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Comment by folkrav | Hacker News Reader

Hmm, I'm genuinely curious: why? I tend to heavily dislike anything infinite-scrolling...

Have you tried it? Check it out e.g. [1].

1) You immediately get to see the date range of the thread. 2) You can instantly navigate to any date or position in that range. 3) Thus, it's not really infinite scrolling. At all. The only similarity is lazy loading, for long threads. 4) On mobile, you also get to preview the comments before actually jumping to it.

[1] https://meta.discourse.org/t/switch-from-gravatar-to-html-cs...

> Have you tried it?

Yes, it’s awful.

> Check it out e.g.

Oh lord. 40 comments? That’s a single page of traditional forums.

How does it work when you have 1e4? 1e5? 1e6? And yes I do mean threads of a million comments.

How is navigating millions of comments in a paginated thread any better? That's more than 25 000 pages.

It's not as awful as I would have suspected from the description, but I still don't really like it. Bar the fancy "scrollbar" timeline they give you to jump directly somewhere in the page - which does alleviate that problem I mentioned a little - it does feel exactly like infinite scrolling to me, I'm not sure where you're making the distinction between lazy loading and this. The content does physically appear later on the page, making the scrollbar jump around, which I heavily dislike. This renders the native scrollbar pretty much useless as a reference point.

The mobile preview is probably a nice touch, though.

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