Thumbtrap

Thumbtrap is “When your thumb keeps scrolling after you've decided to stop.“

Perhaps you know the experience:

Something triggers you to pick up your phone, perhaps a message you think of sending, the weather to check, or just a gap with nothing happening.

But something else catches your eye, then a post below, something interesting, something boring you skip by, a video starts playing, something fun—the algorithm kicking in. Before you know it, minutes have passed.

You become aware that you’re scrolling, you know you should stop, but something peeks up at the bottom that might just be worth checking out. You see your thumb keep scrolling.

You’ve been thumbtrapped.

Design that Produces Thumbtrap

Garry Jones introduced me to the idea of thumbtrap and asked if I would create a sketch of it. He highlights three key design mechanisms that create it:

Infinite Scroll
Infinite scroll, combined with infinite content, provides an infinite canvas for your thumb to keep scrolling. Originally designed to help users avoid constantly refreshing or clicking ‘next page’, it now helps keep us hooked to our devices. Thumbtrap is not doomscrolling—compulsively scrolling negative media or news—but you can be thumbtrapped while doomscrolling.
Variable Rewards
Variable rewards hold a mysterious and irresistible power over us. Remarkably, getting occasional highs is more habit-producing than consistent rewards. Variability of content—what’s in my inbox, today?—keeps us hooked for the next high.
Personalised Algorithms
Old-style mass media doesn’t have the same grip on us as the apps and content on our phones. That’s because what appears on our phones under our thumbs is often tuned, optimised, and curated, just for you.

Like a kind of reverse Flow, after time spent scrolling, you can’t really remember the details—you feel empty

The scene in the sketch drew inspiration from my own experiences with the time-sucking and thumbtrapping power of a phone on a train commute. Also, the genius use of the train map in the brilliant cartoon from Ellis Rosen: That Party Went Well . In general, Ellis Rosen’s Instagram or Threads posts are perfect material to get thumbtrapped, except you only get consistently high rewards.

If you find yourself thinking about kids and screen time, you could do much worse than pick up The Amazing Generation by Jonathan Haidt and Catherine Price (which I also mentioned in Trying New Things).