
Stop Infinite Scrolling - kiyanwang
https://hackernoon.com/stop-infinite-scrolling-on-your-website-now-ie6rg31eu
======
tontonius
The article puts forth 10 reasons to think twice before implementing infinite
scrolling, but many of them are just a variation of the final reason: Terrible
user experience.

For the sake of argument, there are several very successful websites that use
infinite scrolling in one way or another. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit
just to name a few. Is infinite scrolling on these sites disorienting the
user? hard to navigate? rendering a "terrible user experience"? One could
certainly argue that the data says otherwise.

The article doesn't even suggest that there might be situations where infinite
scrolling might befit the site. I'm not a big fan of infinite scroll but
black-and-white rants like this often leave out the vital context and nuances
in the topic they aim to analyze.

~~~
TOGoS
The infinite scroll is one of the reasons those websites are so addictive. My
lizard brain has a hard time closing the tab when I "haven't reached the end
of the page yet."

So it may be 'good' for keeping people on the site. But in the grand scheme of
things I'd rather the page had a bottom.

~~~
jjuel
This. These sites don't use infinite scrolling because it is a great user
experience they do it to keep people on their site. They do it to keep people
engaged. The addiction. Most of those sites would actually be better with
pages in terms of user experience, but that isn't the experience they are
going for.

------
baddox
My favorite example I discovered recently is the Coinbase prices page. You
can’t get to the links in the footer (or their big “enter your email to learn
more” CTA which I’m sure their marketing team works hard on) because it keeps
loading new pages when you scroll to the bottom of the page. Presumably they
will eventually run out of pages and you’ll be able to see the footer.

[https://www.coinbase.com/price](https://www.coinbase.com/price)

~~~
clairity
other issues aside, isn't not being able to reach the footer on infinite
scrolling pages solved with a sticky footer?

it can even be sticky at 2X or 3X the screen hieght so that it doesn't get in
the way of the freshest/most important content near the top of the (very long)
page.

~~~
Groxx
theoretically yes. effectively anyway.

in practice, I don't think I've _ever_ seen a sticky footer that didn't flake
out somewhere. it's always broken weird screen sizes, or mobile, or one
browser, or after a browser update. or it hides content because someone forgot
to add padding. or it jumps around because they're using absolute position for
some insane reason.

------
alpaca128
Not to mention one misclick that brings you to a different page will instantly
make you lose all scrolling "progress", on some fast-paced websites without a
chance to find the original position again.

~~~
littlecranky67
To be fair, this only happens due to programming bugs on the website. You can
easily store the scroll position in the HTML5 pushstate API. The big websites
like Twitter and Facebook get this right.

~~~
mar77i
Famously, imgur gets it wrong. After 10 images you can click "load more
images" to see the rest of the album, but when you return to the album you
have to click it again.

~~~
vimslayer
Imgur does lots of things wrong, it's really really horrible to use,
especially on mobile.

Although to be "fair", that's probably largely intentional crippling of the
site to push users towards their app.

------
tummulfingur
What about techcrunch, where if you scroll all the way down in an article it
automatically re-directs to the main page.

This is so annoying to me that I have JavaScript and cookies disabled for
techcrunch just to circumvent this nonsensical behaviour.

~~~
MisterTea
That's just as heinous as those news sites which load the next article when
you scroll to the bottom of the current article. It appears to sometimes be
part of the article you're reading and then your on another page trying to
figure out what the hell happened. I really don't know how these so-called
designers get paid to confuse their readers and customers.

~~~
WaltPurvis
Related bonus: On many sites, if you try to print the article you've just read
to the bottom, you _can 't_ print _that_ article, you can only print the
_next_ article, and even scrolling back to the top won't fix it.

