infinite scroll

Pragmatic Guide to JavaScript
by Christophe Porteneuve
Published 15 Nov 2010

Download ui/lightbox/lightbox.js $(function() { $('#thumbnails a').fancybox({ zoomSpeedIn: 300, zoomOpacity: true, overlayColor: '#000', overlayOpacity: 0.6 }); }); Related Tasks • Task 12, Pulling Off Classy Tooltips, on page 44 • Task 13, Making Unobtrusive Pop-Ups, on page 46 Report erratum Download from Wow! eBook <www.wowebook.com>this copy is (P1.0 printing, November 2010) I MPLEMENTING AN “I NFINITE S CROLL” 16 Implementing an “Infinite Scroll” Gmail introduced us to infinite scroll, spelling doom for pagination in a number of scenarios. Many people (certainly not all, though) find it more efficient to scroll through a boatload of items and use visual pattern matching rather than pointing to and clicking pagination link after pagination link. Pagination mostly arose for technical reasons alone: • Older browsers render slowly, forcing us to keep our pages “light enough.” • Bandwidth may be limited anywhere between client and server, encouraging us to stay lean. • Server-side processing time grows as the data grows.

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Rendering the entire dataset all at once is not only unnecessary from a consumption standpoint but is infeasible for our servers (or at the very least impractical and unwieldy), especially if they want to keep handling enough concurrent requests. Still, pagination was just one way—the non-JavaScript way. But as soon as JavaScript is enabled, you can hide any pagination links and replace them with infinite scroll when that makes sense. I leave that decision to your usability experts—and to your good sense. As you can see on the facing code, infinite scroll is nothing too fancy. The only tricky part is jumping through a couple of hoops to get our metrics right, across browsers, as evidenced in the lowEnough( ) method code. We check, essentially, that the bottom of the document is not too far below the bottom of our viewport.

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Simulating Background Processing 40 Download from Wow! eBook <www.wowebook.com> CONTENTS III IV V 6 UI Tricks 42 Task 12. Pulling Off Classy Tooltips 44 Task 13. Making Unobtrusive Pop-Ups 46 Task 14. Preloading Images 48 Task 15. Creating a Lightbox Effect 50 Task 16. Implementing an “Infinite Scroll” 52 Task 17. Maintaining Viewport When Loading Content 54 Form-fu 56 Task 18. Temporarily Disabling a Submit Button 58 Task 19. Providing Input Length Feedback 60 Task 20. (Un)checking a Whole Set of Checkboxes at Once 62 Task 21. Validating Forms: The Basics 64 Task 22. Validating Forms: Going Further 66 Task 23.

Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--And How to Think Deeply Again
by Johann Hari
Published 25 Jan 2022

Today, all social media and lots of other sites use a version of infinite scroll. But then Aza watched as the people around him changed. They seemed to be unable to pull themselves away from their devices, flicking through and through and through, thanks in part to the code he had designed. He found himself infinitely scrolling through what he often realized afterward was crap, and he wondered if he was making good use of his life. One day, when he was thirty-two, Aza sat down and did a calculation. At a conservative estimate, infinite scroll makes you spend 50 percent more of your time on sites like Twitter.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT At a conservative estimate, infinite scroll makes you spend 50 percent more of your time: There’s a debate about the precise numbers for this, because it’s inherently hard to measure. One way of measuring it is what’s called the “bounce rate” (the number of people who arrive on a site and immediately leave without going to any other page on the website). For example, Time’s bounce rate apparently dropped by 15 percent when it introduced infinite scroll in 2014; Quartz readers view about 50 percent more stories than they would without infinite scroll. Both of these figures come from S. Kirkland, “Time.com’s Bounce Rate Down 15 Percentage Points Since Adopting Continuous Scroll,” Poynter, July 20, 2014, https://web.archive.org/​web/​20150207201902/​http://www.poynter.org:80/​news/mediawire/257466/time-coms-bounce-rate-down-15-percentage-points-since-adopting-continuous-scroll/.

