Maybe I'm the only one but I would love a feed that never showed me items again that I've already scrolled past without engaging in the first time.

I built that feature (auto mark as read by scrolling) into my feed reader if you’re up to self host and curate your sources

https://github.com/facundoolano/feedi

I did try to build a public facing news aggregator with a similar ux but I couldn’t pull it off purely based on client side state (and I didn’t want to do user management)

I'm with you on not wanting to do user management, feature creep, user data security concerns, etc.

Me too. That's the number one thing I always wish for with every feed. And if I reach the end of the feed, that's fine.

Right, I'm so tired of "infinite scroll". There's a mental/emotional reward for actually reaching The End of something.

I wonder how much this is a factor of the widespread mental health malaise that is often attributed to tech these days? Certainly plenty of factors to go around, but consider the connotation of "scrolling" and how common it is a default replacement to boredom in modern life and suddenly it seems quite insidious.

Super insightful. I feel the same way. I can't mentally "conclude" my read for the day, because there is always just One More Article that is just under the threshold.

An extension of Fear of Missing Out, basically. And yes, I think it causes mental exhaustion and might be directly related to some mental disorders that we have really yet to understand.

Yes - I was actually deliberate about leaving infinite scroll out; I started w/ scrolling on tag pages, for example, but switched them to paginated - largely for the feeling you described.