# Blog

> Notes on replacing the doomscroll: why the scrolling was never the problem, what changes when the feed is worth reading, and what we're learning building Lore.

Notes on replacing the doomscroll — why the scrolling was never the problem, what changes when the feed is worth reading, and what we learn building [Lore](https://lorelearning.app/). Below is the short version of the argument the posts take apart in detail.

**In one line:** The problem was never that you scrolled for ten minutes. It’s that you finished with nothing.

## The scrolling was never the problem

Wanting something new every few seconds is not a character flaw. It is roughly what curiosity feels like on a small screen, and people have always done some version of it — flicking through a magazine, reading the back of a cereal box.

What makes doomscrolling feel bad isn’t the time. It’s the accounting at the end of it: twenty minutes gone and nothing to show, because the feed was built to hold attention rather than reward it. That gap between what it cost and what it returned is the thing people actually want to fix.

## So change the payload, not the habit

Which is why removing the app so rarely works. Deleting Instagram takes the reward away and leaves the reflex intact, so the hand finds the next thing on the home screen. The behavioural literature on habit change keeps landing in the same place: replacing a routine holds better than suppressing one, because the cue and the reward survive while the middle changes.

So Lore keeps everything that works about a feed — the swipe, the short unit, the small hit of something new — and changes what arrives to things that are true. You still scroll. You just come out of it knowing about pack-horse librarians in Depression-era Kentucky, and that turns out to be the difference between time spent and time wasted.

## What we’re watching

Whether learning is a strong enough reward to win the moment on its own, against feeds engineered by much larger teams. Whether the swap holds past week three. Whether a feed of real stories can stay interesting without borrowing the tricks that made the original a problem — infinite variable reward, engineered outrage, streak guilt. Those are open questions, and we’d rather write about them honestly than pretend the app has settled them.

## What we cover

- Why deleting the app almost never sticks, and what the research says about relapse.
- Habit substitution: the mechanism, the evidence, and its limits.
- Whether microlearning in two-minute pieces actually leaves anything behind.
- Designing a feed that isn’t engineered against the person reading it.
- Stories from the app, in longer form than a card allows.

---

Canonical URL: https://lorelearning.app/blog  
Last updated: 2026-08-14  
Site index for assistants: https://lorelearning.app/llms.txt