Against the Feed

In 2006, a young engineer named Aza Raskin solved a small problem of friction. Users had to click to load the next page of results; the click was a tiny tax on attention, and it could be removed. He removed it. The feed became infinite.

He has spent a good portion of the years since apologising for it.

The problem with no bottom

A page has a bottom. You reach it, and the reaching is a decision point — a natural pause where a person might ask whether they would like to continue. The infinite scroll abolishes the bottom, and with it the pause. There is no longer a moment at which you decide to keep going, because you never stop.

This is not a small thing. Almost every defence of our attention depends on the existence of these little seams in experience — the end of the chapter, the bottom of the page, the last item in the list. Remove the seams and you remove the places where judgement can get a foothold.

The feed did not make us distractible. It made distraction frictionless, which is worse, because friction is where choice lives.

What a page asks of you

We have made an editorial decision that will seem perverse: nothing on this site infinitely scrolls. The archive paginates. The article ends. When you finish a piece, you reach a bottom, and at the bottom there is a quiet question — would you like to read another, or would you like to stop?

We think the question is a courtesy. The feed never asks it because it is afraid of the answer.