
The Infinite Scroll - zbentley
https://www.cjr.org/first_person/the-infinite-scroll.php
======
welly
The author described the modern web browsing experience to a tee. It's awful
and one of the reasons my web browsing is limited to very few sites and I'm
careful on what I click on.

The modern web browsing experience is clearly not what TBL had in mind when he
started developing the web.

Newspaper sites seem to want you to do everything but actually read the story
you've clicked on to read.

Take this for example: [https://www.mirror.co.uk/lifestyle/health/coronavirus-
doesnt...](https://www.mirror.co.uk/lifestyle/health/coronavirus-doesnt-scare-
infectious-disease-21658432)

Before we even get to the story, they're trying to draw you away to other
content. Then we have a video and then we have a newsletter signup form. And
an ad. Of course we have an advert. This is the modern web.

Following this, we have a few short paragraphs that are actually the story we
came to read. A huge image, then more links to take you away from the story.
Another handful of short paragraphs, another link to take you away from the
story and this repeats until we get to the end of the story we came to read.
Some comments follow the story (with a bunch of more links to take us away
between the two, of course) and then what feels like an infinite scroll of
sponsored links.

I think the Daily Mirror is possibly one of the worst (one of many reasons I
don't ever visit this site except by mistake or in the case of this comment)
but I'm finding more and more websites are almost impossible to read. Which is
why I don't really spend much time on the web these days. I'd say the majority
of my web browsing habits come via youtube these days.

HN is usually pretty reliable for decent content that is easy to consume, but
beware if you click on a link found via Google or DDG (or other mainstream
search engines)

~~~
coldpie
> The author described the modern web browsing experience to a tee. It's awful
> and one of the reasons my web browsing is limited to very few sites and I'm
> careful on what I click on.

NoScript is pretty useful for this. If a website doesn't work without
JavaScript, odds are very good the author's incentives are something other
than to convey information, so the content is probably not worth consuming
anyway.

~~~
UI_at_80x24
I used to use NoScript religiously, but since the move to `quantum` I couldn't
seem to get it to work right. Either I couldn't understand the icon system or
or was buggy. Has it improved since then?

~~~
cptskippy
Quantum deprecated the old method of Add-On development in favor of Web
Extensions. NoScript didn't have a Web Extensions version initially and has
been working out the transition ever since. But that was 2 years ago...

------
elpool2
When I hear "infinite scroll" I think of the way Facebook or Reddit just keeps
loading new content as I scroll. But this article is really mostly about the
sorry state of advertising on the web, and talks about sites that just have an
infinitely long list of chumbox ads at the bottom of the page. No content,
just infinite ads. The use of infinite scroll by Facebook or Reddit is
controversial in its own right, but this is really a different kind of
"infinite scroll" that I didn't even existed, I guess because I use an ad-
blocker.

~~~
ImpressiveWebs
Reddit doesn’t use infinite scroll. I think you mean Twitter, no?

~~~
saagarjha
It does, unless you're on old.reddit.com.

~~~
mcherm
Sure, but why WOULDN'T you choose to use old.reddit.com ?

~~~
AdmiralGinge
There's loads of reasons not to! Monks who are trying to exercise their
patience skills would find it very useful for example. Those who stress test
input devices for peripherals companies will surely be a fan of the much
increased need to click to read a thread as well.

------
tuxxy
Personally, I find the "infinite scroll" to be one of the most devious forms
of control developers and product folks have leveraged against individuals.
It's extremely manipulative and extremely easy to build.

It's just so incredibly asymmetric with who it benefits -- and it's clearly
not the users.

------
_bxg1
I cannot fathom how the "toe-fungus" ads still make money. Doesn't every
internet user, at this point, have an instinctual spam sense? I don't even see
the individual ads; they're just noise. I actually assume that even if I were
interested in the headlines, clicking the link wouldn't even take me to that
content but to malware and scams. But I don't actually know that because,
again, they are so blatant that I've never actually clicked one.

The most likely explanation is that it's older people who didn't grow up on
the internet and still don't use it that much. If so, I wonder how the
industry will change when nobody's left who's gullible enough to click? Will
the quality of ads increase, at least, to where they represent real products?
Or will scammers just get more creative?

~~~
kumarvvr
Sadly, I have caught myself looking at those ads and clicking them a few
times.

The draw is something similar to browsing Reddit. Endless bullshit and
nonsense, but titillating and addictive.

------
CaliforniaKarl
I used to pay for a digital-only subscription to the San Jose Mercury News.
Then one day, some ad (or combination thereof) appeared that caused the text
to shift every second: On odd-numbered seconds, the text would reflow
slightly; on even-numbered seconds, the content would return to ‘normal’.

This behavior made the page effectively unreadable. Reader modes didn’t exist
for me at the time (or I just wasn’t aware of them). Reloading would sometimes
fix the issue; sometimes not.

The issue began to occur once in every five articles viewed, and I gave up:
When my subscription came up for renewal, I threw the notice away.

------
kumarvvr
I hated the infinite scroll in Facebook and I abhor it in the new Reddit site.

For one, I cannot react the 'footer' of the page anymore.

In addition to that, there is a definite performance tax due to the loading
content.

~~~
rideontime
Okay. Did you have any thoughts about the article?

------
rapnie
Aza Raskin, the inventor of Infinite Scroll, seriously regrets this invention.
He is now co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology (humanetech.com) and
trying to improve the negative sides of tech.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aza_Raskin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aza_Raskin)

~~~
Etheryte
While the sentiment is admirable, I don't think it's anything to beat yourself
up over. History has shown time and again that some inventions will happen
when their prerequisites are filled — if he hadn't built it, sooner or later
someone else would have. Simultaneous uncoordinated inventions of similar
nature throughout history are a good example of this.

------
jakecopp
Even this site had a popup that the article dislikes so much!

~~~
saagarjha
At least they're self-aware:

> There are a few sites that look and work better—the ones that people pay
> for, generally, or ones built with the luxurious snowdrift margins of
> Medium—but mostly there are sites like this one and others that are even
> worse.

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Dahoon
Funny. The site doesn't even work in my installation of Firefox. I can't
scroll.....

~~~
NoGravitas
Yeah, I opened it in Firefox, with the usual adblockers and so forth, and
couldn't actually scroll the article at all. I switched to Reader View and was
able to read it.

------
rchaud
This article _really_ should have included pictures and maybe a short GIF. The
description is clear to anyone who's run into these day after day, but the
visuals would really drive home how badly this type of UX reflects on the web
property's brand.

Surprisingly, for an article named "infinite scroll", there was no mention of
actual "infinite scroll" mechanisms on sites like Reddit, Quartz and
Techcrunch, where scrolling below a a certain point will auto-load the next
article or paginate to the next series of posts.

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eh78ssxv2f
Does anybody has examples of websites that do this? It would be useful to see
this in action.

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JensRex
I can't scroll this website _at all_.

~~~
zwaps
I also can not scroll this website.

What a failure hahaha

~~~
tomhoward
It just takes a while for the content to load.

