How endless scrolling in mobile applications destroys content consumption
Monday, 11 pm. You're lying in bed and reading Twitter. Or Instagram. Or Facebook. Or flipboard. You reach the end of the tape, and an animation appears, indicating that a new piece of information has been downloaded. More news. More pictures. You scroll again. And again, the animation. More content. Scrolling again. And so on without end. You can't finish. The flow of new content continues unabated. While you sleep, the tape will fill up again, as the lake fills with rain. The next morning, your iPhone will be in your hands again. Scrolling Loading cycle More content. Without end. And this needs to be changed. This feeling of dissatisfaction must be replaced by a feeling of achieving something substantial, reaching the end.
Huge amounts of information led to a loss of a sense of completeness. When you read a newspaper, it always has an end. This newspaper has limited information. And this is the key to reading. Understanding that when you reach the end, you will know everything you can learn from it. When you read a book, you read it with the understanding that when you turn the last page, you will know the answer. You will know how it ends, and you will finish something.
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Endless apps like Instagram or Facebook reject this experience. At first it looks great. An endless stream of content will never let you get bored. There is always something to read, to find out, our need for a new one will never remain unmet. It is like a buffet. At first glance, fine. But after three hours you feel overeating. After long hours of scrolling through Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or Flipboard, our mind gets tired. You feel an intellectual glut and total dissatisfaction. Why? Because there are still so many things left! What if you missed something? What if there, all in one scroll, in one finger movement, is critical information left?
This problem of endless dissatisfaction must be solved. Mobile application developers need to understand that the border has already been crossed. What sometimes, if not always, people need to reach the end. Yahoo News Digest is trying to solve this problem, but for a very limited audience. The application offers the same news content to each user, which is clearly not ideal. To solve the problem of infinite content, we don’t have to lose personalization. There are no difficulties for Facebook, Instagram or Twitter to algorithmically determine, say, 20 posts that are important for us and offer to see only them. There are no difficulties for the news application to pick up 10 local or international stories and show only them.
The final list. Instagram feed that can be completed. Twitter feed that ends. Maybe when such applications appear, at 11 pm on Monday you can feel yourself finished. There will be no animation at the end of the tape. We will read stories when we want to read. We will find out what we want. We will finally be satisfied. Or, at the end of the horses, no.
Huge amounts of information led to a loss of a sense of completeness. When you read a newspaper, it always has an end. This newspaper has limited information. And this is the key to reading. Understanding that when you reach the end, you will know everything you can learn from it. When you read a book, you read it with the understanding that when you turn the last page, you will know the answer. You will know how it ends, and you will finish something.
')
Endless apps like Instagram or Facebook reject this experience. At first it looks great. An endless stream of content will never let you get bored. There is always something to read, to find out, our need for a new one will never remain unmet. It is like a buffet. At first glance, fine. But after three hours you feel overeating. After long hours of scrolling through Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or Flipboard, our mind gets tired. You feel an intellectual glut and total dissatisfaction. Why? Because there are still so many things left! What if you missed something? What if there, all in one scroll, in one finger movement, is critical information left?
This problem of endless dissatisfaction must be solved. Mobile application developers need to understand that the border has already been crossed. What sometimes, if not always, people need to reach the end. Yahoo News Digest is trying to solve this problem, but for a very limited audience. The application offers the same news content to each user, which is clearly not ideal. To solve the problem of infinite content, we don’t have to lose personalization. There are no difficulties for Facebook, Instagram or Twitter to algorithmically determine, say, 20 posts that are important for us and offer to see only them. There are no difficulties for the news application to pick up 10 local or international stories and show only them.
The final list. Instagram feed that can be completed. Twitter feed that ends. Maybe when such applications appear, at 11 pm on Monday you can feel yourself finished. There will be no animation at the end of the tape. We will read stories when we want to read. We will find out what we want. We will finally be satisfied. Or, at the end of the horses, no.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/208856/
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