The scroll doesn’t end because the content is good. It doesn’t end because ending isn’t the point.
A social media feed and a slot machine share a specific mechanical feature: neither tells you in advance whether the next pull (or scroll) delivers something rewarding. That unpredictability — a variable-ratio reward schedule — is, by a wide margin, the most compulsion-generating reinforcement pattern known in behavioural psychology, more powerful than a reward that arrives on a predictable schedule or every single time.
Recent research applies this directly to infinite-scroll interfaces: the uncertainty of what the next post holds, combined with the removal of any natural stopping point (a scroll has no last page the way a book has a last chapter), recruits the same dopaminergic reward-prediction machinery implicated in gambling and substance-use disorders. “Doomscrolling” — the specific, now-measurable habit of persistently seeking out negative news in a feed — has its own validated psychological scale as of 2022, distinct from general social media use, and is linked to anxiety, poor self-control, and fear of missing out.
The underlying resource being competed for is attention itself, treated in a growing body of work (most notably by a former Google design ethicist turned Oxford philosopher) as the actual scarce commodity of the digital economy — not information, which is abundant, but the finite human capacity to attend to it, which platforms are commercially incentivised to capture and hold for as long as possible, whether or not that serves the user’s own goals.
Source: Clark, L. & Zack, M. (2022). “Engineered highs: reward variability and frequency as potential prerequisites for behavioural addiction.” PsyArXiv preprint. Sharma, B., Lee, S., & Johnson, B.K. (2022). “The dark at the end of the tunnel: Doomscrolling on social media newsfeeds.” Technology, Mind, and Behavior. Williams, J. (2018). Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy. Cambridge University Press.