The “endless scroll” debate was after it replaced pages where you’d scroll scroll scroll click, scroll scroll scroll click, scroll scroll scroll click. That was annoying while still not actually stemming addiction (at least for me). I’d still read through those megathreads on RPG.net, UI annoyances or no. The endless scroll it just took the clicks out of that process which was an improvement. But what I want is instead taking scrolls out of the process! So it’s tap, tap, tap, tap—like an ebook!
Probably going to be just as addictive but I won’t get anxiety from all the scrolling.
Scrolling and panning is fiddly and I never get exactly the right amount of page scrolled it’s like threding a needle repeatedly and most psge down algos are no good either since they’re paging in a text format that’s not designed for pages so you have to read the same couple of lines twice, last on this page and first on the next. So in the future maybe we’ll render HTML as actual pages (after all, epub readers can [sorta] do it). Even less and more on Unix can do it; they show all of one page, then all of the next page separately and so on. The weaksauce nature of page down in GUI apps like Netscape was one of the biggest letdowns when I first started using them in the nineties.
However, the addiction dark pattern has another component; the endless and often junky content which really makes the scroll endless. That part can not stay.
That’s a secondary reason for why I don’t like discover algorithms on Mastodon, the primary reason being how it’s artificial virality.