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Comment by lelandfe | Hacker News Reader

I dunno, it’s pretty apt for Instagram, Twitter, etc. It is admittedly awful in many other situations, though.

If by "pretty apt" you meant "really effective into keeping their users scrolling mindlessly and contributing to the 'doomscrolling' effect", yep. Seems to be pretty great for them.

The funny thing is that for us who don't use Instagram or Twitter they won't let us scroll past a screen height without asking to be logged in...

I don't think Twitter even lets you scroll at all, these days.

Anyway, "HN yells at cloud" was a fairly predictable low value comment. No, that's not what I mean. I mean "pretty apt" insofar as pagination would add no value. The order and count are changing so rapidly that infinite scroll is the obvious choice.

The order should not be changing - that’s another user-hostile invention designed to encourage doomscrolling. Increasing count is a non-issue because once you reach a content piece you saw previously you know where you are (same as any bulletin board).

People use these apps because of their personalized feeds. Saying the apps shouldn't have that, or calling it anti-user, seems pretty misaligned to what the users actually do on them. The apps are not bulletin boards.

Anyway, again - infinite scrolling is apt for their use cases. We can say that and also all frown at the concept of doomscrolling afterwards.

If users want to scroll endlessly, they should be able to, and they're going to, regardless of what scrolling implementation a platform uses - I scroll through many pages of HN just fine without infinite scroll.

If infinite scroll was an alternative to regular pagination on every site, you'd have a point.

But oftentimes it's the only option available, and it's garbage for everything except mindless scrolling.

That's true, but pagination without read ahead goes a long way to drop engagement, especially for users with slower Internet connections.

Using or thinking of "engagement" is the 8th deadly sin*. It just proves you're not thinking of the user's interests.

* sin count taken from the Iron Maiden song.

But infinite scrolling never worked properly on browsers. With infinite scrolling, it just forgets everything once you navigate out of the page. To resume from where you were, you have to scroll and scroll and scroll and load the results all over again. Even if you were a single page away when you hit the back button. I've now been conditioned to open almost every link in a new tab because of this and it drives me crazy. This and the fact that going a back a page is so slow nowadays for whatever reason.

You just use bad tools for that. When using custom AutoPagerize UserJS mod that utilizes pushState, endless scrolling works like a charm for me for years already. Like I can scroll to thousand-numbered items of HN seamlessly. It remembers the exact page you were on after you close the tab and overrides "target" property of added pages' links to open everything in new tabs regardlessly, preventing accidental page reloads. IDK why developers don't reproduce this.

Kinda sad more and more Web sites switch to pointless AJAX app model recently and it stops working for those.

What?

Infinite scroll gets higher “engagement,” then pagination. Those are people who kept scrolling, who wouldn’t have otherwise.

It's not. Unless you don't care about not being able to find where you were if you mistakenly scroll.

Or Google Sheets, which is even more complex.

It gets particularly tricky when you got tons of data to be rendered but can't keep DOM in memory - you need to scroll virtually.

this happens to me with big sheets it's annoying

No, it's just plain shit. When you have to interrupt your work you have to start all over again and you have zero indication where were you. Idiots come up with things and more idiots copy them and laud it as some kind of secret sauce. While it's just plain idiocy.

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