~~~
snailmailman
oh my god yes! I've ran into this same problem and thought i was going crazy.
cant remember if i was printing or just saving the articles to somewhere, but
i kept getting a completely unrelated article.

how does someone mess up their website that badly? i dont even know how
something like that is possible

------
glandium
My "favorite" infinite scrolling fail is when there is a footer on the site,
and it keeps being pushed down by the infinite loading of new data, such that
you can't reach any of the links the footer contains (like, you know, "About"
or things like that).

~~~
mar77i
Was wondering that and then told myself, come on, nobody would be _that_ evil,
the whole idea is nonsense. And you're suggesting there are websites out there
that actually do that?

~~~
wlesieutre
Google (image search) and Facebook (news feed) have _both_ done this. Last
time it came up I was able to find a screen shot of one of them but not the
other, let me see if I can dig that up.

I don't think they did it deliberately, but I'd bet someone said "We could
increase engagement if people didn't have to click anything to keep seeing
more content" and nobody bothered to think about other design consequences of
automatically expanding the content downward forever.

EDIT: A screenshot of Facebook's in mid-2013 is shown here under the
"Unreachable" header [https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/05/infinite-
scrolling-...](https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/05/infinite-scrolling-
lets-get-to-the-bottom-of-this/)

Or straight to the image:
[https://cloud.netlifyusercontent.com/assets/344dbf88-fdf9-42...](https://cloud.netlifyusercontent.com/assets/344dbf88-fdf9-42bb-
adb4-46f01eedd629/a1c917a5-6828-490d-ae2e-15b49a5e8c05/facebook-loading-
footer.png)

------
jonstaab
I've seen this argument more and more lately, and it's starting to bother me
because some places work great with infinite scrolling (twitter, serial comic
strip viewers).

This article offers a small disclaimer at the end, but otherwise says things
are impossible, when they simply aren't. #1 is easily solved by removing
offscreen content once it's been scrolled past, and autoloading in both
directions. Numbers 3-4, 8, and 9 (several of which are redundant complaints)
are definitely the worst part of infinite scroll websites, but are pretty
easily fixable with client-side routing.

The problem is people implement infinite scroll in terms of finite-scrolling
documents, when there are a number of other dynamics to take into account.
It's like saying "Don't make video games because you can't play them with a
remote".

~~~
bhauer
> _some places work great with infinite scrolling (twitter, serial comic strip
> viewers)._

I would contend that Twitter does not work great with infinite scrolling. In
fact, I kept envisioning Twitter as I read the article. One of my biggest
grievances with Twitter (shared with much of modern computing because multi-
device computing doesn't have something like PAO [1], which would keep all my
devices' views the same) is that I can't easily resume reading my Twitter
stream between devices. I can't even easily navigate to "show me the stream at
11am today," which would be a viable workaround for multi-device views. If I
want to find a last-read point, I just need to sit with my finger on the page
down key until I see something familiar.

Ultimately, my user experience with infinite scrolling is simple: I give up
and stop bothering to try to be thorough in my consumption of Twitter content.
I wonder if Twitter has the necessary metrics to realize that infinite scroll
can hurt engagement. I doubt it.

[1] [http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao](http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao)

~~~
jonstaab
I'd contend Twitter's problem isn't infinite scrolling, it's eschewing
chronological sorting in favor of algorithmic. There is no objective order to
most content on twitter, so deep linking to a place in the feed is impossible,
whether you use pagination or infinite scroll. Which is why infinite scroll
works - it solves the problem of defining what page 2 even is. Not defending
algirithmic sorting of course.

------
oftenwrong
Paging should be incorporated into web standards. Imagine your browser
indicating "you are on page 2 of 8". Imagine having browser hotkeys for "next
page", "previous page" and "jump to page".

The browser itself could even provide a non-broken, customisable, universal-
across-all-sites implementation of infinite scrolling.

~~~
leokennis
I remember from ~10-15 years ago, in the Opera browser there was a button to
go foward even when you did not go backwards. It was pretty good at guessing
what the next page was going to be (example.com/1.html > 2.html, 2005-08.jpg >
2005-09.jpg etc.)

