Infinite scroll: the feed that never asks you to leave

Infinite scroll is the rare design choice that admits its purpose in its mechanics. A page with an end is a page where you might stop. Remove the bottom, and stopping stops being a decision and becomes a failure of momentum. Nobody reaches for the next page because there is no next page; there is only more of the same, pulled up by a thumb that has learned the gesture faster than the mind has learned to object.

What strikes me is how quietly it reverses the old contract. Books, newspapers and television had endings built in, which meant a person could finish, and finishing was a moment of agency. Infinite scroll converts that moment into a void. The tragedy is not that people use it; it is that the design treats their own sense of enough as a friction to be engineered away.