Endless scroll creep of smartphone apps really killed the smartphone for me.

[JINSBEK]

mystify.jpg (79.41 KiB) Viewed 27 times

Remember when we had things like pagination, and screensavers? I keep thinking that maybe if our phones played Mystify on “idle”, instead of showing notifications coaxing us to traipse into endlessly scrolling apps, people wouldn’t be so glued to and stressed by their smartphones.

Every single media platform is vying for your attention now. Whether it’s YouTube, Reddit, or even a news website (I scroll to the end of my current article and I’m suddenly in a different article?!) they want to keep you stuck on their platform for as long as humanly possible. I’m actually surprised that Amazon doesn’t keep you in a scrolling hamster wheel—yet. But other shopping apps like Temu definitely do.

Has anyone else here been forced to drop a media platform, that you formerly used responsibly on Mobile, because of the endless scrolling design that’s so pervasive now? YouTube is the last one to drive me crazy (the others I’ve uninstalled long ago already, ha), and also the last straw.

As infuriatingly boring the depression rectangle hardware is, I actually can’t blame it for nearly as much pain as the software being designed for it.

[CitricScion]

It's possible to get rid of many of the social media apps that run like this, but I think it would be hard for me to find an in-between. Either I am glued to a service or I am not really using it at all. If you run apps through a browser sometimes the experience is more limited than the native app, and that friction can be enough to keep scrolling at bay. Just an idea.

[JINSBEK]

Ah! Well, for me, it’s actually no problem to remove all SNS apps (and I suppose, refrain from reading news websites now, since they endlessly scroll…) from my phone—and I don’t even browse those on a Mobile browser. I don’t have a problem with going to those platforms only very occasionally in a homebound, desktop environment. I love Facebook Groups, but I don’t need to see, exactly, what is going on in the artisan cheesemaking group at this very moment! I can do that when I get home… And honestly, if I don’t? That’s fine, too. I can just explore those sorts of things when I actually want to look for new cheesemaking ideas, and so on. There are many things I like to do outside of work that don’t involve SNS, and I’d like to keep it that way.

Maybe it was a mistake to make the Internet always accessible from your pocket, even on the toilet. I just wish I could read a single news article without being bombarded, or just play one YouTube video (in my case, typically recordings of live performances, or someone’s mix) without YouTube immediately recommending me something else before the video has even started. I remember when Gawker Media (back when I read it…!) first abandoned their paginated layout for an endlessly scrolling one. There was an outcry in the readerbase, because at the time, everyone was reading these sites on their desktops. Ironically it seems to be a case of updating their site design far too early, before the ubiquity of smartphones. Now almost every single platform is designed to be endless, with zero discrete breaks.