~~~
_randyr
If I'm not mistaken qutebrowser also has this feature.

~~~
The-Compiler
Yup! It has various kinds of shortcuts for this kind of thing
(increment/decrement number, find prev/next link, remove component from path).

If you're curious, the implementation is here:
[https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/blob/master/quteb...](https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/blob/master/qutebrowser/browser/navigate.py)

------
cm2187
I’d add: if you do pagination, do large pages instead of a huge number of
small pages. It’s easy to scroll quickly through a fixed size page, it’s a
pain in the ass to have to click through pages.

~~~
theobeers
More small pages means more opportunities to show ads. And in the case of
search, a larger portion of the first page can be given to sponsored results.
:-(

Somehow the web has evolved to a place where the poles of infinite scroll and
excessively short pages are two of the great annoyances.

~~~
cm2187
True, but I see that even in private control panels. So it's not all malice!

~~~
paulryanrogers
Right, there's also some cargo culting

------
MentallyRetired
I once implemented infinite scroll that 1) didn't auto-scroll from the first
page, you had to click to continue and _then_ it would infinite scroll. This
way, people could see the footer and didn't have auto-loading content
unnecessarily and 2) the infinite scroll worked bi-directionally. 5 "pages"
would be loaded at any given point, with the goal that the user would be on
page 3, in the middle of the stack of pages. This way, memory was kept low,
and we even implemented the History API so you could link to the pages by post
ID.

------
talove
I run a collection of websites that all use infinite scroll and serve ~90
million MAUs.

#1 Poor performance issues

We started doing off-screen clean up, but it's a similar pattern to any
ListView like component. Setup and teardown. The browser is smart though. It's
not any more work than the setup/teardown a typical SPA should be doing.

#2 Footer is drowned

Footers are useless. Put it in the menu.

#3 Difficult to implement analytics

No more difficult than triggering a SPA pageview. This is misleading.

#4 Navigation is muddled

This is the most valid argument. We solved by being clever about
History.pushstate(), triggering when the next article title hits 50% of
screen. Bookmarking works fine.

#5 Scrollbar is hard to use

Misleading. The web is mostly mobile. People generally use efficient scroll
input devices, scroll wheels trackpads. Most browsers hide the scrollbar
because of this. Scrolling many tens-of-thousands of pixels is NBD.

#6 It is hard to use

Misleading, not quantifiable.

#7 Disorients users

Misleading, not quantifiable.

#8 No skipping allowed

Easily solved. We built an in-between module to provide the user with the
option to modify their infinite scroll path. If you pick something here we use
that to make the rest of articles closer to your interests.

#9 No bookmarking

Solved with History.pushstate()

#10 Terrible user experience

Any UI pattern can be abused to be bad UX.

# Pagiantion UX is usually bad

To counter the arguments. Arguably pagination is more broken. Navigating
pages. Generally they aren't bookmarkable unless you implement advanced cursor
pagination.

# Content consumption flow

Data supports that users want to consume content with minimal interaction and
engagement. If you provide a consistent scroll experience to get from one
thing to another, and it's relevant enough, people will really stick around
and consume it.

Bounces, time spent, and other KPIs for web-traffic engagement have all gone
up as a result of using infinite scroll.

Perhaps we're an outlier and paid attention to the difficult to solve
implementation nuances but I don't mind it on other sites.

The alternatives were footers full of information I'm not interested in and
outbrain modules...

~~~
nofunsir
I think your points are completely biased.

I'm going to rail against your attitude here, not you:

0\. Appeal to authority.

1\. Sounds like job security.

2\. Footers are NOT useless. Menus are aggravating.

3\. Analytics are 99% evil, 1% hot gas.

4\. Stay out of my History.pushstate(). I don't need 50 things in my back
stack just because your "page" couldn't fit on one screen.

5\. Too many incorrect facts to address in one line.

6\. It depends on what the definition of "is" is. No. Single cluttered pages
are quantifiably easier to use than a dynamic page of unknown length. Is it
ever going to stop?

7\. It disorents me, and I'm a super-ultra-mega power user. Spinning a 3D
model when the user scrolls down is downright unexpected behavior. It's a
trick. A gimmick. A distraction. It's disorienting.

8\. I don't want a choose-your-own-adventure. I want a damn single page with
damn information on it.

9\. I don't think that's a solution.

10\. I don't care about "User Experience." I want "User Interface". "UX
engineer" is just job title inflation for non-committal designers.

