Case Study 12-2: Aza Raskin and the Infinite Scroll — Invention, Regret, and the Ethics of Design at Scale

Background

In the history of technology, there are relatively few cases in which the inventor of a widely deployed technology has publicly recanted or regretted their invention. James Watt did not come to regret the steam engine. Tim Berners-Lee did not abandon the World Wide Web — though he has expressed significant concern about what it has become. Oppenheimer's famous "I am become death" remark about the atomic bomb is perhaps the most iconic example of an inventor's horror at the scale of their creation's consequences.

Aza Raskin is not Oppenheimer. Infinite scroll is not the atomic bomb. But Raskin's public reckoning with what he built in a few hours at a startup in 2006 — a simple JavaScript feature that has since been deployed across essentially every major social media and content platform on the planet — represents a genuinely important document in the emerging ethics of technology design. It illustrates what happens when an elegant technical solution to a design problem is adopted at scale, and when the person who conceived it takes seriously the question of what scale does to a solution's effects.

Raskin's story is also important because it is not unique. It sits within a growing movement of technology industry insiders — designers, engineers, product managers, executives — who have expressed concern about, or come to regret, the psychological and social consequences of the products they built. James Williams, who worked in advertising at Google before writing "Stand Out of Our Light"; Tristan Harris, who was a design ethicist at Google before founding the Center for Humane Technology; Justin Rosenstein, who co-invented Facebook's "Like" button before adding app-blocking software to his own phone to prevent himself from using the apps he helped build: these figures form an informal but publicly visible cohort of technology workers grappling with the gap between intent and effect.

Raskin's specific contribution to this conversation — the infinite scroll — is worth examining in detail, because it illustrates with unusual clarity the way that design choices at the interface level can have behavioral consequences at the population level that no individual designer could have fully anticipated.

Timeline

2006: The Invention Aza Raskin is working at Humanized, a small user interface design firm. He is thinking about the problem of pagination: the interruption that occurs when web content is divided into pages and users must click "next" to see more. The click requires a small but real investment of deliberate action. Every click is a moment at which the user must choose to continue — and every such moment is a moment at which some users will choose not to.

From a design perspective, pagination feels like friction. Good design, in the user interface tradition Raskin works in, minimizes unnecessary friction between users and their goals. If a user wants to browse content, the content should flow continuously, not stop every fifty items and require a deliberate action to restart.

Raskin implements a solution: a JavaScript event listener that detects when the user is within a few hundred pixels of the visible content's bottom edge and automatically triggers the loading of additional content. The transition is seamless. The user does not see a page boundary. Content simply continues.

The implementation takes a few hours. It is technically simple — a well-understood pattern of event listening and dynamic content loading. Raskin does not consider it a particularly significant innovation at the time. It is, from his perspective, an interface improvement: removing unnecessary friction from the browsing experience.

2006–2012: Rapid and Universal Adoption Infinite scroll is not patented and spreads freely. Twitter implements it. Facebook implements it. LinkedIn implements it. Pinterest, whose image-grid format is particularly suited to continuous scrolling, makes infinite scroll a defining feature of its interface. Google's image search adopts it. Within a few years, infinite scroll is the dominant paradigm for content feeds across the web.

Each platform's adoption amplifies the reach of the design decision Raskin made on an afternoon in 2006. By 2012, hundreds of millions of people are scrolling through infinite feeds on a daily basis — feeds that, by the nature of Raskin's design, have no bottom, no completion point, no signal that reading or browsing is done.

2013–2016: Growing Awareness of the Behavioral Consequences As research on social media's psychological effects begins to accumulate, and as the conversation about the attention economy gains traction in technology and media circles, some designers and researchers begin to examine infinite scroll specifically as a behavioral intervention rather than a neutral interface improvement.

Raskin, following these conversations, begins to revise his assessment of what he built. The interface improvement framing he had applied in 2006 — removing friction, facilitating browsing — starts to look, in the context of the accumulating evidence, like it was removing not merely friction but a crucial regulatory mechanism. The "click to next page" he had experienced as unnecessary friction was, from a behavioral economics perspective, a stopping cue: a moment at which the user could evaluate whether to continue.

2016: The Public Reckoning Raskin begins speaking publicly about the unintended consequences of infinite scroll. In interviews, essays, and public talks, he articulates a position that would become influential in the emerging design ethics conversation: that the responsibility of a designer extends beyond the intended function of a design to include its foreseeable behavioral effects at scale, and that "I didn't mean for this to happen" is not an adequate ethical response to documented harm.

