What if infinite scroll had nothing to scroll through?

Frederic Eltschinger — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 18:25:55 +0000

I built a website with no content on purpose
It’s called futile.ch.
You open it on mobile. You scroll. Nothing happens. You scroll more. Still nothing. Just a counter telling you how many meters you’ve traveled into the void.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

Where it came from
I was thinking about infinite scroll one day — not in a “big tech bad” way, just genuinely wondering what the mechanic looks like without anything attached to it.
Like, what if you took away the content? The images, the posts, the outrage, the ads. Just left the gesture itself.
Would anyone keep going?
Turns out: yes. A lot of people. For a surprisingly long time.

Building “nothing” is weirdly hard
The irony is that making something empty feel right took a lot of iteration.
The scroll had to be smooth enough that it didn’t feel broken. The counter had to move at a pace that felt real — too slow and people assume it’s bugged, too fast and it loses its weight. The emptiness had to be intentional, not lazy.
At some point I was spending serious time tuning the physics of scrolling through nothing, which felt appropriately absurd.

“Remove the content, and you expose the habit.”

What people actually do
There’s a pattern I keep seeing:
First few seconds — they scroll slowly, expecting something to load.
Then they realize nothing’s coming. Most stop. A few get weirdly competitive and push past a kilometer. Someone made it to several km. I don’t know what to make of that.
The site has a leaderboard. People check it. That part surprised me.

I’m not trying to make a point
Honestly, I didn’t build this to lecture anyone about attention spans or tech addiction. That framing gets old fast.
It’s more like — I was curious, I built the thing, and now I find it genuinely funny that it exists and that people use it.
If it makes you think about your scrolling habits for 30 seconds, fine. If you just want to see how far you can get, also fine.

Try it - futile.ch

Mobile works best. Desktop exists but it’s not the same.

Built this as a side project. Curious what devs think — both the concept and the technical side if anyone wants to dig into how the distance tracking works.

DEV Community: Frederic Eltschinger

What if infinite scroll had nothing to scroll through?