The Problem With Infinite Scrolling Feeds

They’re infinite

Consumption is addictive. Just think of the number of times you’re sitting idle and you whip out your phone or open up those extra tabs on your laptop. Only to mindlessly scroll through never-ending streams of cat GIFs, cute baby videos, biased political commentary and updates from friends you don’t care about. The more you consume, the more you want to. Once you start drinking from the fountain of infinite content, you can’t stop. You need to jerk yourself off the hook, both mentally and physically.

The problems associated with digital vortexes are well-documented. Drill down further and you’ll see the root cause: Infinite Scrolling Feeds (I’m going to hereby refer to them as ISF). ISF is what caused the earliest social networks to be truly ubiquitous. ISFs are designed to maximize your time spent on the network, because that means more eyeballs for their ads, juicier retention metrics for the investors and a higher chance of you adding fuel to the fire. A network cannot grow until and unless each and every node actively participates in it. All the usual suspects are at it — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Quora, Snapchat, Pinterest — nudging you every now and then to open the app, dive into the abyss and fan the flames of never-ending content.

We’ve tried to fight back by creating nifty tools like this one, which tracks our time spent on each website.

But is it enough to slay the insatiable monster of content hunger?

Not really.

I tried using such time-tracking productivity extensions only to find that every time I came face to face with my report card, the only emotions that used to be triggered were self-pity and a feeling of guilt I couldn’t shake off. It did not change my consumption behaviour drastically, it only made me think more about the battle I cannot win. And that made me sad. So I stopped using it altogether.

Product makers have realized the power of ISF and have started introducing it in their products in some way or the other. Of late, I’m starting to see this trend catch up in a lot of unexpected places. Zomato, a restaurant discovery platform, also has a social feed where you can see restaurant reviews posted by people in and around you. And like any other network, you can ‘Like, Comment or Share’, making it a ‘Discover and Discuss’ platform. You can also follow other foodies and geek out about food, drinks and trending restaurants.

Zomato’s ISF

IMO, it’s only a matter of time before others catch on the ISF frenzy. For example, I won’t be surprised if say, a Flipkart or a Myntra (the biggest e-commerce marketplaces in India) introduce some form of an ISF or a social angle in their product. Myntra already introduced Shopping Groups and Hand-Picked Fashion Curations, so any Product guy worth his salt can extrapolate this to an ISF (a fashion feed where you can browse the latest in fashion and what your friends are buying/trying). And as I’m writing this Flipkart just added an update that has Product Q&A, a place where you can get your product queries answered by certified buyers. Next they’ll be launching a Quora-style platform for discussing/asking about upcoming products or products your friends are interested in/have already bought and want to recommend. All aboard the ISF train.

Which makes Medium’s decision to switch to a finite feed all the more refreshing and defiant. Now, I just bookmark stories from the limited feed throughout the day and knock them off one by one at night. I don’t know if they are just testing the waters to see the initial reaction but as someone who’s tired of endless scrolling, I’m loving it! They break the feed down neatly into useful sections like ‘New from your network’ (a finite curation of authors and publications that you love the most), a ‘Morning/Afternoon/Evening’ edition featuring stories from tags you follow, ‘Popular on Medium’, ‘Handpicked by Medium Staff’ and so on. If you want to explore a section further, you can take a deep dive by clicking on ‘More>’. But your homepage remains finite, a collection of a handful of stories that Medium thinks you’ll like.