Hacker News Reader

Comment by gcmrtc | Hacker News Reader

You'd have the same problem with pagination, you'd need to Ctrl+f on each page.

Solution? Use the website's search form.

They're similar, but at least with traditional pagination you have a very clear page transition boundary. You can manually loop through Next → Ctrl-F repeatedly much faster in my experience. With infinite scroll I'm left to work out my own "pages" by eye or some other mechanism, which is slower. Not by a lot, but still slow enough that I feel the friction.

Pagination is still preferable to infinite scrolling in my opinion, especially if it is reflected in the URL. Never actually found a positive example of infinite scrolling. It might be good for activities that are unfocused, but for anything else it is misplaced. For browsing images I could imagine use cases. But not for an archive on the other hand.

I agree with this. I feel like infinite scroll gets a bad rap. Pagination is no better. There are some sites and use cases where infinite scroll is a huge usability improvement.

(I know -- pagination gives you a URL to a specific page of results. Who cares? When was the last time you deep-linked into a specific index page? Doing so is probably a bad idea, since when new content gets added, the contents of a specific index pagination will change.)

> Doing so is probably a bad idea, since when new content gets added, the contents of a specific index pagination will change

unless you paginate in chronological order rather than reverse chronological. but no one does.

It's easy enough. Just request the next X results after the last result on the current page, like so: `?resultsperpage=50&resultsafter=postid750`. If you're not sorting by time, then you should be able to add a time constraint to the search backend and include that parameter as well. I've also seen forums that cache the results for a certain amount of time, and only return the search ID and page number in the query string.

Pagination is a lot better. In the example presented, most of the time the user just wants to find something on the front page. Nobody uses ctrl-F to search all of reddit.

The "front" page would be the default load of an infinite scroll, before anything has been added. Pagination or infinite scroll -- the initial load is likely the same.

Yeah, but than I don't miss anything. I very much prefer it to infinite scroll, where it's possible to scroll "too fast" and miss content ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com