The End of the Feed and the Birth of Discovery

Every era has an interface that defines it.

For the past two decades, it’s been the feed.

The next one will be something entirely different.

The feed, as we all know it, is an endless scroll designed to keep us watching.

It is optimized for reaction only.

But users are starting to push back.

A 2025 University of Ulm study found that 80% of participants felt “caught in a loop” while scrolling, staying longer than they wanted, often on content they didn’t value.

An Oxford study the year before linked “mindless scrolling” to higher guilt and lower daily well-being.

Even interventions designed to help people stop scrolling show the same pattern: most users want out, but they can’t find the exit.

The feed has hit its limit.

That opens space for a new kind of interface, one that learns with us instead of trying to hook us.

AI changes what comes next.

It doesn’t need to guess what everyone will click.

It can learn what you care about, what you’re curious about, and what you want to build next.

The replacement isn’t another algorithmic feed.

It’s a new interface layer:

→ AI-driven discovery systems that map knowledge instead of ranking posts.

→ Systems that learn your goals and values, not just your behaviors.

→ Interfaces that evolve with you, guiding exploration rather than driving addiction.

AI won’t just generate content; it will curate context.

The incumbent platforms can’t remove the feed; it’s too core to how they make money.

So they’re optimizing it further, even as users grow tired of it.

The real innovation will come from systems that make discovery feel alive again.

We don’t need feeds that react to us.

We need systems that evolve with us.

That’s the interface shift already underway, and the one that will define the next decade.

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The research papers I mentioned above for the curious:

→ Does mindless scrolling hamper well-being? Combining ESM and log-data to examine the link between mindless scrolling, goal conflict, guilt, and daily well-being: https://academic.oup.com/jcmc/article/29/1/zmad056/7582213

→The Loop and Reasons to Break It: Investigating Infinite Scrolling Behaviour in Social Media Applications and Reasons to Stop: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3604275