I have thought quite a bit about why social media is so addictive these days. I think one of the big aspects is the never-ending flow of content. There is literally no end. The platform is made this way, because it wants you to keep on the platform in order for the platform to earn more money on you by showing you ads or influencers.
The infinite scroll wasn't an original core feature of a social media platform. In the beginning there was a limit. After a while, you would have seen everything there was to see, and a text would show indicating you should come back later for more. This is something that's almost unimaginable now.
The Michigan Daily wrote an article about the inventor of the infinite scroll:
The dangers of [the infinite scroll] have been voiced by the creator of the tactic itself. Raskin, the infinite scroll’s inventor, has grown to abhor the function and is now an advocate for social media restrictions that limit the infinite scroll’s impact. He is also a co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, which “(works) to expose the drivers behind all extractive technologies steering our thoughts, behaviors, and actions.” He’s calculated — he says conservatively — that infinite scroll wastes 200,000 human lifetimes worth of time every single day, and tweeted that “optimizing something for ease-of-use does not mean best for the user or humanity.”
So, the inventor of the infinite scroll regrets what he did, and he has worked out that the time equivalent to 100,000 human lifetimes is wasted on a daily basis because of infinite scrolling. This is the tweet that is being referenced:
Is there a way back?