TikTok is a welcome pacifier for people looking to disconnect as our world careens towards the fiery abyss. However, the app has one major flaw standing in the way of total smooth-brained pleasures: you have to move your fingers when you want to see another video. Terrible, yes, but that nightmare may be ending. An upcoming AutoScroll feature will do the swiping for you, so you can finally sit back and pump content straight into your thick, gluttonous veins.
TikTok famously loops the video you’re currently watching in perpetuity. That can lead to disasters in situations where you set the phone down and start doing something like brushing your teeth (believe me, I have a few clips burned into my retinas forever). AutoScroll offers some respite. As the name implies, it disables the looping and automatically skips to the next video when the one you’re on is through. It’s a feature borrowed from YouTube, where users have been able to numb themselves with pretty flickering lights without lifting a finger since 2014.
There’s no official word about the feature from TikTok, but the app dolled out AutoScroll to some users in early 2023, and reports on social media suggest it hit a larger batch of accounts over the past few weeks. TikTok didn’t answer Gizmodo’s questions about AutoScroll’s status.
Big platforms like TikTok often test features in the wild before an official release. It’s been almost a year since TikTok users started spotting the feature, and a wider rollout could mean AutoScoll is going standard in the near future, but there’s also still time for the company to pull the plug and keep you scrolling manually like some kind of sad caveman. Regardless, some significant number of users have access to the feature already. Here’s how to check if you’re one of them.
To find AutoScroll, tap and hold on any video in the For You or Following feed. If you have AutoScroll, you should see a button among other features such as Report, Not Interested, and Captions. To turn it off, tap and hold again and hit Manual Scroll.