His estimate — that infinite scroll captures approximately 200,000 hours of human attention per day that would not have been captured under pagination — becomes one of the most quoted figures in the design ethics literature. The number is an estimate, not a measured finding, but its order of magnitude and the reasoning behind it have not been substantially challenged.

Raskin introduces what becomes a widely cited formulation: infinite scroll is "a slot machine in your pocket." The comparison to slot machines — devices whose design is explicitly optimized to maximize engagement through variable reward schedules — reframes the evaluative question. A slot machine in a casino is subject to regulatory scrutiny of its design's psychological effects on users. Should an interface feature that produces similar behavioral outcomes be evaluated differently because it is distributed as software?

2018: Co-founding the Center for Humane Technology Raskin joins Tristan Harris in co-founding the Center for Humane Technology, which becomes the most prominent advocacy organization in the design ethics space. The Center campaigns for specific design reforms — including the removal of infinite scroll and autoplay — and works to influence platform behavior through public advocacy, corporate engagement, and regulatory input.

The Center's founding document, "The Problem," articulates the structural analysis that underlies both Raskin's regret and the Center's advocacy: social media platforms are not simply offering a product that people happen to want too much of. They are deploying, at scale, psychological techniques — many borrowed from behavioral economics and persuasion research — to capture and direct human attention in ways that serve platform interests rather than user interests. Infinite scroll is Exhibit A.

2020: The Social Dilemma Raskin appears in the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, produced by Jeff Orlowski, which brings the design ethics critique to a mass audience. The film features multiple former technology executives and engineers describing, from the inside, how social media was built to be addictive. Raskin's account of inventing infinite scroll and his subsequent regret is one of the film's most memorable sequences.

The documentary generates significant public discussion and a measurable short-term reduction in reported social media use among some viewers. Its longer-term effects on platform design or regulation are more modest, illustrating a recurring feature of the design ethics conversation: raising public awareness of the problem does not, by itself, change the incentive structures that produce the problem.

2021–Present: The Advocacy Continues The Center for Humane Technology continues its work on design ethics, with varying degrees of influence on platform behavior and regulatory discussions. Some platforms have made limited modifications to their infinite scroll implementations — reduced scroll speeds, more prominent session-time indicators, opt-in options for paginated feeds in some markets — in response to user feedback and regulatory pressure.

None of the major platforms has replaced infinite scroll with pagination as a default. The business case for infinite scroll — its measurable effect on session length and content consumption — remains compelling under the engagement-metric optimization model that governs platform economics. The design Raskin built in a few hours in 2006 remains the dominant paradigm for content feeds across the web.

Analysis

The Ethics of Unintended Consequences at Scale

Raskin's story raises a philosophical question that is central to the ethics of technology design: what responsibility does a designer bear for the behavioral consequences of their work at scale, particularly when those consequences were not intended and not fully foreseeable at the time of design?

One view holds that responsibility requires intent or negligence: if you did not intend the harmful outcome and were not negligent in failing to foresee it, you are not responsible for it. On this view, Raskin's regret, while personally significant, does not represent a moral failure. He solved a design problem competently in 2006; the fact that the solution was adopted at scale with unforeseen consequences is a feature of the technology ecosystem, not of his design choices.

A second view holds that the scale effects of widely adopted technology design are, if not fully foreseeable in their specifics, foreseeable in their general character. A designer who removes a friction point from a content feed should be able to foresee that users will consume more content as a result; this is, after all, the design's intent. The question of whether that additional consumption is beneficial or harmful requires psychological research that Raskin did not conduct in 2006. But the question itself was available to be asked.

Raskin's own position, as expressed in his subsequent advocacy, seems to fall somewhere between these views: he did not intend the harm, and could not have precisely foreseen it, but takes responsibility for it nonetheless — both because he could have asked the question he did not ask, and because the social benefits of his product role that came from the design decision were real and should be acknowledged alongside the harms.

The "Slot Machine" Analogy and Its Implications

Raskin's description of infinite scroll as a "slot machine in your pocket" deserves careful examination. The analogy is productive in some respects and potentially misleading in others.

The productive aspect: slot machines are the most extensively regulated gambling devices in the world, subject to detailed engineering standards governing their psychological effects on users. The specific mechanisms through which slot machines produce compulsive engagement — variable reward schedules, sound and light design, bet-per-spin minimums — are studied, documented, and regulated. If infinite scroll produces comparable behavioral effects through comparable mechanisms (variable reward from content novelty, continuous availability, elimination of stopping cues), the analogy suggests that comparable regulatory scrutiny might be appropriate.

