Its own inventor couldn't stop.
He had to write code against himself.

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, en uiteindelijk moest hij zijn eigen software schrijven om het gewoonte te doorbreken.

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 seen. 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, en het is het niet van plan. Wat dit laat zien is dat het patroon verder gaat dan een design-blog praatpunt. Het is nu specifiek genoeg, en de effecten op minderjarigen zijn zorgwekkend genoeg, dat meerdere staatswetgevers zijn naam rechtstreeks in de wet hebben opgenomen.

Raskins getuigenis in de rechtszaal vormt bijna het sterkst mogelijke argument tegen een beroep op wilskracht. Hij ontbrak niet aan informatie. Hij bouwde het ding, begreep de mechanismen van binnenuit en had toch externe software nodig om zijn eigen gewoonte te doorbreken. Als volledige technische kennis van de truc niet genoeg is om het betrouwbaar te verslaan, is een algemene intentie om „minder te scrollen” waarschijnlijk ook niet genoeg.

Fella adresseert de werkelijke structurele kloof die infinite scroll creëerde: het ontbrekende stopmoment. Het ontwerp maakte het natuurlijke einde dat een paginatie-feed ooit had weg. Fella brengt een stopmoment terug, niet in de feed, maar op app-niveau. Apps blijven standaard geblokkeerd, dus er is helemaal geen feed om in te vallen, en de één 5-minuten unlock per sessie is een vaste, doelbewuste grens in plaats van een hoop dat het scrollen ooit eindigt, wat design-technisch nooit zal gebeuren.