~~~
spookthesunset
“Analytics are evil”? Seriously? How else do you propose understanding how
people are interacting with your site? How can you A/B test improvements
without analytics?

------
qwtel
that is mostly a complaint against poorly implemented infinite scrolling.
there’s no reason why it would have the break urls, indexing, or the back
button.

~~~
forgotmypwd123
There's a lot of reasons why it would break all of those things. Hacking it so
that the URL & history is rewritten when content is loaded is significant
extra work.

I have no idea what you mean by indexing, given the word index doesn't feature
in the article. You also ignore the problems of making the scrollbar useless &
the footer unreachable. I don't see any fix for those issues at all.

~~~
greenhatman
You need to choose between having a footer and using infinite scroll. Can't do
both.

~~~
yesbabyyes
The way we did it for a product search type website was to show a regular page
first, with a "show more" button. After clicking that button, it would auto
load the next page(s) on scroll. If all you wanted was the footer, you
wouldn't ever experience the auto load.

------
crispinb
Not being used by social media, I don't come across infinite scrolling much.
But where I do it's most annoying. Discourse: how _dare_ you take over my
ctrl-f keyboard shortcut.

~~~
kadfak
That's a great example of the extra magic and complexity an infinitely
scrolled view requires. As you scroll down a huge Discord thread, they are
removing posts from the DOM for performance reasons.

You could use the browser's built-in search functionality by choosing _Edit -
> Find in This Page_ from your browser's toolbar, but in this case it would be
pointless as the results would be inconsistent as most data you've come past
is not present.

I'm curious how much worse the performance would be if they did not apply this
specific optimization.

