The Man Who Invented Infinite Scroll Says He Is Sorry. You Are Still Scrolling Anyway.

In 2006, a designer named Aza Raskin sat down to solve a mildly annoying problem: pagination. Clicking “Next Page” felt clunky. He wanted something smoother, something that would just keep going. He coded it in a weekend. Infinite scroll was born.

He later estimated it costs humanity around 200,000 hours of attention per day. He called it “a mistake.”

You are almost certainly reading this after scrolling past at least three things you forgot immediately.

Why Infinite Scroll Worked So Well It Broke Everything

The mechanism is simple: there is no end. Traditional pagination forces you to make a choice. Clicking “Next Page” is a small decision point, a tiny speed bump where your brain can ask “do I actually want to keep going?” Infinite scroll removes that question entirely. The page just keeps coming. Your thumb keeps moving. Your brain, which evolved to notice movement and new information, gets exactly what it was wired to want, forever, or until your battery dies.

This is not a design flaw. It is the design.

Raskin built it to solve a UX friction point. He was optimizing for flow, for the sensation of smooth, uninterrupted reading. He got flow. He got the entire Yangtze River of it, running 24 hours a day through every smartphone on earth. What he didn’t model was what happens to people when you strip out every natural stopping point from their information diet. The answer, as it turns out, is nothing good.

The Regret Industry

Raskin now works at the Center for Humane Technology, which he co-founded with Tristan Harris, the former Google design ethicist who gave the TED talk that made everyone feel genuinely bad about their phone habits for roughly 48 hours before going back to normal.

The Humane Technology movement is well-intentioned. They want apps to include natural stopping points, to respect your attention, to not engineer compulsion into the core product loop. These are reasonable positions. Their problem is structural: the people building attention-harvesting products have a quarterly earnings incentive, not a humane technology incentive. Those two incentives point in exactly opposite directions.

Raskin’s regret is sincere. It is also, practically speaking, irrelevant. The scroll is everywhere now. Instagram. TikTok. LinkedIn. Your email client probably has it somewhere. News sites added it. Even some e-commerce checkouts use scroll-triggered loading. You cannot un-invent something by feeling bad about it, however publicly.

The Weird Part Nobody Talks About

Here is what gets buried in most coverage of this story: Raskin didn’t invent infinite scroll because he was malicious. He invented it because pagination was genuinely annoying. And he was right. Pagination was annoying.

This is almost always how attention-design disasters happen. Someone solves a real, visible friction problem. The solution creates a larger, less visible friction problem downstream. The new friction is diffuse and hard to point at. “I wasted two hours and feel vaguely hollow” is a much harder user complaint than “I had to click Next Page.” One of these shows up in usability testing. The other shows up in your life, years later, when you realize you can’t read a full article anymore without checking your phone.

Our collective failure to model downstream effects is not unique to tech. But tech moves fast enough that the downstream arrives before anyone has finished celebrating the upstream win.

Where This Leaves You

Some people have found personal solutions. Scroll-limit apps. RSS readers (which, crucially, do have a bottom). Timers. Leaving the phone in another room. Grayscale mode, which makes the screen less rewarding to look at.

This all works, sort of, in the way willpower always works: inconsistently, and only until something more interesting shows up. The apps are designed by full teams of engineers whose entire job is to defeat your timer.

The more durable fix is probably structural. The EU has been pushing for design regulation requiring natural stopping mechanisms. Some platforms have experimented with daily limits. TikTok shows a screen time reminder that approximately no one heeds. The attention economy is not going to regulate itself into being less addictive.

Raskin thinks the fix is a combination of legislation and better user-side tools. He’s probably right. He’s also the guy who thought removing pagination would be a clean usability win with no downside, so take his forecasting with a small grain of salt.

The Pudgy Cat Take

Infinite scroll is not uniquely evil. It is the logical end product of an incentive structure that rewards time-on-platform above everything else. Fix the incentive, and the design follows. Leave the incentive in place, and the design will always find a way to keep you there, whether that’s infinite scroll or whatever comes after it.

Raskin built a tool. The tool got deployed inside an attention economy. The attention economy turned the tool into infrastructure for harvesting human focus at scale. Blaming the tool is like blaming the spoon for the sugar.

That said: you probably spent 40 minutes today scrolling through something you cannot name right now. So. Worth thinking about, at least for the next few minutes before you go back to your phone.