Terrible user experience. If it infinitely scrolls I can be sure some gesture on the phone will lose my spot and it will take ages to find where I was. Also they rarely play nice with the back button. There is usually a better way to present data.
For reading, do you prefer books or ancient scrolls?
Apollo (reddit client on iOS) solves this by having the same gesture undo itself -- tap at the top to scroll to the top of the reddit post, tap again to return to where you were.
I'm not saying your complaint is invalid, just that there are ways of mitigating the issue. And that said, I can't imagine how reddit threads would work if paginated.
Yes. Pagination can be bad if the URL indexes by 1-10, 11-20 etc. But I think HN paginates using the post ID, so that the links are permanent (?) which is a better way to do it. Basically the novel idea here is to treat the browser like a REST client.
This also means you need a predictable, deterministic algorithm, like "ORDER BY DATE DESC", but Reddit does have order by popularity, so that will not be idempotent. But now being super picky as order by popularity is pretty useful. Although I think date should be the default. And order by [what cambridge analytica-likes know about me] should be off.
HN also lets you elide branches with a click, so you're not trapped in a section you're not interested in. It's so nice opening a 400 response thread, getting 10 messages into the top comment, and clicking the hide button and watching 200 messages vanish.
Do you have a way to fold a branch once you're, as you say, 10 messages in? Or do you need to scroll back up to the parent to fold it? That's what I'm seeing and it's sub-optimal.
HackerNews threads aren't paginated, at least not for me. I just checked a post with 500 comments on it, and they all displayed in one long list.
HackerNews posts are paginated. And there isn't any interface for navigating the pages. Which is fine for HN's minimalist approach and tech-oriented audience. But it hardly seems optimal for a general audience.
Yeah but how many people will discover that functionality themselves vs how much effort will you expend trying to educate the rest of your users? Pagination wins because there's nothing to learn, it's obvious where you are and how to get somewhere else.
Sounds reasonable. I am complaining about infinite scroll on the web. But inside a native app it might be better since there is more precise control of that experience. Assuming the app creator has done a good job.
Well, first, it's not reliable. If the network goes down and it doesn't have some form of recovery, you gotta start from scratch. Second, it's not bookmarkable (except for the odd case), so you can't send specific pages to anyone, you often can't start navigating in it one day and continue on other, or in another device. Third, you lose navigation and exploration features, like navigating to the first page and seeing the oldest stuff, or going into the middle.
But the biggest reason people hate as a matter principle is because it is in 99% of cases done without any UX research and without any care from developers, and that's in the best case. The worst case is to cause doomscrolling, which is nefarious in its own.
It is disrespectful to users. If you don't want people seeing old content just fucking delete it.
I feel vaguely-neutral/negative toward it. It plays somewhat annoyingly with things like bookmarking (mitigated slightly by the fact that infinite scrolls are usually generated content anyway so bookmarking them is probably meaningless) and are trying to tempt the user into endless scrolling (but I guess it is our responsibility to resist the temptation there).
