Who Invented Infinite Scroll, and Why Its Designer Regrets It

Two answers to who invented infinite scroll

The popular answer is Aza Raskin. According to the BBC, Raskin designed infinite scroll in 2006, when he was working for Humanized, a user-interface consultancy. The idea was simple: instead of making people click to a next page, load more content underneath as they reach the bottom. No click, no page load, no interruption.

The less known answer is Microsoft. Hugh Williams, then at Microsoft, wrote in 2012 that he, Nick Craswell and Julie Farago built infinite scroll into MSN Search's image search, which later became Bing's, in 2005. Publicly it was called smart scroll, and it showed up to 1,000 images on one page. Microsoft filed a patent application on February 14, 2006 that describes an infinite scrolling feature for viewing all or almost all search results. The patent, US 7,664,739, was granted in February 2010 and lists Julia Farago, Hugh Williams and seven other inventors.

So the fair answer is that both happened within about a year of each other. Microsoft has the earliest paper trail. Raskin has the public story, and he is the one who has spent the years since asking what the idea did to people.

When did infinite scroll start?

The short version: 2005 to 2006. The longer timeline, with only the dates that have a source:

Between 2006 and 2018 the pattern went from an image search feature to the default shape of almost every social feed. By the time vertical short video arrived, the idea of a feed without an end no longer needed defending. It was simply what a feed was.

What Raskin has said about it

In the 2018 BBC Panorama report, Raskin described infinite scroll as one of the features now seen as highly habit-forming, and explained the mechanism in one line: if you don't give your brain time to catch up with your impulses, you just keep scrolling. He said he had not set out to addict anyone and felt guilty about what happened. He also put most of the weight on business models: many designers, he said, were driven toward addictive features by the business models of the big companies that employed them.

In the same report he compared the effect to sprinkling "behavioural cocaine" all over an interface. It is a vivid line, and it is worth reading as what it is: a designer's description of a pattern he knows from the inside, not a medical claim.

On February 26, 2026, Raskin took the stand in the State of New Mexico's case against Meta, which was about how Facebook and Instagram affect young users. Coverage of the day by MLex and KOB News reports that he expressed regret about his creation and told the jury he falls for its pull himself, even knowing exactly how it works.

Why a feed without an end is hard to leave

Removing friction is close to the founding rule of interface design. Every extra click is a chance for someone to give up, and for most software, removing those clicks made things better. Pagination on a search results page really was an accident of how web pages were built.

The blind spot is that the rule assumes every stopping point is a leftover inefficiency. Some aren't. The last page of a newspaper, the credits at the end of an episode, the back cover of a book: each one forces a small, low-stakes decision about whether that was enough. From a pure interface point of view, those endings look exactly like a next page button. Remove one and you remove the other, and the software can't tell which kind of friction was protecting you.

That is the part Raskin has said he didn't see coming. A frictionless list is harmless on an image search. Attached to content picked to be as appealing as possible, inside a business that earns money per minute of attention, the same mechanism stops being a convenience and becomes the reason people look up an hour later. The same story played out with pull-to-refresh, whose inventor also regrets it, and it was the subject of Tristan Harris's 2013 Google slide deck.

From endless feeds to endless short video

Short video took the idea one step further. A text feed still asks you to scroll and pick what to read. YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels and TikTok play the next video full screen the moment you swipe, so the only decision left is a thumb movement. There is no list to look at, no page to reach the end of and no natural break between clips.

None of these apps offers a setting that gives the feed an end. The closest built-in tools are time limits: YouTube's Shorts feed limit, Instagram's daily limit and Android's app timers in Digital Wellbeing. They are free and they work for some people, but each one ends in a reminder you can dismiss, or blocks the whole app, including the parts you wanted.

Putting a stopping point back

Nobody needs pagination back on search results. The argument is narrower: in the specific feeds where the missing stop does the damage, restoring a stop deals with the mechanism instead of the symptom. Our guides on blocking YouTube Shorts on Android and blocking Instagram Reels on Android walk through every free option first.

Dam It! takes the narrow route on Android: it blocks the swipe to the next video inside Shorts, Reels and TikTok, while long videos, messages and videos you open on purpose keep working. It is not for you if you use an iPhone, or if you want a whole app locked for the evening; Android's own app timers do that for free.

To see what your daily scrolling adds up to over a year, the time wasting calculator does the arithmetic.