Doomscrolling

Reddit on a Bigger Screen: The Endless-Scroll Trap

By Gokhan Tosun · October 31, 2026 · 4 min read

A wristwatch, a blank calendar page and a pencil on a desk

Reddit is one of the best things on the internet when you use it for a question and one of the easiest places to lose an hour when you use it for nothing in particular. A larger screen, like the 7.6-inch inner display on Apple's new iPhone Duo, doesn't create that problem. It does make the feed feel roomier.

In short: the trap on Reddit is the ranked, site-wide feed: r/popular, r/all and Best-sorted home pages. The fix doesn't depend on screen size. Read the communities you joined, sorted by New, and skip the front page. Stillfeed, an iPhone app, opens Reddit that way and blocks r/popular and r/all.

What a bigger screen changes

According to Apple, iPhone Duo has a 7.6-inch inner display and a 5.4-inch cover display, and the product page shows two apps side by side in landscape. The general point stands for any large screen: more of the feed is visible at once, so there is less friction between you and the next post.

That friction used to be a small natural stopping point. On a phone you get a screenful, you flick, you get another. On a bigger display the same flick reveals more, and the cost of continuing drops further. Whether that's good depends entirely on what's in the list.

Why ranked feeds keep you scrolling

Reddit has two kinds of front pages. Your home feed is built from the communities you joined. r/popular and r/all are built from everything, ranked by votes and activity. The second kind is the endless one: no matter how many posts you read, there are more, and none of them are from a community you picked for a reason.

Sorting matters too. Best, Hot, Top and Rising are ranking systems that put the most engaging items first. They are good at keeping you reading. They don't tell you when to stop. We explain the underlying mechanism in what is doomscrolling, and why it is hard to resist in social media addiction.

Why sort by New

Sorting by New puts the newest post at the top and works backwards. That has a useful property: when you reach something you've already seen, you've caught up. The feed has an end, in the sense that matters, which is "I've read what's new in the places I care about." It is also less tuned to provoke you, because nothing is ranked by how much reaction it gets.

You give up some things. New surfaces posts that nobody has voted on yet, so it is noisier, and a great post can be found less quickly. For a joined-communities home feed, that's usually an acceptable trade. If you want the best of a single subreddit, search or sort within it on purpose.

Reddit in Stillfeed

Stillfeed is an iPhone app that works as an in-app browser, loading the real Reddit website signed in as you. As of October 2026 it:

Sorts your home feed by New, so it's your joined communities, newest first.
Blocks r/popular and r/all, the two site-wide feeds.

Subreddits, search, comments and messages remain there. See the Reddit platform page for the full walkthrough. Stillfeed is an iPhone app and isn't optimized for, designed for or tested on iPhone Duo, so we aren't claiming anything about how it looks on a foldable display.

Free and Pro

Those two Reddit changes are part of Stillfeed's free core. The optional Stillfeed Pro adds extras on top: hiding sponsored posts, and a media filter that can drop videos or show text only. Open settings in the app to see which toggles do what.

Two honest limits. The change applies only to Reddit opened inside Stillfeed, so if the official Reddit app stays on your home screen, it will still open on its own screens. And a New-sorted feed of 40 communities can still be long; unsubscribing from the ones you never read is free and effective.

Common questions

How do I hide r/popular?

In the Reddit app itself we don't know of a setting that removes it. In Stillfeed, r/popular and r/all are blocked.

Is sorting by New better than Best?

For avoiding endless scroll, usually. New has a natural end point; ranked sorts don't. Best can still be right when you want the strongest posts in one community.

Does a bigger screen make doomscrolling worse?

We haven't seen evidence either way. It lowers the effort of continuing, so the feed's design matters more.

Can I still search Reddit?

Yes. Search and communities work normally.

Is Stillfeed made for iPhone Duo?

No, it is an iPhone app.

Sources

Apple Newsroom, Apple unveils iPhone Duo.
Apple, iPhone Duo product page.