It was late, and I was in bed, and the news was still going. My thumb was working on its own by then, and somewhere in that stretch I noticed what the app was never going to do. It was not going to end. No bottom, no last story, no line saying that is everything worth knowing today, you are caught up, go to sleep. I stopped because it was late, not because I was done, and I put the phone down more agitated than informed: aware of more bad things than an hour before, understanding none of them better.
It looks like a willpower problem
The obvious reading says the fault is mine, and it has a name ready: doomscrolling. Too much news, too little discipline, and the fix is a screen-time limit and firmer habits. The other reading says the fault is the era: there is simply more news than there used to be, most of it grim, and feeling swamped is the sane response to a loud age. Both are partly right. The news is genuinely heavy, and no container makes a war lighter. But neither explains the small structural oddity I keep snagging on, which is that no feed, in any state of the world, ever arrives at a point where it considers you done.
Four in ten are backing away
The retreat from news is not a mood. It is measured. In the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report for 2025, a survey run across nearly 50 markets, 40% of people said they sometimes or often avoid the news, up from 29% when the question was asked in 2017, and the joint-highest level the report has recorded. (Nic Newman and colleagues 2025) The reasons people give are not indifference. They cluster on the emotional ledger: the news lowers their mood, they are worn out by the sheer amount of it, and there is nothing they can do with what it tells them. People are not drifting away from being informed. They are backing away from something that hurts, deliberately, to protect themselves.
That evidence cuts both ways, and I want to be honest about the half that cuts against me. Avoidance is driven by what the news contains, war and politics and helplessness, at least as much as by how it is delivered. A finite, well-made account of the day would still carry the day, and a heavy day is heavy in any container. The missing ending is one mechanism in this, not the whole machine.
The ending was designed out
But the delivery is not innocent either, and this is the part I can source rather than suspect. The bottomless page has an inventor and a date: Aza Raskin, 2006, who built infinite scroll so a reader would never have to click to the next page, and who has spent the years since saying publicly that he regrets it. (NPR 2026) His reasoning is the interesting part. A page-end is a stopping cue, a built-in moment where a person gets to ask whether they want to keep going, and removing it removes the question. By his own arithmetic the pattern now wastes on the order of 200,000 human lifetimes of attention a day, an estimate rather than a measurement, but his, about his own invention. The feed did not lose its ending somewhere along the way. The ending was designed out.
Why it stays designed out is an argument rather than a finding, and I should frame it as one. The attention-economy critics, Tim Wu most thoroughly, argue that when the reader’s time is what is sold to advertisers, the design must maximise time spent, and a finish line is a leak in that machine: a place where a satisfied person leaves. (Tim Wu 2016) On that account the feed withholds done because done does not monetise, and the unease that keeps you scrolling is not a side effect but an input. I find the argument persuasive, and I cannot prove intent, and I do not need to. Whatever any given product team meant, the stopping cue is gone, the man who removed it regrets it, and every incentive that shapes these designs points away from putting it back.
Why more never feels like enough
Here is what the missing ending actually removes. Informed is not a quantity, it is a state, and it is a finished one. To feel informed is to feel caught up: you have reached the end of what matters today and are free to go. A feed cannot produce that feeling at any volume of reading, because the feeling depends on an edge the feed does not have. You can add stories forever and never arrive, the way you can pour water forever and never fill a glass that has no bottom.
I want to be careful with the tempting next step, the claim that the more news you consume through a feed, the less informed you feel. Nobody has measured that head-on, as far as I can find, so it stands as an inference, drawn from the avoidance numbers above and from what has been measured: in a US survey study, about 16.5% of respondents showed severely problematic news consumption, checking compulsively and struggling to stop, and that group reported significantly worse mental and physical health, a result that held in replication. (Bryan McLaughlin 2023) Correlation, self-report, one country. But the direction is consistent wherever anyone has looked: more feed does not reliably produce more informed, and it keeps close company with feeling worse.
Who ends the day
The last piece is the one I keep coming back to, because it explains why the ending cannot be reinstated by turning a dial. An ending is not what happens when the news runs out. The news never runs out; somewhere it is always afternoon and something is always happening. An ending in news has only ever been a decision: a person, or a room of them, deciding that these six stories were the day, that the rest can wait for tomorrow, and that enough is enough. Every earlier form of news employed someone to make that call. The Herald went to press whether the world had settled or not. The six o’clock bulletin ended at seven and handed you back your evening. Those endings were not natural facts. They were editorial acts, performed daily, by people paid to judge and then to stop.
The feed declines the act. It hands you everything, ranked by whatever keeps you there, and calls the absence of judgment freedom. That is the mechanism under the whole thing: an ending in news is a made object, somebody has to choose to make it, and the feed is the first form of news with nobody anywhere in the machine whose job that is. Which is why, however late it got that night, nothing was ever going to say go to sleep. An ending is made, and nobody was making one.