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Comment by glandium | Hacker News Reader

My "favorite" infinite scrolling fail is when there is a footer on the site, and it keeps being pushed down by the infinite loading of new data, such that you can't reach any of the links the footer contains (like, you know, "About" or things like that).

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Was wondering that and then told myself, come on, nobody would be that evil, the whole idea is nonsense. And you're suggesting there are websites out there that actually do that?

Not evil, but stupid.

Google (image search) and Facebook (news feed) have both done this. Last time it came up I was able to find a screen shot of one of them but not the other, let me see if I can dig that up.

I don't think they did it deliberately, but I'd bet someone said "We could increase engagement if people didn't have to click anything to keep seeing more content" and nobody bothered to think about other design consequences of automatically expanding the content downward forever.

EDIT: A screenshot of Facebook's in mid-2013 is shown here under the "Unreachable" header https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/05/infinite-scrolling-...

Or straight to the image: https://cloud.netlifyusercontent.com/assets/344dbf88-fdf9-42...

I have seen this multiple times. It's almost certainly out of ignorance, and not intentional. Just someone trying to implement a slick UI without really thinking it through.

Old Navy does this. There's a limit; 3 or so "loads" finally gets you to the footer.

https://oldnavy.gap.com/

https://www.indiehackers.com/

Plenty. Most likely because they first have a footer, then someone says "MUST IMPLEMENT INFINITE SCROLLING", and then you get that.

Came here to say just this! It's even better when you actually might want to click on something on the footer.

Bonus points if you go on to click on the footer, the infinite scroll kicks in, and your mouse cursor ends up on a link in the newly loaded text, which you end up clicking on. (Or video content, or whatever ends up doing something because you clicked)

... then you get ads served based on that.

And then you click to go back and it doesn't resume where you were before, and instead dumps you right back up at the top, with none of the previously loaded content available.

Or in the case of Facebook, a new top, one that intentionally excludes whatever you were looking at before (because "it has been read" - even though you got no more than a glimpse in frustrated passing).

Yes. FTA, "Website visitors have been taught that a footer is placed at the bottom with information such as contact, about us, privacy policy and so on."

Bonus points when that info actually still lives there but is now rendered inaccessible, violating the actual laws their presence is intended to comply with.

E.g. in Germany the impressum (often also called "imprint" in English versions of German websites; a mandatory page listing the physical address, contact information, registration numbers and other legal information, typically linked in the footer) must be easy to find and accessible with no more than two clicks (though this seems to be more of a heuristic than a strict legal definition).

None of the sites that I use that have infinite scroll have a footer worth mentioning. Can you point out a site? That seems more like just bad coding than a problem with infinite scroll.

https://www.indiehackers.com/

They have useful info in the footer. But it's impossible to get to the footer.

To overcome this problem and reach the footer, I usually search for About page.

You can also try Command (or Alt on windows) + bottom arrow, this would take you to the footer on a lot of websites.

Yep, then you have to view the source and find the links from there

And that gets frustrated when, even though it's static content, it's dynamically loaded.

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