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So instead of getting “this constant drip of behavioral cocaine,” telling you every few minutes that somebody liked your picture, commented on your post, has a birthday tomorrow, and on and on and on—you would get one daily update, like a newspaper, summarizing it all. You’d be pushed to look once a day, instead of being interrupted several times an hour. “Here’s another one,” he said. “Infinite scroll.” That’s his invention, where when you get to the bottom of the screen, it automatically loads more and more, forever. “What’s going on there is it’s catching your impulses before your brain has a chance to really get involved and make a decision.” Facebook and Instagram and the others could simply turn off infinite scroll—so that when you get to the bottom of the screen, you have to make a conscious decision to carry on scrolling. Similarly, these sites could simply switch off the things that have been shown to most polarize people politically, stealing our ability to pay collective attention.

Vue.js 2 Cookbook
by Andrea Passaglia
Published 27 Apr 2017

Pressing the edit button triggers a PUT and the Delete button, well, you can imagine that it uses the DELETE verb. Axios makes this very clear by naming the methods of its API with the verbs themselves. Implementing infinite scrolling Infinite scrolling is a fine example of what you can do with Vue and AJAX. It is also quite popular and can improve interaction for some kind of content. You will build a random word generator that works with infinite scrolling. Getting ready We will use Axios. Take a look at the Sending basic AJAX requests with Axios recipe to know how to install it and its basic functionality. Other than that, you don't need to know much to follow along.

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Creating a form and sending data to your server Getting ready How to do it... How it works... There's more... Recovering from an error during a request Getting ready How to do it... How it works... Creating a REST client (and server!) Getting ready How to do it... How it works... Implementing infinite scrolling Getting ready How to do it... How it works... Processing a request before sending it out Getting ready How to do it... How it works... Preventing XSS attacks to your app Getting ready How to do it... How it works... Single Page Applications Introduction Creating an SPA with vue-router Getting ready How to do it… How it works… There's more… Fetching data before switching route Getting ready How to do it… How it works… Using named dynamic routes Getting ready How to do it… How it works… Having more than one router-view in your page Getting ready How to do it… How it works… Compose your routes hierarchically Getting ready How to do it...

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I'll quote the documentation to summarize what we said so that you can have a proper checklist when you are in doubt: Props: They allow the external environment to pass data into the component Events: They allow the component to trigger side effects in the external environment Slots: They allow the external environment to compose the component with extra content Vue Communicates with the Internet In this chapter, the following recipes will be covered: Sending basic AJAX request with Axios Validating user data before sending it Creating a form and sending data to your server Recovering from an error during a request Creating a REST client (and server!) Implementing infinite scrolling Processing a request before sending it out Preventing XSS attacks to your app Introduction Web applications rarely work all by themselves. What makes them interesting is actually the fact that they enable us to communicate with the world in innovative ways that didn't exist just a few years ago.

Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children
by Susan Linn
Published 12 Sep 2022

They often appear when apps are open and then may “pop-up” again after a set amount of time. Push notifications are notices designed to encourage and prolong the time we spend with our devices. Types of push notifications include news of what “friends” are doing on social media, “likes” garnered by posts, or alerts about updates to a particular app. Infinite scroll is just what it sounds like. It’s a design technique to prolong engagement by loading content continually as users scroll down a page. Copyright Criscillia Benford. Adapted with permission. One particularly powerful technique to keep us hooked is the use of intermittent rewards. We don’t just post on social networks, we check our offerings repeatedly for “likes,” “shares,” and comments.

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As with so many of digital technology’s innovations, it’s possible for social media to play a positive role in children’s lives. Producing videos for TikTok and YouTube can be wonderfully creative. Facebook and Instagram can facilitate connections for kids who don’t fit easily into their communities’ norms. The problem is that social media sites are home to some of the worst tech industry business practices. TikTok’s infinite scroll is designed to keep users on the site indefinitely. Snapchat’s streaks, in which two people respond to each other’s posts for as long as possible, are designed to keep kids constantly returning to the platform. Instagram’s photo editing feature allows users to correct perceived flaws in their appearance, including the ability to slim waists and legs, sending the clear message that our genuine appearance isn’t good enough for sharing.

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In and of themselves, and for better or worse, our phones, tablets, and other devices are powerful tools for influencing human behavior. What makes tech use turn toxic for children and families is rooted in the industry’s prevailing profit-generating strategies. These include invasions of privacy, data-driven advertising, infinite scrolling, and other manipulative techniques designed to capture and hold our attention and leave us yearning for more. The problem is not that young children are harmed if we occasionally hand them a cell phone to play with. The problem is that once we start doing that, it’s often a struggle for us and our children not to make it the norm.

