Infinite scroll amplifies the "I'm never going to find that again" problem. That's the thing I hate most about it.
this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2026
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Misleading headline, it's only one of multiple "addictive features" they're considering banning to make social media less addictive.
i personally have pushed back on every “infinite scrolling” feature request from product designers. first, you think you need it; you don’t. second, you think it’s just so nifty! it isn’t. oh is your content is dynamically generated? what was wrong with Reddit’s pager that launched that site into popularity?
it’s unnecessary complexity that hides information from the user, makes API calls (which are, spoilers, paginated) more complicated, can cause the obvious memory/resource consumption issues, and just generally disempowers the user. which i guess on a social media app is the point. but totally counter to the goals of a fleet management system lol
Thank you. Infinite pagers are such poor usability, just all around annoying. I really don’t understand why people want them unless it’s developers saying “this is cool”
@technocrit what pseudo-science is being exploited?
Why claim "pseudoscience" when real world studies, as well as internal documents of the companies themselves, show that these platforms are addictive? Studies also show that kids want to, but can't, spend less time on these addictive platforms.
LET'S GOOOO
I don't know man, I'm not a fan of infinite scroll
I don't like infinite scroll.
Voyager (lemmy) has paged scroll and it let's me.know when I've wasted enough time.
Unlike say, Instagram...
I'm surprised Slashdot still exists.
I miss the cmdrtaco days of /. lol.
I don't remember what I was downloading the other day, but I ended up on SourceForge. I forgot that existed too. Don't visit without an ad blocker though.
Brussels has told the company to change several key features, including disabling infinite scrolling, setting strict screen time breaks and changing its recommender systems.
I'm not really a rabid fan of infinite scrolling myself, but setting aside the question of whether the state should regulate this sort of thing (I'd say no, but I'm in the US and Europeans can do whatever they want as long as it's not affecting me), in all seriousness, it seems like it should be client-side. Like, we have prefers-color-scheme in CSS at the browser/OS level to ask all websites to use dark mode or light mode. If you want to disable infinite scrolling on websites, presumably you want to do so globally and can send that bit (and if you want it on a per-site basis, the browser could have support for a toggle).
And if you want screen time break reminders, there's existing browser-level and OS-level functionality for that. Debian has a number of packages to do just that. I mean, I'd think that the EU can just say "OS vendors in an EU locale should have this feature on by default", rather than going site-by-site.
We are well past the point where the client decides how hypertext looks. You are talking about feed readers.
I mean that the setting should be client-side. With prefers-color-scheme, it's a hint to the website's CSS design as to what theme to use.
Is this only for TikTok or is it going to lead to worse Fediverse software? Because all infinite scrolling does is remove to annoyance of hitting next page, it’s a great QoL feature.
I think they mean algorithmic feeds that no human could ever reach the end of; like TikTok, but all the big social media platforms have similar features nowadays.
Anything else would be stupid but who knows what politicians think
Right? Imagine if you were to come into the comments and there are 50 comments but you can only read them 10 at a time.