

Infinite Scroll: The Web's Slot Machine - irunbackwards
http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/18/infinite-scroll-the-webs-slot-machine/

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_delirium
Another way it's like a slot machine: the randomness of whether you'll get to
scroll or not. Scrolling on Twitter is a suspenseful game where it sort of
works for a while but then at some point stops responding when something times
out or a script breaks. Sometimes you can coax it to get going again by
scrolling up and then scrolling back to the end again (presumably getting it
to re-send the AJAX request that timed out). But other times that doesn't
work, and you have to do a full reload. Then re-do the tedious effort of
infinite-scrolling back to where you were when it stopped working. Paginated
history would make going back a few months in my Twitter feed a lot less
frustrating.

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slantyyz
What I find annoying about infinite scroll:

Sites with a footer at the bottom of the web page that populate new items so
fast that as you're scrolling it's impossible to click on the footer items.
Facebook, I'm talking about you.

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lukifer
It's strange how I love or hate infinite scroll based on the use case: when
wasting time looking at funny stuff on the internet, I hate it, because it's
so hard to find a clean stopping point to get back to work. But when shopping,
I love it, as it makes it convenient to browse a large selection of products
to try to find what I'm looking for.

Either way, it's a psychologically powerful design pattern, and it should be
used with care.

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philip1209
There is an infinite scroll wordpress plugin. I haven't installed it yet, but
I intend to over the next day - pagination of articles on a homepage seems to
lack fluidity.

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gojomo
These are great analogies: infinite scroll as a "slot machine". The Pinterest
homepage is "like opening a can of digital Pringles".

But the comparison should also raise the question: are slot machines and
Pringles (and everything like them) good for people?

Some of these UX patterns are thus a High Fructose Corn Syrup of design.
Shovel them into any interface to make it seem more urgent, important, and
novel... but it's a false sheen that's ultimately unhealthy for the audience.

I'm not just picking on Pinterest and its ilk. The kind of 'top stories'
ranking used by HN is also an 'attention sugar' offender. The dynamic-but-
decaying ranking creates an often-false sense of urgency; mixing unlike
stories (including a trickle of duplicates and mislabeled material) in close
and semirandom proximity heightens the sense of novelty. It makes reading even
stories that are trivial, redundant or quickly superceded by corrections seem
more important than it really is.

Perhaps we need to categorize interface patterns by a sort of 'attentional
glycemic index', and limit intake of the worst variants.

