[welearnednothng]

But it's only a dark pattern in the right (wrong?) context, no? For instance, my webmail has infinite scroll and it's damn convenient. Yet, I never find myself mindlessly scrolling through my mail. It doesn't increase the time I spend on the site... quite the opposite.

Likewise, I swear Google was playing with infinite scroll in their search results recently, where I didn't have to hit next to see the next page of results. Same result for me - it was convenient and I didn't find myself spending more time looking for/at search results.

But when the context is addictive content, infinite scroll is always there to spoon feed you one more helping.

More often than not, infinite scroll isn't actually the UX pattern you're looking for. But on occasion, it does make sense. However, when combined with insidious content, a dark pattern it does become.