The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource
by Chris Hayes
Published 28 Jan 2025

But the scroll on the phone has no finite limit. You could, theoretically, scroll TikTok until the end of your days. It is the source of infinite jest. In fact, the actual name for the technical feature that allows this experience harkens back to Wallace’s novel. It’s called the “infinite scroll.” Designed by Silicon Valley engineer Aza Raskin, the infinite scroll changed the way the web worked.[31] Once upon a time, you would arrive at the end of a web page. If you wanted to read more you had to click somewhere, akin to turning a page. But Raskin got rid of this tiny little bit of attentional friction. Now, on X or Facebook, you can just gently edge your thumb down on your phone and keep going.

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See also grabbing attention; holding attention Hamlet (Shakespeare), 87 Hannity, Sean, 142 happiness, 252–53 Harari, Yuval Noah, 37–38 “hard limits” of attention, 186 Hari, Johann, 10, 72 Harris, Tristan, 7, 56 Harvard University, 82–83, 127 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm, 110–11, 118 Hell Is a Very Small Place (Blake), 84 helplessness, 20, 37, 81, 82 Hendrix, Jimi, 147 herd mentality, 139 Hill’s Pet Nutrition Science Diet, 17 Hobbes, Thomas, 136, 218 Hobbs, Katie, 215 holding attention, 39–43, 47–50, 57, 194, 222 Homer’s Odyssey, 1–2, 4, 59, 254 Hooked (Eyal), 10 Hooked (Moss), 44–45 House Judiciary Committee, 231–32, 234–35 House Ways and Means Committee, 190 How to Do Nothing (Odell), 78 How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway (Canter and Siegel), 177 hunger, 43–45 hunger strikes, 43–44, 85 hunter-gatherers, 63–64, 85–86, 155 Huxley, Aldous, 206–7 Hwang, Tim, 127–28 hydrofracking, 184–85 hypercapitalism, 265 hyperlinks, 170 I Ibuka, Masaru, 148 id, 2, 223 “identification paradox,” 35–36 idleness, 9–10, 74–75, 77 inattentional blindness, 30–31 individuation, 120, 151–52 industrialization, 18, 119–20 industrial revolution, 66, 97, 155, 157–58, 174 Infinite Jest (Wallace), 71–72 “infinite scroll,” 71–72 Infiniti QX80, 173 information age, 13–14, 156–64, 174, 186, 248 attention age and, 164–68, 178, 186–87 productivity and, 168–69 informational poverty, 164, 167–68 information overload, 163–64 “Information Overload” (song), 163 information processing, 164–66, 186–87 information-processing systems (IPS), 165–67, 170–71 information theory, 160 Instagram, 53, 76, 129, 253, 254–55, 262–63, 266 insurance claims adjuster, 158, 159 intellectual property, 14 internet, 159–62, 209, 251–52, 261–62 attention economy and, 186–87, 188–89 group chats, 261–62, 263 pornography on, 224 search engines, 160, 169–74 spam, 174–78, 180, 181–83 trolling, 231–37 internet service providers (ISPs)., 160, 182 invisible gorilla test, 30–31, 32 involuntary attention, 31–33, 34, 36, 38, 40–41, 54 iPhone, 15, 46, 53, 134, 143, 148, 151, 167 iPod, 72, 77, 148, 256–57 Iraq War, 208, 241–42, 244 Irish Times, The, 237 ISIS, 241, 242 isolation, 84–86, 88, 145–46, 151 Israel-Hamas war, 238–39, 246–47 Ive, Jony, 167 J Jackson, Peter, 10–11 James, William, 3, 4, 28–30, 36, 77–78 James VI and I, 10 Jennings, Rebecca, 108–9 Jobs, Steve, 167 Jordan, Michael, 98 Journal of Education, 8 Joyce, James, 2 K Kaji, Ryan, 47 Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, 204 Kapar, Charles, 42 Keynes, John Maynard, 68–70, 72 Khan, Azmat, 241 Kierkegaard, Søren, 74–75, 77 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 216 king’s paradox, 62–63, 75–76, 79 kinship, 96 Klein, Ezra, 183 Klein, Naomi, 16, 17–18, 243 Klinenberg, Eric, 87 Kojève, Alexandre, 110–11, 192 koumiss, 46 Kroger, 17 Kuwait Airways Flight 422, 42 L labor, 264–65, 267, 268 commodification of, 24, 120 Marx’s theory of, 24, 68, 118–22, 135–36, 144, 145 Lacan, Jacques, 110 Lake, Kari, 215 language and gossip, 94–95 large language models, 182 La Sirène (boat), 3 Lessig, Lawrence, 14 Lexus, 135 Liberator, The, 196 Limits to Growth, The (study), 184–85 Lincoln, Abraham, 195–98, 200–201 Lincoln-Douglas debates, 195–98, 200–201, 202–4, 216, 227–29, 238, 247 lions, 96 Lippmann, Walter, 18–19, 221, 224 Living Colour (band), 163 Lochner, Joseph, 267 Lochner v.

Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart
by Nicholas Carr
Published 28 Jan 2025

And then the smartphone told us we never had to leave the simulation. The overriding goal of social platforms has from the start been to find new and more efficient ways to feed us novelty. The major design innovations that have shaped the social media interface—the pull-to-refresh function, the infinite scroll, the multidirectional swiping, the autoplay routines—are all intended to make seeking easier and more efficient. Our compulsion to discover new stuff once required us to go out and walk around. Now it’s gratified with a flick of a finger. And the algorithms make sure our seeking is always productive.

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The fee might be increased for ten thousand recipients and again for a hundred thousand. A broadcasting license might be required for any account with more than a quarter million followers or subscribers. Pop-up alerts could remind users of the number of people who might see a post or a message. Infinite scrolls, autoplay functions, and personalized feeds and advertisements could be banned outright. There’s much to be said for the frictional design approach. It introduces values other than efficiency into media technology, and it would promote the construction of networks that, like the analog systems of old, encourage more deliberation and discretion on the part of viewers and listeners.

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
by Christopher Wylie
Published 8 Oct 2019

At the same time, we have fallen for the idea that these services are “free.” In reality, we pay with our data into a business model of extracting human attention. More data led to more profits, and so design patterns were implemented to encourage users to share more and more about themselves. Platforms started to mimic casinos, with innovations like the infinite scroll and addictive features aimed at the brain’s reward systems. Services such as Gmail began trawling through our correspondence in a way that would land a traditional postal courier in jail. Live geo-tracking, once reserved for convicts’ ankle bracelets, was added to our phones, and what would have been called wiretapping in years past became a standard feature of countless applications.

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The randomness of a slot machine prevents the player from being able to strategize or plan, so the only way to get a reward is to keep playing. The rewards are designed to be just frequent enough to reengage you after a losing streak and keep you going. In gambling, a casino makes money from the number of turns a player takes. On social media, a platform makes money from the number of clicks a user performs. This is why there are infinite scrolls on newsfeeds—there is very little difference between a user endlessly swiping for more content and a gambler pulling the slot machine lever over and over. * * * — IN THE SUMMER OF 2014, Cambridge Analytica began developing fake pages on Facebook and other platforms that looked like real forums, groups, and news sources.

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
by Nir Eyal
Published 26 Dec 2013

Compared with the number of steps needed to access photo apps on other smartphones, the simple flick gesture of the native iPhone camera gives it a virtual monopoly as users’ go-to solution whenever they need to snap a quick pic (figure 12). FIGURE 12 Scrolling with Pinterest How can a Web site make browsing easier? One solution, popularized by digital pin-board site Pinterest, is the infinite scroll. In the past getting from one web page to the next required clicking and waiting. However, on sites such as Pinterest, whenever the user nears the bottom of a page, more results automatically load. Users never have to pause as they continue scrolling through pins or posts without end (figure 13).

Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason
by Dave Rubin
Published 27 Apr 2020

Unfortunately, there’s never been a trickier time to try to break this cycle. Why? Because it’s facilitated by a new, powerful distraction that previous generations never had to deal with—one that’s literally designed to keep us trapped in a constant state of conflict, suspense, and panic: social technology. According to Aza Raskin, the smartphone’s infinite scroll feature (which allows us to swipe down continuously without clicking) was deliberately built to be habit-forming. He should know. He’s the engineer who created it. “Behind every screen on your phone, there are literally a thousand engineers that have worked on this thing to try to make it maximally addicting,” he told the BBC’s investigative journalism show Panorama.

Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less
by Michael Hyatt
Published 8 Apr 2019

According to a survey by Salary.com, seven in ten respondents admit to wasting time at work every day, and most use the web. The biggest draw was social media—Facebook leading the pack—but people also reported online shopping and browsing travel, sports, and entertainment sites.12 How often do we catch ourselves mindlessly surfing from one page to another, or thumbing the infinite scroll on our phones, with no clear objective in mind? I’ve heard people say that social media provides breaks in the day, the way people used to walk or go outdoors for a smoke. That’s part of what’s happening, but the accessibility of social media means people aren’t usually working for a long period and then taking a break.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 7 Sep 2022

Fogg’s book on the FBM, Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do , makes no secret of his research findings, and has become required reading in the user interface departments of most tech companies. Compliance engineers have used the FBM to develop addictive algorithms like the ones in Las Vegas slot machines, to create suggestions for new contacts on LinkedIn, to design the “infinite scroll” on Facebook, to reinforce extremist channels on Twitter, and to devise the “streak” feature on Snapchat where kids are rewarded for making contact every day. Thanks to data mining and machine learning, technologists can use computers to operate people. Fogg is often villainized for having hacked human behavior in order to systemize the dark art of persuasive technology.

The Productive Programmer
by Neal Ford
Published 8 Dec 2008

When you close a command prompt in Windows, it asks if you want to save these settings for all command prompts with the same title (thus making them “sticky”). You can leverage that to create specialized command prompts. Create a shortcut to launch a window with a specific title, set some options, and save the options for the window as you close it. For development work, you need a command prompt with the following characteristics: • Almost infinite scrolling. The default is a measly 300 lines, which will easily scroll off when doing something interesting. Set it to 9999 lines (and ignore the 1990s-era warning that your command prompt will now eat a precious 2 MB of memory). • The widest width that your screen will support without horizontal scrolling.

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir
by Anna Wiener
Published 14 Jan 2020

Beautiful women in wide-legged canvas pants were doing beautiful things: making candy and throwing pots, wallpapering apartments with hand-painted patterns, drizzling yogurt over everything, eating breakfast salads. The algorithm told me what my aesthetic was: the same as everyone else I knew. The platforms, designed to accommodate and harvest infinite data, inspired an infinite scroll. They encouraged a cultural impulse to fill all spare time with someone else’s thoughts. The internet was a collective howl, an outlet for everyone to prove that they mattered. The full spectrum of human emotion infused social platforms. Grief, joy, anxiety, mundanity flowed. People were saying nothing, and saying it all the time.

The Twittering Machine
by Richard Seymour
Published 20 Aug 2019

‘Read receipts’ give us an anxious prompt to reply to messages, keeping the churn going. Default settings, where the preferred settings are more visually appealing than the alternatives, reward acquiescence and put friction in the way of change. Defaults are often linked to a confirming prompt like a tick, further encouraging compliance. Infinite scrolling makes your social media feed a kind of force-feeding; you never get to the end. Autoplay means that audiovisual parts of your feed stand out more and encourage you to pause.10 The ideological power of our interactions with the machine derives from the way that the conditioned choice, be it the compulsive selfie spiral or the angry 3 a.m. thread argument, is experienced as freely and pleasurably chosen.11 From games to feeds, our capacity for reverie is riveted to a wholly designed dream space, our free-floating attention guided down channels strewn with reinforcements that we often don’t even notice.

Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age
by Vauhini Vara
Published 8 Apr 2025

If technological capitalism can transmute information or a ceramic pot, it can also transmute a human. To live like this—endlessly comparing our imperfect fleshy selves with the sanitized digital simulacra of selfhood that appears online and finding ourselves wanting, endlessly finding ourselves trapped in an infinite scroll of algorithmically advantaged outrage and scorn—exerts such a subtle psychic violence that we might not even be aware of it as it’s happening. Teens who spend more time using social media tend to be likelier to have symptoms of anxiety and depression, and yet, on average, U.S. teens spend five hours a day using it.

Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King: Bill Gates and His Quest to Shape Our World
by Anupreeta Das
Published 12 Aug 2024

Since 1987, Forbes has also published an annual list of the world’s billionaires; at last count, there were more than 2,600 people around the globe with estimated fortunes of at least one billion dollars.5 Rising wealth has given birth to an entire cottage industry of wealth tracking in America, where, in addition to Forbes, companies like Wealth-X and Bloomberg, through its Billionaires Index, calculate, quantify, rank, and track in real time the changing fortunes of billionaires, how they were sourced, whether they are “self-made,” and how generous they are in terms of giving that fortune away. These lists are inexact but directionally accurate. Wealth managers subscribe to them so that they can target their services. Journalists, academics, and policymakers regularly cite them, especially the Forbes list. A search for “how to become a billionaire” on Google produces an infinite scroll of results, not all of them facetious. Investopedia, a site dedicated to financial information and advice, lists the do’s and don’ts of becoming a billionaire. Amazon sells books offering strategies for making billions—essentially get-rich-quick lists upgraded to meet the moment. It also offers a broad selection of popular books about billionaires, from hagiographies to critical portrayals.

Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency
by Andy Greenberg
Published 15 Nov 2022

Soon after first registering an account on the site, he thought to try a certain basic check of its security—a long shot, he figured, but it wouldn’t cost anything. He right clicked on the page and chose “View page source” from the resulting menu. This would give him a look at the site’s raw HTML before it was rendered by the Tor Browser into a graphical web page. Looking at a massive block of illegible code, anyway, certainly beat staring at an infinite scroll of abject human cruelty. Almost immediately, he spotted what he was looking for: an IP address. In fact, to Gambaryan’s surprise, every thumbnail image on the site seemed to display, within the site’s HTML, the IP address of the server where it was physically hosted: 121.185.153.64. He copied those eleven digits into his computer’s command line and ran a basic traceroute function, following its path across the internet back to the location of that server, just as he had when trying to locate the infrastructure of BTC-e years earlier.

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future
by Noreena Hertz
Published 13 May 2020

Hand, The Wellbeing of Nations: Meaning, Motive, and Measurement (New York: Wiley, 2014). 20 Noreena Hertz, The Silent Takeover (Random House, 2002), 17–20. 21 See here too Diane Coyle’s work in this area, e.g., GDP: A Brief But Affectionate History (Princeton University Press, 2014). 22 ‘Business Roundtable Members’, Business Roundtable, https://www.businessroundtable.org/about-us/members. 23 Milton Friedman, ‘The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits,’ New York Times magazine, 13 September 1970. 24 ‘Business Roundtable Redefines the Purpose of a Corporation to Promote “An Economy That Serves All Americans”’, Business Roundtable, 19 August 2019, https://www.businessroundtable.org/business-roundtable-redefines-the-purpose-of-a-corporation-to-promote-an-economy-that-serves-all-americans. 25 Julia Carrie Wong, ‘Amazon execs labeled fired worker “not smart or articulate” in leaked PR notes’, Guardian, 3 April 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/02/amazon-chris-smalls-smart-articulate-leaked-memo. 26 Chris Smalls, ‘Dear Jeff Bezos, instead of firing me, protect your workers from coronavirus’, Guardian, 2 April 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/02/dear-jeff-bezos-amazon-instead-of-firing-me-protect-your-workers-from-coronavirus. 27 Julia Carrie Wong, ‘Amazon execs labeled fired worker “not smart or articulate” in leaked PR notes’. 28 ‘AG James’ Statement on Firing of Amazon Worker Who Organized Walkout’, Office of the New York State Attorney General, https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2020/ag-james-statement-firing-amazon-worker-who-organized-walkout. 29 Brad Smith, ‘As we work to protect public health, we also need to protect the income of hourly workers who support our campus’, Microsoft, 5 March 2020, https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2020/03/05/covid-19-microsoft-hourly-workers/. 30 See for example Republican Senator Josh Hawley’s bill in July 2019 to curb smartphone addiction by banning the ‘infinite scroll’ of social media feeds, and limiting an individual’s social media usage to thirty minutes a day across all devices, Emily Stewart, ‘Josh Hawley’s bill to limit your Twitter time to 30 minutes a day, explained’, Vox, 31 July 2019, https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/7/31/20748732/josh-hawley-smart-act-social-media-addiction); or EU industry chief Thierry Breton’s warnings in February 2020 that should major tech platforms fail to adequately curb hate speech and disinformation, tougher rules and penalties would be forthcoming (‘EU threatens tougher hate-speech rules after Facebook meeting’, DW, 17 February 2020, https://www.dw.com/en/eu-threatens-tougher-hate-speech-rules-after-facebook-meeting/a-52410851). 31 ‘Camden Council tackles the climate crisis’, see video at: https://youtu.be/JzzWc5wMQ6s.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
by Naomi Klein
Published 11 Sep 2023

