Traditional media has edges — a book ends, an episode finishes, a newspaper runs out of pages. Those edges create natural stopping points where the reader has to actively choose to continue. Infinite scroll, autoplay, and algorithmically generated feeds remove those edges entirely.
The mechanism is simple: if there is always more content, the question "should I stop?" never arrives via an external cue — it has to be generated internally, by the user, against a stream designed to never pause and never run out. Aza Raskin, who invented infinite scroll, has since described it as one of his biggest regrets for exactly this reason.