The rabbit hole is endless scroll. There are no bunnies at the bottom, just more hole.

There is something poetically appropriate about endless scroll and its role in consumption. Where other versions of consumerism have certainly aimed for an infinite delivery of a product or services to the consumer. None have succeeded to balance the content so well with the distribution method. Endless scroll is the high-fructose corn syrup⁠1 of your social brain, served through lit screen until your battery dies or you emotionally break under the strain of FOMO.

Scroll history

Scrolling allows the user to move across an asset when the screen is to small to show the whole item. It is a useful function to extend a long text article for example. The consumer could scroll further down the page to continue reading. Eventually the article would end and the reader moved on. Or it could be implemented horizontally to pan across a large panoramic landscape picture. It changed significantly with the needs of social media. When consumers needed to be engaged for as long as possible. Having a finite limit to content was not enough.

Infinite Scroll.

Infinite Scroll, also called Endless Scroll, or Continuous Scroll, was invented by Aza Raskin, an interaction designer in 2006. Its first implementation is widely believed to be on The Humanized Reader app. Aza Raskin talked about it briefly at the Interaction Design Conference 2008 in Canada.

Infinite scroll allows users of social media to carry on consuming content. Facebook, Tiktok, Twitter, amongst others, use it to great effect. It is especially relevant for mobile use. Instagram is a particularly good example.

Social media

Infinite scroll is the perfect interface for social media. Its endlessness captures the essence of a digital societal norm. It’s lack of tangible ending is the perfect metaphor for the wider consumer experience of social media. Effort required to pull yourself away is many multiples of brushing your thumb across the screen.

According to the productivity tool Freedom, that is helping people manage their media consumption, the endless scroll “exploits a heuristic or mental shortcut that many people naturally use — the unit bias. Human beings are naturally motivated to complete a unit of something. The tendency is to believe that whatever amount we’re given of something is the ‘right’ amount, so we try to finish it to gain satisfaction.”⁠2

Drag yourself away

I remember in my youth having a similar relationship with MTV, the music channel. It was easy to wait for the next video (the unit) to roll. And very hard to pull yourself away to do something more purposeful. MTV had a natural pause with Ad breaks. Then was your opportunity to break away. Where the social media version hides the Ad within the content so it is smooth delivery of content forever. Their is no break. No moment to reflect. The focus is locked.

Aza regrets his invention now, tweeting in 2019 “One of my lessons from infinite scroll: that optimizing something for ease-of-use does not mean best for the user or humanity”.⁠3

The Hook Model

Endless scroll requires additional help in making it addictive. It won’t work when it is full of junk, so the content has to have meaning to the viewer. This is where the Hook Model comes in. Together they balance pace and content. According to Product Plan, a product management software company, the Hook Model is a “is a four-phase process that businesses can use to create products or services used habitually by customers.”

It works by fulfilling these attributes.
1. Trigger (External or Internal): This is the actuator of behavior. It cues the action that then builds a habit.
2. Action: Behavior executed in anticipation of the reward.
3. Variable Reward: The problem that’s solved because of the action taken reinforces the cycle of behavior. Reward types include Rewards of the Tribe (social rewards based on connection and acceptance), Rewards of the Hunt (search for material resources), and Rewards of the Self (personal gratification in the form of mastery or self-realization).
4. Investment: An action that improves the product or service in the future. 4

Together, Endless Scroll and the Hook Model have created the perfect addictive experience for consumers. An endless reward system for engagement. But the cost is significant. The inventor of endless scroll, Aza Raskin, estimates that the infinite scrolling we do online wastes over 200,000 human lifetimes daily. 5

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup

2 https://freedom.to/blog/infinite-scroll/

3 https://freedom.to/blog/infinite-scroll/

4 https://www.productplan.com/glossary/hook-model/

5 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/i-m-so-sorry-says-inventor-of-endless-online-scrolling-9lrv59mdk