In a way, it was perfect that the first time I heard my name confused with Wolf’s was in an eavesdropped conversation taking place in a public restroom. When I joined Twitter and clicked on the little bell icon signifying my “mentions,” that was my initial thought: I was reading the graffiti written about me on an infinitely scrolling restroom wall. As a frequently graffitied-about girl in high school, this felt both familiar and deeply harrowing. I instantly knew that Twitter was going to be bad for me—and yet, like so many of us, I could not stop looking. So perhaps if there is a message I should have taken from the destabilizing appearance of my doppelganger, this is it: Once and for all, stop eavesdropping on strangers talking about you in this crowded and filthy global toilet known as social media.

Beautiful Data: The Stories Behind Elegant Data Solutions
by Toby Segaran and Jeff Hammerbacher
Published 1 Jul 2009

Holovaty performed nightly collections of report data and published them on a dynamic, pan-and-zoomable, or “slippy,” map. The service was an absolute coup, coming as it did hot on the heels of Google’s early 2005 makeover of online mapping best practices. What had previously been limited to primitive line drawing and static images was transformed into an infinitely scrolling, reactive environment for geographic data. Chicago Crime was not alone. Near the same time, developer Paul Rademacher created Housing Maps (http://housingmaps.com), an analogous combination of apartment rental data and visual browsing. The previous year, Michael Frumin and Jonah Perretti at the New York arts foundation Eyebeam (http://eyebeam.org) created FundRace (http://fundrace. org), a visualization of political contributions to presidential campaigns in the 2004 race for the White House.

The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change
by Bharat Anand
Published 17 Oct 2016

Go to VG ’s front page today and you’ll see certain unusual features: a predominance of pictures rather than text; an absence of “sections”; on the front page, a seamless blending of stories around politics, entertainment, sports, or culture; and, a long—indeed, a very very long—page. In these respects, VG ’s approach differs to this day from the vast majority of news sites around the world. The long, “infinite scroll” feeling of the front page was decided mostly by happenstance, and ran counter to expert editorial opinion. Hansen again: The long front page happened mostly by accident. We started to produce more, but we didn’t have a strong team to edit at that point, so the front page just grew. We would add a new story at the top and just move the rest below it.

How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Liberalism and the Fight for Its Life
by Ian Dunt
Published 15 Oct 2020

One of the key tools used in this process was that of variable rewards. It was the basic psychological driver behind slot machines in the gambling industry. When you randomised the reward schedule for a particular action, the user took that action more regularly. Twitter and Facebook displayed infinitely scrolling news feeds that could be pulled down to be refreshed, just like a slot machine. The repeated use of red indicators and notifications made users come back time and again to see who had responded and what they had said. The slot machine variable reward function made people spend more money.

Facebook: The Inside Story
by Steven Levy
Published 25 Feb 2020

Essentially, his argument was that the traditional methods of maintaining attention—well known in television and even serial novels—had reached a new dimension of toxic addictiveness with the digital tools and artificial-intelligence breakthroughs of the twenty-first century. He considered News Feed and other “infinite scrolls” the worst offenders, Facebook being the worst of the worst. In the United States, around one-fourth of all mobile Internet time was Facebook time. In some countries it was even more. To Harris, these products were not just addictive distractions but an existential threat to humanity. While the movies portrayed the threat of artificial intelligence as Terminator-style robots pursuing us, what we really should fear, he argued, was Mark Zuckerberg, whose algorithms were overwhelming us with irresistible digital junk food.