It's a good thing that its awful to use with pagination. Frequently I would find myself using RES and scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, the only thing stopping me from continuing scrolling was suddenly noticing that these posts had 12 upvotes and I was 600 posts off the front page at this point. Friction like pagination gives you pause. Sure, its annoying, but subconsciously that annoyance leads you to make a finite ending of saying "I'll stop after I get through this page," instead of time flying by scrolling and scrolling.

Looking at your last line I think it would be helpful to assess your addiction in brass tacks. Imagine if you said, "I only use cocaine intraveinously, insufflation is awful." Sometime its helpful to add some breaks to unhelpful habits than trying to min max them all the time. I still have a lot of problems with this myself and I am doing my best to introduce more friction to my internet usage, since you can't just flush it down the drain and walk away like a pack of cigarettes in this day and age when internet means work.

Should it be up to social media companies to integrate controls for people who lack self-control into their products? Should alcohol companies include a BAC meter on each bottle to determine if you can drink from it? Should casinos allow you to only withdraw a certain amount when you enter and no more?

I don't believe it's the place of these companies to implement these kind of controls. Governments will create regulations that force these companies to implement controls, but I don't believe that addresses the root cause.

The root cause is, why can't you control your social media/gambling/alcohol use? It's a wide ranging cause from genetics to mental health problems to other external causes. I believe those should be the first level of addressing from the government, but it's easier to just regulate

Its not so much that they should build controls, but the other side of the argument, that they shouldn't spend so much effort hiring psychologists as consultants to figure out how to make their website/app/service the most dominating thing in at least a portion of their user's daily life (most companies call these sorts of users "whales" since they produce so much meat for the company).

Infinite-scrolling is awful for 2 reasons:

1. What you’re currently looking at is not directly addressable (instead it’s “open this URL, within this time-window, and scroll exactly X-many pixels in exactly S-seconds to get to the exact same content as me”).

2. It makes it impossible to get to the real page footer, which often contains essential links like Contact Us, the About/Impressum page, and other important stuff.

For #1 it's the same because the content on each page is dependent on reddit's algorithm, which may change by the time you load up the next page (maybe reddit has some caching that prevents this), so if you link page 3 to someone, they will see something different depending on when they open the link

For #2 that's useful for novice users but as a reddit user for who knows how many years I don't care about the footer

The truly awful implementation is the paging of comments on this website.