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105 points venusgirdle | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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palata ◴[] No.43236789[source]
> For the uninitiated, doomscrolling is essentially when one passively scrolls through endless feeds of content on social media until eventually stopping to realize that they've wasted the last five minutes of their life doing something entirely unproductive.

This is wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomscrolling

"Doomscrolling or doomsurfing is the act of spending an excessive amount of time reading large quantities of news, particularly negative news, on the web and social media."

In other words, doomscrolling is about scrolling the bad news, specifically. Like covid-19 or war.

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1. ultrafez ◴[] No.43242042[source]
Anecdotally, I've heard the term "doomscrolling" being used by a reasonable number of different people in different circles to refer to passively consuming "bitesize" content (e.g. social media, short text posts or short videos) for extended periods of time, regardless of content.

If you look at the definitions on Urban Dictionary[1], the ones from 2020/2021 are in the same vein as what you've described and what Wikipedia says, but more recent 2024/2025 definitions generalise the concept and lose the "negative news" element.

Always fascinating how language evolves and how quickly the meaning of words can change.

[1] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=doomscrollin...