Of all the bullshit innovation the idealess tech industry has given us over the last decade, the endless scroll must be one of the most evil. The obvious reason is the addiction of the never ending feeds of social media, but one subtler reason that I loathe is that it defeats any effort to find the long tail. Whenever you get a ranked list of “(thing|music|movies|books|search results) you should be interested in” that is actually just the “list of the most average stuff we are trying to shove into your face”, a good trick was to jump to result page 4 or 10 and poke around there. Way higher chance to find interesting things if you're willing to filter by trial and error. Except you can't do that anymore. There is no page 4. There is just the endless scroll. Maybe you can open items further down in new tabs. But more often, you're in an app, scroll scroll scroll, tap one item, go back and can't even find it again because the feed refreshes. This concentration of gate-keeping power instead of the promised personalisation is deeply destructive.