Here's a thread with 618 replies, for example: [https://users.rust-
lang.org/t/crate-of-the-week/2704](https://users.rust-lang.org/t/crate-of-the-
week/2704)

~~~
crispinb
I remember reading a thread about this issue on Discourse's own board, and it
was clear the continuous scrolling was non-negotiable "because modish",
regardless of user preferences or experience.

> _I 'm curious how much worse the performance would be if they did not apply
> this specific optimization._

Pages without continuous scrolling that can have large numbers of posts or
entries don't typically show all by default. There are all the usual options -
paging, allowing the user to choose the number per page, etc. They're all
imperfect workarounds, and all better (for me) than continuous scrolling.

------
croo
... but I like infinite scrolling. I just don't like infinite content.

I prefer having a webshop list everything they have in a sub instead of
pagination. I prefer Amazon layout which just goes on and on with all kind of
stuff related to an item. I like to be able to ctrl-f on a page and see if I
hit what I need without clicking through mazes of links. I just don't like
pages that just generate more content after I finished the current one in the
hope I get bored and click on ads.

------
Grumbledour
I remember when Google Reader came along was probably the first time I saw
infinite scrolling and it was glorious! The best thing ever! I don't want my
RSS feeds any other way!

But for anything else? Not so much.

------
vezycash
I cant count how many times i've had to turn off wifi, or use firefox's
offline mode just because of infinite scrolling.

------
seriocomic
Title / Article should be "Stop Badly-implemented Infinite Scrolling". As many
commenters have pointed out, some of these "reasons" are due to poor
implementation.

------
chriswwweb
To me infinite scroll or not is more about what kind of content is it,
statistics like generated clicks and of course UX, than the questions what's
more difficult to implement.

With the abundance of ready to use opensource solutions, I'm sure most devs
don't need to implement infinite scroll or a pagination mechanism themselves
but they just use a component that does it out of the box and solves all those
technical problems for them.

To be sure what works best for your users and type of content, I would do two
versions, one with pagination and one with infinite scroll and let the numbers
decide which technique makes the user click / visit content and maybe which
technique does the user spend most time on the website.

I'm not totally against infinite scroll, for a social network news feed I
think it's a good use case. Also all the potential problems listed have a
solution and also some of the problems also exist when using a pagination. For
example letting a user bookmark a page url with a pagenumber on a website with
lots of new content is bad, as the content on the page number XY will have
changed after few hours / days. Some good solutions if you really want to
implement it on your own are listed in this google blog post:
[https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/02/infinite-scroll-
se...](https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/02/infinite-scroll-search-
friendly.html)

------
CorvusCrypto
Infinite scroll is not for user experience. It's to increase session times. If
you increase the time spent in an app or on a page you increase the chance of
getting revenue in ads for social or media sites or purchases in marketplaces.
In other words screw UX because this is about increasing engagement to
increase monetization. Stressed or not, users do increase session time on
infinite scroll pages than when using regular paginated views

------
textmode
One of the websites where one can find this annnoying "infinite scroll" is
YouTube channels.

I wrote a quick and dirty script to address this annoyance.

It can be used to output a table of all the video urls and video titles for
any YouTube channel.

"yy032" and "yy025" are some utilities I wrote to decode html and transform
urls to HTTP for HTTP/1.1 pipelining, respectively.1 Instead of using yy025
and openssl, one could alternatively make a separate TCP connection for each
HTTP request, e.g., using something like curl. Personally, I prefer not to
make lots of connections when retrieving mutiple pages from the same domain.

Here is a hypothetical example of how to use the script, "1.sh", to make a
table of all the video urls and video titles in a channel.

    
    
       echo https://www.youtube.com/user/example/videos|sh 1.sh|yy025|openssl s_client -connect www.youtube.com:443 > 2.html
       sh 1.sh urls < 2.html > example.1
       sh 1.sh titles < 2.html > example.2
       rm 2.html
       paste -d '\t' example.1 example.2
    
       # 1.sh
       case $1 in
       "")
       exec 2>/dev/null
       export Connection=close
       yy025|tcs www.youtube.com |sed 's/%25/%/g'|yy032 > 1.html
       while true;do
       x=$(sed 's/%25/%/g;s/\\//g' 1.html|yy032|grep -o "[^\"]*browse_ajax[^\"\\]*"|sed 's/u0026amp;/\&/g;s/&direct_render=1//;s,^,https://www.youtube.com,');
       echo > 1.html;
       test ${#x} -gt 100||break
       echo "$x" 
       echo "$x"|yy025|openssl s_client -connect www.youtube.com:443 -ign_eof > 1.html
       done;
       rm 1.html;
       ;;-h|-?|-help|--help) echo usage: echo https://www.youtube.com/user/example/videos \|$0 ;echo usage: $0 "[1|2]" \< 2.htm
       ;;1) sed 's/\\//g;s/u0026amp;//g;s/u0026quot;//g;s/u0026#39;//g'|grep -o "ltr\" title=\"[^\"]*"|sed 's/ltr..title=.//'  
       ;;2) sed 's/\\//g;s/u0026amp;//g;s/u0026quot;//g'|grep -o "[^\"]*watch?v=[^\"]*"|sed 's,^,https://www.youtube.com,'|uniq
       esac
    

1
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17689165](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17689165)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17689152](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17689152)

~~~
0xdeadb00f
All YouTube channels have an RSS feed too, which might be more intuitive to
parse.

