Original Summary

i deactivated my instagram earlier this year because the algorithm was doing a number on me. it helped, a lot, but i didn't kill the scrolling habit entirely. last month, i caught my finger headed for youtube shorts during a 15 minute break i was taking from some project work, almost on autopilot. that entire week, my youtube shorts had been horrendous. i mean, absolutely abysmal consumerslop. random snippets from shows i'm never going to watch, celebrity worship, unfunny twitch clips, if i scrolled shorts for 30 minutes, i wouldn't be able to recall a single thing i had watched. so, i was fed up and told chatgpt something along the lines of "i don't want to waste my time scrolling mindless short videos. i like reading. give me 3 tiny articles that teach me something about the world. it could be philosophy, geopolitics, history... i just need enough information to understand it myself, and potentially explain it to someone else." and i won't lie, it was incredible. in the span of 20 minutes i went from reading about why the roman empire could've kickstarted the industrial revolution but didn't, to how our brains constantly predict the future. chatgpt started off by giving me 3 mini articles, and by the end of the evening i had read like 50. so i thought to myself "wait... this is so good, surely it must exist already right?", and i started looking for an app which did the same thing, but i couldn't find anything. there's a few adjacent ideas: tiktok feed style wikipedia random articles, gamified "duolingo-but-for-knowledge" apps, but nothing hit that sweet spot of just being able to devour fascinating information. so i spent the entirety of the last month building scroll. the premise is simple: scroll through... well, scrolls. (haha, geddit? because scrolls are rolled up pieces of paper? and you're reading tiny articles, and you scroll through them? yeah nevermind). each scroll has a tiny optional multiple choice question at the end of it, to see if you actually focused and understood the gist of the article. there's also an interest picker, so you could read about things you're interested in. full disclosure: my backend relies heavily on generative ai. but since llms are notorious for hallucinating, i didn't want to just prompt an agent to "write an interesting article about xyz" and leave it at that. there's a multistage pipeline, where real information is gathered from reliable sources on the internet (published scientific papers, encyclopedias, etc.), and then a writer agent compiles the collected information into a tiny article. no factual claims are ai generated. you can view the sources for each scroll individually! i added this so i wasn't just wasting my own time gobbling up hallucinated slop. but yeah, i've genuinely cut down on mindless doomscrolling, while simultaneously indulging myself in the familiar fidgety scrolling muscle memo

  • 情报分类：商业与市场研究
  • 分类依据：内容涉及商业、投资或市场动态
  • 信息来源：Reddit · SideProject
  • 发布时间：2026/10/6 23:59:07