What is The Bottomless Well?
Because new content loads automatically as you scroll, the feed has no end point. Without a natural stopping place, it is much harder to decide you are done.
Where it comes from
Aza Raskin (2006)
How it hooks you
Exploits missing stopping cues: the brain relies on end points to register that a task is finished, and the feed deliberately never provides one.
What the research shows
Inventor Aza Raskin now campaigns against his own design, estimating that infinite scroll collectively wastes the equivalent of 200,000 human lifetimes per day.
Source: Aza Raskin, BBC interview (2018)
How to resist it
Set a timer before you start scrolling, or use apps that impose session limits.