Aza Raskin

Why do we doomscroll?

After all, who hasn't sat on their couch / at the dinner table (KIDS!) / in the bathroom and scrolled, scrolled that phone down, and down, to what end? Doom.

Well, we can't really answer that (must be something deep inside our psyches), but let's answer a simpler question:

Why CAN we doomscroll?

The answer is Aza Raskin. If that name sounds familiar, then you're either well versed in computer nerdom or remember his previously-profiled father, Jef Raskin, the man responsible for the Apple Macintosh. The younger Raskin worked as the lead designer for the Firefox browser, and is generally credited for making infinite scroll possible on web pages.

(On a purely technical level, infinite scroll gives you a small win for a big cost: it gobbles up browser memory while making searching inside the page more inefficient. No wonder that many, including Google, who switched to infinite scroll when it was at its peak, quietly reverted. Is it really that hard to click "Next Page"?)

Raskin has since expressed his regret, claiming he did not foresee the consequences... even though infinite scroll was "deliberately" designed to "keep [users] online for as long as possible".

You know what's a better way to keep users online? A fantastic website with 20 years worth of Jewy profiles!