenges. South Carolina's law and New York's SAFE for Kids Act both explicitly name infinite scroll and autoplay as regulated design features for minors.
Infinite scroll was built specifically to remove the natural stopping point a paginated feed used to provide. Fella reinstates a stopping point at the app level instead: the app is blocked by default, so there's no feed to fall into in the first place, rather than relying on willpower to supply an ending the design itself was engineered not to have.
The core mechanic is similar, but implementation varies. Some platforms preload content aggressively to make the scroll feel seamless, while others insert brief loading delays that create their own separate psychological effect.
Rarely, and not fully. A small number of browser extensions or accessibility settings can restore pagination on some sites, but most native mobile apps don't offer a built-in way to turn the feature off.