The potentially misleading aspect: slot machines are designed with the explicit purpose of generating compulsive engagement for financial profit. Infinite scroll was designed to reduce friction in content browsing; its compulsive engagement effects were, as Raskin tells it, unintended. The moral evaluation of slot machines and their manufacturers typically focuses on the intent to exploit as much as the fact of exploitation. Whether the same evaluation applies when the exploitation is unintended is a question the analogy does not fully answer.

What the analogy does productively is reframe the evaluative question. Before Raskin's slot machine formulation, the dominant framing of social media behavioral concerns was in terms of individual psychology: some people are more susceptible to addictive patterns than others, and those individuals should exercise more self-control. The slot machine analogy shifts the frame to design: these devices are engineered to produce specific behavioral patterns regardless of individual psychology, and the relevant evaluation is of the design, not the user.

What the Story Reveals About Technology Culture

Raskin's trajectory — enthusiastic invention, adoption at scale, delayed realization of consequences, public regret, advocacy work — is instructive not only for its personal dimension but for what it reveals about the culture in which technology design happens.

In 2006, user interface design culture was organized around the principle of removing friction. Friction — the resistance between users and their goals — was understood as the enemy of good design. Every click that could be eliminated should be eliminated. Every loading delay that could be reduced should be reduced. The ease and smoothness of the user experience was the primary value, and the question of what users would do with that ease and smoothness was not, systematically, a design question.

This culture had a technological ideology behind it: that more access, more ease, more connectivity is always better. The internet was a liberation technology; making it easier to use liberated more people more completely. Friction was the enemy because friction was the barrier between people and the free information that would empower them.

What this culture did not have — and what design ethics is now attempting to provide — is a framework for asking: better for whom, in what ways, and under what conditions? Friction-removal that facilitates the reading of important news is better. Friction-removal that facilitates compulsive consumption of algorithmically optimized content is not clearly better, and may be worse. The distinction requires asking questions about behavioral consequences that the friction-removal ideology, in its unreflective form, does not make room for.

Raskin's regret is, in part, a personal document of what happens when that ideology runs up against the actual behavioral consequences of its application at scale.

What This Means for Users

The Raskin story offers several insights for understanding and navigating the infinite scroll environment:

The design of your feed was not inevitable. Infinite scroll was invented by one person in a few hours and adopted industry-wide because it drove engagement metrics in the desired direction. It could have been designed differently, and in principle it could be changed. Understanding that the current design is a contingent historical choice — rather than a natural feature of how content must be presented — supports more critical engagement with the environment.

The 200,000 hours figure is an invitation to personal accounting. How much of your own attention, over a typical week, goes to content consumption that you did not actively choose to continue — that continued because the scroll did not stop? How does that figure compare to what you would have chosen deliberately? The gap between intended and actual engagement is the personal analogue of Raskin's 200,000-hour estimate.

Knowing the mechanism can change your relationship to it. Many users who learn about infinite scroll's design rationale — that the continuous content load was designed to prevent the natural stopping cue of page navigation — report a change in their relationship to the scroll experience. The dissociation between "I'm just browsing" and "I'm in a designed environment that is structured to prevent me from stopping" can be a useful conceptual frame for exercising more deliberate engagement.

The Center for Humane Technology offers practical resources. The organization Raskin co-founded provides consumer-facing guidance on managing digital engagement, as well as policy advocacy for design reforms. Their resources are informed by the same research and experience base that underlies this chapter.

Discussion Questions

Raskin's regret about infinite scroll is personal and publicly expressed, but he did not intend the harm his design caused. How should we evaluate responsibility for unintended harms that are nevertheless predictable in retrospect? Does "I couldn't have known" remain a sufficient defense as research on digital behavior accumulates?
The slot machine analogy reframes infinite scroll from an interface feature to a behavioral engineering tool. Is this reframing accurate? What are its implications for how we should regulate and evaluate social media design features?
Raskin implemented infinite scroll in a few hours without consulting psychologists, behavioral economists, or other experts whose knowledge might have anticipated the behavioral consequences. What does this tell us about the expertise gaps in technology design culture? What kinds of expertise should be systematically included in product design processes?
The Center for Humane Technology's advocacy has produced modest changes in platform behavior and regulatory discussion, but has not changed the dominant design paradigm (infinite scroll remains standard across major platforms). Why has the advocacy had limited structural impact? What would it take to produce more significant change?
If you had been in Raskin's position in 2006 — a skilled designer asked to solve the pagination friction problem — what additional questions would you have asked before implementing the infinite scroll solution? What research or expertise would you have consulted? What does your answer reveal about the design culture changes you believe are necessary?