Teen Tech Talent from Ethiopia Fights Doom Scrolling with YScroll

A 16-year-old in Addis Abeba turned a 5-hour YouTube Shorts binge into a startup idea. He built YScroll, an app designed to interrupt endless scrolling and help users set limits on doom scrolling.

On one October afternoon in 2025, while most of his peers were in class, 11th-grader Sanyi Diriba found himself five hours deep into a YouTube Shorts rabbit hole. He had opened the app "just for a few minutes." By the time he looked up, half his day was gone.

"I remember checking the time and realizing I had been scrolling for five hours," Sanyi told Shega. "That’s when it hit me. If I can’t control this, how many other people are losing time like this every day?" 

Instead of simply uninstalling the app, the 16-year-old decided to build a countermeasure. That decision birthed YScroll, an app designed to disrupt the frictionless design of modern social media. 

 “As a developer, I saw it as the perfect opportunity to build something that could help me and potentially help others as well.” he said. 

Sanyi initially attempted to build YScroll as a standalone mobile app. However, after working on it for about a month, he nearly abandoned the project. “It got very difficult,” he said. “There was a point where I wanted to stop.” Instead of giving up, he pivoted and built a Chrome extension version first, which allowed him to launch more quickly.

Quickly, the Chrome extension version of YScroll gained around 1,500 users. Encouraged by the traction, he returned to the mobile app version. The beta version was of the app was released about a week ago, and he said more than 600 users joined within the first ten hours of launch. 

YScroll works by enforcing personalized daily limits on scrolling on platforms such as YouTube Shorts. Using browser APIs, it tracks active engagement, alerts users when limits are reached ranging from 30 minutes to three hours and provides reports showing how much time users spend on scrolling activity. 

The mobile version uses accessibility permissions to monitor screen activity and detect when users are scrolling on specific apps. Currently, the tool focuses on YouTube Shorts, with plans to expand support to platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), and LinkedIn based on user feedback. 

“You can set your own daily limit,” he said. “It’s about being intentional with your time.”

The problem Sanyi is trying to solve is increasingly common. Short-form video feeds such as TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts are designed around infinite scrolling, where new videos appear continuously with no clear stopping point.

Doom scrolling, the compulsive consumption of endless short-form content, has severe repercussions on mental health and productivity, particularly among young users like Sanyi. A 2025 Payless Power report estimates it drains up to $5,600 per worker annually in lost productivity, with 50% of doom scrollers struggling to concentrate during meetings or tasks. Research links it to elevated psychological distress, anxiety, and depression, reducing life satisfaction and harmony by up to 29%, while exacerbating sleep disturbances and existential dread. For ages 16-24 averaging over three hours daily on social media, studies show nine times higher acute stress from excessive negative content exposure, alongside decreased resilience and professional engagement, perpetuating cycles of emotional exhaustion.

Globally, people averaged 2 hours and 20 minutes daily on social media, in 2025 ballooning to over three hours for ages 16-24. Short-form video drives much of this surge, with vertical feeds proliferating across major platforms and spiking consumption in recent years. 

 “Right now, YScroll is free because my main focus is improving the product, learning from users, building in public, and growing my presence,” Sanyi said. “In the future, I’m considering a premium version with additional features, but the core idea of helping people control their scrolling will always remain accessible.” He noted. 

Sanyi’s entry into software development began during the COVID-19 lockdowns, at the ripe age of 11. While many teenagers defaulted to gaming or social media when schools closed, Sanyi turned to learning. Inspired by his older brother, a software engineer, he began teaching himself the basics of coding through YouTube tutorials and online platforms such as freeCodeCamp and Coursera.

“Instead of sitting around, I started creating content, doing graphic design, and learning how to code,” he said. What began as curiosity gradually hardened into discipline. By the age of 14, he decided to take learning more seriously.

“I realized I didn’t just want to learn. I wanted to build,” Sanyi recalled. 

That mindset led to his first major venture, Go2Cod, launched in September 2024. Struggling to find internships that would accept a 14-year-old, Sanyi teamed up with two university students, Eyu Birhanu and Samuel Diriba, to engineer their own opportunity. Together, they built a platform that provides free, structured, internship-style tasks for aspiring coders who lack real-world experience. 

SOURCE : SHEGA.CO