Ever since I removed social media from my phone, I’ve noticed how often I still reach for it just to scroll. Not because I actually want to see anything in particular, but because of the muscle memory. Swiping, refreshing, seeing something new has become ingrained into my brain. That little dopamine hit of novelty, over and over again.
So as an experiment for myself, I built these two little prototypes sometime last year:
Both sites are super simple and barely designed. I wanted create something that mimicked the mechanics of infinite TikTok like scrolling but without the mental sludge that comes with it. So instead of doomscrolling, each scroll serves up a new Wikipedia article or a new NASA image. That’s it.
They aren’t the most polished but I thought maybe they’ll be useful for someone else too.
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Footnotes
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NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day API rate limit is 1000 requests a day so it might not work until later again. ↩