About This Feed
The Doomscroll Odometer looks like any other endless feed: the same grey placeholders every app shows for a fraction of a second before a post appears. Here, nothing ever appears. There is nothing to catch up on, because nothing was ever coming.
The only thing that changes is how far you have gone. An odometer converts the scrolled pixels into the real distance they cover on your screen, so the number is how far the feed has physically slid past your thumb. Calibrate it once with a bank card and it is accurate to your device.
As you scroll, the feed sinks. It dims the way seawater does, through the sunlight zone, the twilight zone and down into the dark, passing real landmarks on the way: a giraffe, a diving board, the Eiffel Tower, the deepest scuba dive ever made. The total is kept across visits, so the dive continues next time.
Landmarks on the Way Down
| Distance | Landmark |
|---|
Most are heights; the ocean ones are depths. All are rounded, commonly cited figures.
How To Use It
- Scroll inside the phone frame, with a finger, a trackpad, a mouse wheel or the arrow keys once it is focused.
- Press Calibrate and match the bar to a bank card for an accurate distance. Until then the reading is labelled as an estimate.
- Switch between metres and feet with the units button.
- Ignore the notifications. They are not real either.
Why This Exists
Endless feeds are designed so that every screen looks like the last one. There is no landmark to measure progress against, so it never feels like you have gone anywhere. Putting the landmarks back, even arbitrary ones like the height of a giraffe, is enough to make an ordinary session register differently.
Removing the content entirely is the more honest version of the point. A feed with posts would just be a feed. An empty one that is still oddly compelling to keep scrolling says something about which part was doing the work all along.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Doomscroll Odometer?
A free browser toy. It looks like a social feed, but nothing in it ever loads; every post is a grey placeholder forever. An odometer measures how far the feed has slid past your thumb in real metres or feet, and the feed sinks through the ocean's light zones as you go, passing real heights and depths along the way.
Is the distance real?
As real as your screen allows. The odometer converts scrolled pixels into the physical distance those pixels cover on your screen. Until you calibrate, it uses a typical figure for your kind of device and labels the reading as an estimate. To make it accurate, press Calibrate, hold a bank card against the screen and drag the bar until it matches the card's width, which is 85.6 millimetres on every standard card.
What are the depth zones?
The feed darkens like the ocean does. The top 200 metres is the sunlight zone, then the twilight zone to 1,000 metres, the midnight zone to 4,000 metres, the abyssal zone to 6,000 metres and the hadal zone in the deepest trenches. The colour change is gradual, so you will notice the feed dimming within the first few metres.
Is there an end?
The feed itself never ends, as feeds do not. There is a finish line at Challenger Deep, the deepest known point in the ocean at about 10,935 metres, and a final milestone at the Karman line, 100 kilometres down. Reaching either in one sitting would take many hours of scrolling, which is rather the point.
Is my scrolling tracked or saved?
Only in your own browser. Your calibration, chosen units, deepest dive and an all-time distance total are kept locally so the odometer remembers you next time. Nothing is uploaded, and the Reset button clears the current session.
Does it work on mobile?
Yes, and it is most honest on a phone, which is where most scrolling happens. Swipe inside the phone frame exactly as you would in any feed. The odometer sits at the top of the frame so it is always visible.
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