Free, ad-free, built by real people
About Aimless Scrolling
A free, ad-free, sourced site about how social media apps engineer aimless scrolling — and practical, evidence-based ways to manage the habit. Published by a small German software studio.
Published by ai51 UG (haftungsbeschraenkt)Registered software company from northern Germany.
Site mission
Make prompting clearer and the model landscape legible
Aimless Scrolling exists to make one thing clear: when you can't put the phone down, that is usually the design working as intended — not a personal failing. We explain the actual mechanisms behind the For You feed, autoplay, infinite scroll, and the variable-reward loop, in plain language.
Then we get practical. Every page should leave you with something usable: a setting to change, a small piece of friction to add, a swap to try, or a clearer picture of what the research does and does not show.
We do not catastrophize, we do not sell a detox, and we do not dress up weak studies as settled science. Where the evidence is thin or contested, we say so.
Who we are
Who We Are
Aimless Scrolling is published by ai51 UG, a small software studio in northern Germany. Our team includes two physics PhDs, and most of our day-to-day is building software that helps people learn.
We kept running into the same gap: writing about screen time is either moral panic or shrug-it-off dismissal, and almost none of it explains the machinery clearly enough to act on. The apps are deliberately easy to use and deliberately hard to leave; that deserves a careful, honest explanation.
This site is our attempt to fix that — documented carefully enough that we'd send it to a friend who feels stuck in the feed — and then left open for anyone to read.
Responsible team
Content Managers and Editors
Editorial Team
Aimless Scrolling Editorial
Pieces are written or edited by the ai51 team. We sign articles under one editorial banner because the focus is the topic, not the byline. Where a piece reflects first-hand testing of a setting or tool, the author is named inline.
Why trust this site
Why Trust This Site
- Published by ai51 UG, a registered company in northern Germany.
- Built by working software engineers who ship real products.
- Founding team includes two physics PhDs with technical and scientific backgrounds.
- Psychology and health claims cite primary research; app-mechanic articles describe features that are publicly documented or directly observable; anything time-sensitive states its date.
- Legal operator details are in the imprint.
Editorial principles
Editorial Principles
- Everything is free to read, with no ads.
- We explain the mechanism before giving advice.
- Health and psychology claims link to primary research, and we flag where the evidence is weak or mixed.
- We separate myth from finding (no, blue light is not the main problem; no, your attention span is not 8 seconds).
- We do not shame anyone for scrolling. The goal is agency, not abstinence.
- Anything time-sensitive (an app feature, a setting location) shows its date, because apps change.