------
jcims
Maybe it's just me because I just realized how irritating it is, but I really
dislike when the title of an article commands me to do something. I don't
really even understand why people do it, is it supposed to make me hate-click
the link? It just makes me think the author is juvenile and i lose interest.

~~~
brlewis
I think it's to draw the attention of people who want to tell others to do the
same thing. E.g. if you're saying the title of this article internally while
looking at an infinite-scrolling web site, then the title will get your
attention.

------
jasonlotito
So, as many problems as there are with infinite scrolling, people keep using
them because they generally work. Some might say that it's bad for users but
good for companies because it encourages them to stay on the site more by
using psychology, one can also point to the way sites promote a "Most popular
package" or how they price things to encourage people using psychology to
spend more than they might have originally.

Argue whatever you want, but if something works, people are going to use it.
And as long as it's not misleading people, it's hard to present it has a dark
pattern.

------
segfaultbuserr
The most stupid design is (1) put meta links such as "about", "copyright",
"contact", "abuse", "profile" links in the footer of the website, and (2)
using infinite scrolling. Literally, WTF?!

Every time I want to find a meta link, I need to have a race between my
reaction speed and the JavaScript loading time... Worse, some background
scripts are written in a way to trigger even if you press "Esc", which is
supposed to stop the current executing script.

------
jFriedensreich
The article is flawed, because for example it takes for granted that the
footer needs to scroll with the infinite scrollable content pane, which is
just an absurd thought to begin with. Similar statements hold true for memory
management, of course a naive implementation will eventually fill memory, but
the same is true for a bad implementation of an single page web app with
paging UI. Same for bookmarks, of course if you bookmark page 1 of a multi
page list, eventually the articles you saw will be pushed to page 2. And if
you have a single page application and forget to have the url change to the
articles you read, you will have issues, on the other hand if you read an
article in an infinite loading list, it would be no problem to change the url
as you read articles and make them linkable. If you take away all of these
statements you end up with the following: a) it is easier to mess up infinite
scrolling than to mess up paging, don't think its easy or you can build it
quickly 'on the side'. (my take on that point is) -> We need better best
practices and tooling to build infinite scolling for popular frontend
frameworks. In my opinion it is on the level of complexity as building a state
library such as redux including the react integrations and redux tooling and
needs a similar amount of contributors, support, application feedback, bug
reports etc. until it can provide a satisfactory mainstream user experience.
b) the article traps into the same mistake most medium/hackernoon articles
make: not more explicitly discriminating between real web apps and web pages
that just happen to use a js framework. A real web app is something like
calender, mailclient, taks, slack, fb messenger, trello etc. They have
completely different requirements and expectations and it would be absurd to
click to older pages of messages on slack and is really annoying to do so in
gmail. Even though the article just mentions the term "web site", it does sell
its advice as a kind of universal truth independent of context. For a web
page, something like new york times or medium articles or some informational
page for a company offering, i agree that especially autoloading of next
articles at the end of one opened post can be really annoying and in the
context of articles infinite scrolling is even easier to get wrong, but not
because of an universal law, but because the user interface has more things to
take into consideration and requires better planning.

------
t34543
I’d like to see the browser APIs prohibit this - and also disable interference
with text selecting and copy/paste buffer. There is no legit reason for this
functionality.

~~~
clinta
I think it would be very difficult to make something like Google docs or the
rich text compose options in a new email without the ability to trigger
actions on text selection and clipboard.

What I would like to see is a permission though, like when browsers ask for
your location: "This site want's to manipulate your clipboard. Allow?"

~~~
mikeash
If we could go back in time and redesign everything from a clean slate, we
really should just have different formats and client apps for “run portable
apps with rich GUIs over the Internet” and “view text with clickable links
embedded.”

------
kingkool68
I really took to heart this article about building a thoughtful, useable
infinite scroll that doesn't break the back button.
[https://tumbledry.org/2011/05/12/screw_hashbangs_building](https://tumbledry.org/2011/05/12/screw_hashbangs_building)

I think photo blogs are a good place to use infinite scroll.

------
yoz-y
I agree with most points but not with the bookmarking. Bookmarking paginated
content is rarely useful, unless the content rarely changes.

The thing that irritates me a lot with infinite scrolling is that it ruins
history. If the content somehow botches open in new tab then this basically
constrains the user to only ever see one piece of detail before getting crazy.

~~~
dogma1138
That’s only the case if the pages do not have unique URL’s for the content on
them.

------
nkozyra
I've seen this disappear from the web so much that it's jarring to encounter
nowadays. It was never, ever good UX.

~~~
brlewis
Twitter still does it, but their implementation is not terrible.

