The problem he was actually solving
In 2006, Aza Raskin was working on interface design at Mozilla. The problem in front of him was small: loading a new page of search results or a long list required a click, and that click was a place where people stopped. He built a page that kept loading automatically as you neared the bottom, removing the click entirely. That's the whole original idea, a fix for pagination, not a plan for attention capture.[1]
What that fix quietly removed
A paginated list has a shape. It has a first page, a middle, and a last page, and reaching the last page tells you something: you're done. Infinite scroll doesn't have a last page. There's always more to load, so there's never a structural signal that says stop. Raskin didn't add anything that captures attention. He removed the one thing that used to end it.
Why he says he regrets it
Raskin has been on the record about this for years, including under oath. Testifying in the New Mexico v. Meta trial, he described not thinking through what happens when a feature built to remove friction gets deployed at the scale social platforms operate at, where every additional minute on screen is the thing the business is optimized to produce.[1] In a separate interview, he put it plainly: he was blind to how the design he shipped for a usability problem would be picked up and used for something else entirely.[2]
That's the part worth sitting with. Nobody had to invent a new manipulation technique to make feeds addictive. They just had to take a legitimate fix for a legitimate problem and never put the ending back.
Why every major feed still uses it
Once infinite scroll existed, there was no reason for an engagement-driven platform not to use it. It's strictly better than pagination at the one metric that matters to a ranked feed: time spent. YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, X, and Reddit all load the next batch of content automatically, silently, before you've decided you want it. The click Raskin removed in 2006 is the same click none of them ever brought back.
That's what a following-only, chronological feed restores, not different content, just a bottom. DoomOff sets feeds back to the people you follow, in the order they posted, which means the list is finite again. You can reach the end. That's the part infinite scroll took away, and it's the part getting it back gives back.