One advantage printed books have over screens is affordances and mechanisms for skimming, flipping around, while holding your place (fingers in pages, bookmarks, sheer physical memory and inertia, the heft of progress, flipping friction). One problem long web articles have is that it’s so easy to scroll that people just run ahead looking for flash graphics and then close the tab without really reading. But scrolljacking sucks. So this attempts to just kinda…. subtly reframe the interface so as to make it easier to navigate more thoughtfully, and add a little friction to navigating thoughtlessly. A little anchor to a good place.
Inspired by those multiplayer sidescrolling videogame platformers where when you get too far from your friend the screen goes splitscreen. Scroll too fast and the screen splits, to try to hold the last place you were “actually” reading.
To-do: more elegant & obvious & self-explanatory implementations, stacking multiple, try making it symmetrical (w/r/t scrolling up and down), apply to problems like “holding my spot in a series of articles”, noncontiguous progress bar on scroll bar, dynamic language like “Continue reading from ‘The notion that Pegasus must be…’”, wipe away the cruft, refine detection of skimming, collapse to a summary of territory traversed, etc.