~~~
WillPostForFood
Twitter is horrible - scroll down a few pages, click something interesting,
hit back, and you’ve lost position, and have to reload and rescroll through
everything again. Even worse because some clicks will open a modal that you
can close and save position, but other clicks will reload the page.

------
Quekid5
Infinite scroll absolutely is a Dark Pattern unless you have a _very_ good
reason for it. For many things it's just obnoxious, but for e.g. Reddit (or
'endless' feeds in general) it is an extremely cynical way to drive compulsive
behavior to its logical (awful) conclusion.

------
yellowarchangel
I still firmly believe Reddit is only usable with RES infinite scroll enabled.
It's such a joy not having to click the 10px wide "next page" button.

Infinite scroll works in a lot of ways, and is integral to a content absorbing
functionality (if that's what you want).

~~~
anonymousab
I think an important point is to make it optional, and in some cases, opt-in.

------
wscott
[https://eviltrout.com/2013/02/16/infinite-scrolling-that-
wor...](https://eviltrout.com/2013/02/16/infinite-scrolling-that-works.html)

------
n_ary
Will read the article once home, but for now I have this rule of thumb: if
data is of streaming nature & short time valued, infinite scroll, else always
pagination. So far worked for me (:

------
tolger
I agree with the article, I hate infinite scrolling. It just doesn't feel
natural, and sometimes the performance is bad which makes everything feel
sluggish.

------
tomphoolery
> a developer suggests using infinite scrolling

What developer suggests this? Seems like the author can't tell the difference
between a developer and a "growth hacker".

------
segmondy
I'll like to see an infinite scrolling with pagination. It's easily do able. I
don't know why it's not being done.

~~~
HereBeBeasties
I do this on one of our internal sites at work - it makes a table that is
fitted to the page vertically, where scrolling with the wheel changes the
page. Super easy to flick through results (better than infinite scroll in
fact), which is the main issue I have with paginated things.

------
katzeilla
I guess sometimes infinite scrolling is fine, as long as you have a "go to the
last reply" btn.

------
flywithdolp
People spend so much time in their companies on doing the same tasks like
looking at Google Analytics

it's insane

------
rado
Especially if it has a footer.

------
reroute1
Will they consider an article titled "Stop using bright neon green in
prominent design elements"? I think I figured that one out in 6th grade.

------
witrak
Highly biased opinions... What about articles where access to all parts is
needed, like scientific articles, manuals, reports, etc? And for the general
public too, at least part of readers are able to concentrate on reading much
longer than thru a couple of paragraphs.

~~~
irishsultan
That's not infinite scroll. That's just a large page.

~~~
Geee
No, a book is not a large page.

~~~
ozzmotik
i bet it would be theoretically feasible to take each individual page of a
book and perform some chemical process on them such that you join the bottom
of a given page with the top of the next one on chemical level, in which case,
a book certainly can be a single page. really, all books are just a single
conceptual page split at given boundaries to give the impression of structure.

~~~
ozzmotik
no, I didn't say that you can turn a book into a single page exactly. I said
that you can bind the pages of a book together in such a way that it would be
one long, continuous page. rather, i said that conceptually, a book can be a
single page, and beyond that I also went on to clarify that a book is nothing
more than a single page split at arbitrary locations to give the impression of
structure.

if there were a single piece of paper long enough to hold the entirety of a
book, and it were written out on that page, would that make it any less of a
book? it may not be one in the sense that it is no longer bound together, but
at the same time, in the former example the pages were bound together by some
chemical process into one monolithic page; the only thing missing is a cover
to hold it together, though I have seen college textbooks come as just loose
leaf paper that one has to bind themselves but that's still a "book" prior to
binding.

also: what if a story or some such were to be written on a scroll? just
because it doesn't fit the precise literal definition of what a book is,
doesn't mean it doesn't contain the same semiotic substance as "book" and as
such doesn't mean that it automatically isn't one. but maybe im just being
pedantic ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

