I think they meant how you can’t get a permalink to your feed/timeline view-state[1], so other people can see exactly what you see (not just what’s in the viewport but also the surrounding/offscreen content and broader context).
[1]: something like a link specifying the contents of my feed at a specific date+time and scroll-position.
…whereas with old-school SSR paging it’s right there in the querystring paging params (page-size, page-index or item-offset, and an optional results anchor for stability).
I’ll concede that a well-designed infinite-scrolling (or “click to load more inline” button) feature could use history.pushState to dynamically update the browser’s address with new query params but I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen anyone do that - which is a shame.
“Anchor + Offset” is stable because the anchor param should uniquely identify a specific record from which the offset is applied; a sort-order, direction, and page-size may also be optimally specified.
No it's not stable. You also need the query/filter, and a snapshot of the state of all posts at the exact moment you want to grab the link, since posts can be created/deleted/changed. That's also assuming that your anchor still exists and wasn't deleted or changed.
The only stable way to share what you're seeing is with a screenshot.
The reason infinite scroll is bad has nothing to do with the technicalities of the HTML behind it. You could always implement a technical solution for these technical issues but that wouldn't fix the real problem.
It's addictive. There is no "one more page and I'm done" because the page never ends and you're never done. You get to the bottom, more content loads automatically and people say "this looks interesting, let me scroll some more". That's why it's doom scrolling because all you do is scroll, no need for any other input. The bait is always there right in front of you and I'll bet that the algorithm make sure the first couple of posts that load every time you get to the bottom are the "juiciest" ones to make sure you take that bait and keep scrolling.
Pagination hides the juicy bait. It's still there waiting for you but it's hidden until you ask for it. That's a big difference.
It's very much a slot machine, maybe the next short video will be interesting. Maybe not, who knows, but you keep scrolling through shorts and binge watching.
Google search or a traditional paginated forum doesn't provide that either. No guarantee that page 15 of thread X will contain the same posts as it does now when the moderators wake up and delete the flame war.
