Stop mindlessly doomscrolling—doom scroll MINDFULLY with the new “doomscrolling” scroll bar! (The best new computer UI element since the drop-down menu!)

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Background:

“Doomscrolling” refers to the act of relentlessly scrolling through negative news online, often to the psychological detriment of the person scrolling.

It may be surprising that a person would intentionally ingest distressing news, but consider that doom-adjacent news is more emotionally engaging than “normal” news: imagine the hypothetical article “Interest rates were raised by 0.5%” versus the article “Headless Body Found in Racquetball Court.” There’s just no contest: doom news wins by a mile (1.61 kilometers)!

The Issue:

Currently, doom-related news (grisly crimes, natural disasters, etc.) has almost entirely displaced “normal” news in all media. In a perfect world, a user would be able to get their fill of doom news, and then also maybe get a little bit of regular relevant news too.

But since doom news ALWAYS outcompetes regular news, how do we do accomplish this balance?

Proposal:

The solution is suggested right there in the name: “doomscrolling.” We’ll simply take the existing single scroll bar seen in most web pages [*] and add a second scroll bar that is doom-specific (Figure 1).

[*] On desktop computers. For phones, where it is usually not possible to actually scroll via scroll bar, we can accomplish regular-vs-doom-scrolling in another way: for example, perhaps sliding a finger on the the left half of the screen would accomplish doom scrolling, while using the right half of the screen would accomplish regular scrolling.

Fig. 1: This new “doomscrolling” scroll bar (right, red bar with a skull) would only bring forth graphic violence, grisly crimes, and other types of bad news to the user. The other scroll bar (light blue) would operate the same as before, providing a mix of news of various types.

Conclusion:

This new scrollbar will help users self-regulate their quantity of bad-vs-normal news. Additionally, there is room for many more additional topic-specific scroll bars! For example, one could imagine a third scrollbar that, say, only provided news about birds or hedge mazes or something.

PROS: May reduce the amount of time that people spend wallowing in unnecessary disaster news.

CONS: Reduce the amount of doomscrolling could negatively impact the “grisly unsolved murder investigation“ podcast industry, which would deal a major blow to journalism.

Originally published 2024-01-13.