Instagram's every surface scrolls forever. Our.one's every list ends at 50.

Instagram's feed, Reels, Stories, Explore are all infinite. Meta's own engineering blog publishes the ranking formula. TikTok, YouTube, X, Facebook all run the same. Our.one's every list ends at 50 items with 'Load more'. The terminal point is design.

How Instagram does it

Instagram's main feed, Reels, Stories, and Explore are all built on infinite-scroll architecture: the bottom of the list does not exist. Meta's own engineering blog publishes the ranking formula directly — content is scored as Expected Value = W_click * P(click) + W_like * P(like) – W_see_less * P(see less) + etc., where each engagement signal is weighted and the model retrains hourly on new data. The system gets better at predicting what holds you longest with every additional interaction.

Aza Raskin, who invented infinite scroll in 2006 while building a prototype for an earlier product, has publicly regretted the design choice ever since. In a widely-cited 2018 BBC interview he described the mechanism as "taking behavioural cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface, and that's the thing that keeps you like coming back and back and back." The Center for Humane Technology — which Raskin co-founded with Tristan Harris — names infinite scroll as one of a family of "addictive design features" engineered to manipulate human psychology and keep users on the platform regardless of whether the time is good for them.

The architecture is no longer Meta-only. TikTok, YouTube Shorts, X/Twitter, Facebook News Feed, and surfaces that pre-dated infinite (LinkedIn, Reddit) have all moved to bottomless feeds. The consequence reaches where the US Surgeon General named it in his 2023 advisory: a youth mental-health concern, time displacement from real life, and a family of dark patterns that exists because the optimization target is time-on-platform.

How Our.one does it

Our.one's every list — Hall's proposals, Wishes, Comparisons, the build log, every future product surface — paginates at 50 items with an explicit "Load more" button. The terminal point of every list exists by design. Reaching the bottom is a feature: it gives the visitor a moment to choose whether to continue or leave. There is no autoplay. There are no infinite-feed surfaces, anywhere, in any Our.one product. Commitment 6 forbids pay-to-play; we apply it broadly. Pay-with-attention is the same dynamic with a different currency, and infinite scroll is the engineered floor through which attention leaks.

Why this matters

Infinite scroll exists because removing the stopping cue is more profitable than respecting it. Aza Raskin invented it in good faith — to remove an unnecessary "next page" click from a music product in 2006 — then watched it spread across every social platform and saw what it did to attention spans, to kids, to adult time-budgets. Whether the inventor regrets it is no longer the question. The architecture is now standard, and the harm is downstream of the optimization target.

Pagination is friction. Friction is the design choice that says: this is what's here, you've seen it, decide what you want next. Infinite scroll is the design choice that says: don't decide, just keep scrolling. The two are not interchangeable technical alternatives. They are moral alternatives. Our.one chooses friction — every list, every product, every surface. The cost is honest: the product feels less "flowy" on first visit. The reward is that no Our.one product can ever be tuned to remove the moments where you'd otherwise notice yourself spending time you didn't want to spend. The operator's sons are growing up in the affected age range. The constitutional refusal is the parents' answer to the question of what their kids' attention should be worth to a product.

Citations (4)

Meta Engineering — Scaling the Instagram Explore recommendations system (Aug 2023)
“Expected Value = W_click * P(click) + W_like * P(like) – W_see_less * P(see less) + etc.”
Fetched 2026-04-28
BBC News — Social media apps are 'deliberately' addictive to users (Aza Raskin interview, 2018)
“It's as if they're taking behavioural cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface and that's the thing that keeps you like coming back and back and back.”
Fetched 2026-04-28
Center for Humane Technology — The CHT Perspective
“addictive design features on social media — including red notifications, algorithmic curation, intermittent reinforcement, and infinite scroll”
Fetched 2026-04-28
US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy — 2023 Advisory on Social Media and Youth Mental Health
“Our children have become unknowing participants in a decades-long experiment.”
Fetched 2026-04-28

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Published by Rado Sukala on April 29, 2026.