Against Infinite Scroll: Reclaiming the Way We Read Online

Before the feed, reading online meant navigating to something specific — a publication, an author, an article — and reading it in full. You chose what to read. You started and finished things. The act of reading online was, if not identical to reading a book, at least structurally similar: directed, sequential, completable.

Infinite scroll changed all of that. Instead of navigating to content, you open a stream. The stream has no beginning and no end. Nothing you read on it is something you chose — it's something the algorithm decided to show you, based on a model of what will keep you looking. You don't finish things in a feed. You just scroll until you stop.

The effect on reading habits over the past decade has been well documented, if not always well attributed. Researchers have observed a decline in sustained reading capacity — the ability to follow a long argument, to hold context across paragraphs, to finish longer texts without distraction. This is sometimes chalked up to information overload generally, but the mechanism is more specific: we have trained ourselves, through thousands of hours of feed consumption, to treat text as something to skim and scroll past rather than to read.

This is not irreversible. Reading is a skill, and skills that have atrophied can be rebuilt with consistent practice. But rebuilding requires recognising the problem accurately. If you find it hard to read books, the issue is probably not that books are too long — it's that your reading brain has been reconditioned by a different and incompatible mode of text consumption.

The practical intervention is simple but uncomfortable: replace some portion of feed time with directed reading. Not audio, not video — reading. Longer form. Things with structure and argument. The discomfort in the first few weeks is real, but it's diagnostic: it's the discomfort of a skill being asked to perform that hasn't been used in a while. It passes. And on the other side of it is something that the feed can't replicate — the experience of following a long thought from beginning to end, and arriving somewhere different than where you started.

Tools like Instapaper and Readwise Reader exist precisely to support this habit — to create a reading environment that is not a feed, that you control, that contains things you chose. They won't fix the problem on their own. But they remove the friction from building a different habit, which is often all that's needed.