I regret it: the founder of infinite scroll was blind to how it would be used
About Aza
- Co-founded Center for Humane Technology
- National Geographic Explorer
- Co-founded Earth Species Project to decode animal communication with AI
- Architect and subject of Emmy-winning The Social Dilemma
- Co-host of Your Undivided Attention
I regret it: the founder of infinite scroll was blind to how it would be used
Aza Raskin invented infinite scroll in 2006 to make browsing easier — no more clicking ‘next page.’ But he says he was blind to how it would be weaponized to capture human attention. His estimate: half a million human lifetimes are wasted every month just scrolling.
Transcript
Note: Transcripts may be automatically generated and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.
You invented the infinite scroll, and then you were pretty vocal that this was kind of a unfortunate invention. So this was 2006. It used to be that you had to like refresh your webpage to get any new information. Well, I'm a designer. Every time I ask the user to make a choice they don't care about, I have failed as a designer. So simply, if you're scrolling down a set of blog posts or a set of search results and you haven't seen what you're looking for, you keep scrolling, then don't make me click the next button. And then I went around and I talked to like Twitter and Google, like, this is just a better interface, it's more efficient. And when I was making it, I was really thinking about how can I reduce friction. And what I was blind to was the way that all of my best intentions were sort of irrelevant in the face of this machine with an incentive now to capture human attention. And I don't remember the exact number now, but it's something like half a million human lifetimes are wasted every month scrolling.
