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Comment by fletchowns | Hacker News Reader

I can't be the only one that absolutely despises infinitely scrolling lists, right?

Nope. Give me one long page or page links. I hate the perpetual pausing, I hate being unable to go directly to the end of what I'm reading. I like to feel in control over what I'm looking at, and infinite scroll ain't that.

I hope it is a fad that passes.

Depends, infinite scrolling can be and has been done right [0], but it's really not the focus of the feature -- it's a product.

[0] http://warpspire.com/experiments/history-api/

Maybe I just haven't seen it done right - do you have some example links?

Check out deviantArt's infinite scroll implementation. If you go to their home page, and scroll to the bottom, there's a big green "Show More" button. No infinite scrolling happens until you explicitly want it to and you are able to get to the stuff in the footer. Once you start scrolling, it's very fast and there's not much of a delay as it loads more things. It also updates the URL as you scroll so when you click on something and hit the back button you are where you left off. It's quite slick.

The Tumblr "dashboard" (feed) is pretty good. Also, collections and news on Are.na.

Having a linkable infinite scroll is only solving one of the issues in infinite scroll.

Have you ever tried to click the links in Facebook below your news feed?

Why is it that everyone who implements automatic infinite scroll shoves it into a context where there's stuff beneath it on the page, making that content completely inaccessible?

No, because FB puts the same links and content under the right-hand side. Can you enumerate the issues that need to be addressed? I have ready of research on the lack-luster implementations (eg. Twitter) that many assume is the status quo.

My biggest problem is how to get back to where I was. I was reading a funny tumblr on my phone and got to the point where the page was incredibly slow, so I wanted to start reading again from where I currently was in the page... how do I do that?

The great-grandparent of your reply details such a solution.

Oh, boy. It drives me absolutely insane when I try to click on a footer link, scroll down, and just before I click, another batch of the infinite list shows up and pushes the footer further away. Kickstarter is guilty of this, among many others.

Well done ones (e.g. in native iOS applications) work really well in my experience, they're regular lists with memory savings.

Badly implemented ones (which is 97% of those on web sites) on the other hand...

I don't hate it, but some websites implement it so badly. Sometimes I want to reach the career or about page of a website, but it's hard to do that when the page is constantly scrolling. I usually end up typing /about at the end of the URL.

It depends if all the content needs to be consumed or not. Twitter/Facebook where I realistically won't read every entry it's fine. In some ways the list can be considered infinite.

All other cases of finite lists shouldn't use infinite scrolling. It breaks jumping back to a specific position and the length is not predictable.

http://danwin.com/2013/01/infinite-scroll-fail-etsy/

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