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Infinite scroll evolved alongside algorithms that incentivise addictive content. So it’s “good” UX in that it’s effective for consuming addictive content… When
by afandian 2mo ago
Infinite scroll evolved alongside algorithms that incentivise addictive content. So it’s “good” UX in that it’s effective for consuming addictive content…
When I’m trying to do something constructive, like search or browse, infinite scroll is IMHO disastrously bad. You can’t keep your place in the list, or jump ahead/back.
- xigoi 2mo agoOn the contrary, pagination makes it impossible to keep your place in the list if it changes between page loads.
- vitally3643 2mo agoDid you think HN has an unusable and bad interface? It seems to be a remarkably popular website despite having hard pages that change order on every refresh.
- xigoi 2mo ago> Did you think HN has an unusable and bad interface? In thems of pagination, yes, which is why I prefer to use https://hckrnews.com/ https://hckrnews.com/.
- im3w1l 2mo agoWhy is the list constantly changing anyway?
- xigoi 2mo agoBecause other people keep adding new posts (and upvoting existing posts, which changes their order).
- im3w1l 2mo agoWhile that's true I think that once the feed has been observed in a certain way the advantages of stability outweigh the advantages of showing a tweaked version the second time it is loaded.
- xigoi 2mo agoThe user expectation is that if you refresh the page, you will see fresh content.
- alpinisme 2mo agoNot if you’re on page 2
- 8note 2mo agomine isnt? if i refresh the page it should be almost the same. maybe a couple new things at the very top, but i should still be able to find the thing i was just looking at. by comparison, facebook auto-reloads while you're halfway down a page, and wont show you any of the same things. its an incredibly poor experience
- drdexebtjl 2mo agoYeah, this is terrible UX that we somehow normalized. At the very least we should be able to scroll backwards after a page refresh to see previous posts.
- dsego 2mo agoI get frustrated by this so much, because sometimes I come across a post with a video or something I want to see, but I leave it for a few minutes to take care of something, and then when I come back it auto reloads and I can't find it anymore, the back button won't work, scrolling through the timeline is futile, it's just gone.
- cwillu 2mo ago‹looks at hn›
- afandian 2mo agoThe challenge is to retain an ordering over the result set. How would infinite scroll behave any differently in this case? The changing results seems to be an orthogonal concern to pagination/infinite scroll.
- xigoi 2mo agoInfinite scroll makes the problem much easier, even if it’s still a problem. The only action you need to support is loading more results, which you can do by loading all results and filtering out those already shown. With pagination, the user may say “give me page 3” and you have no idea what was on pages 1 and 2, if they were even loaded.
- hdgvhicv 2mo agoIf page 1 and 2 were 10 each you load results 21-30 Same as if you are scrolling and have reached result 20 And want to load more.
- falcor84 2mo agoBut the underlying table changed since. I'm not very familiar with these myself, but it seams to me that the best solution is to keep a session cursor for the user, and these are a lot simpler when you only ever move it forward.
- Dylan16807 2mo agoIt's slightly different but I don't see why there should be a notable difference in difficulty. You need to somehow represent what you saw so far and act based on that.
- xigoi 2mo agoWith infinite scroll, “what you saw so far” is in the client. With pagination, it exists only in the user’s mind.
- nkrisc 2mo agoHow are you going to keep your place if the order changes anyway? What is your place if the order has changed? If the order changes, all bets are off regardless of pagination or infinite scroll.
- xigoi 2mo agoWhen asked to load more items, simply take the entire list (which may have changed) and remove the items already shown on the screen.
- tmtvl 2mo agoHow does that differ from 'when asked to load more items, simply take the entire list (which may have changed) and remove the items already shown on previous pages'?
- xigoi 2mo agoThe fact that, in general, you don’t know what was on the previous pages, if anything. The user may just randomly decide to open page 3 without having visited the previous two pages. Or they clicked “next” after having page 2 open on their computer for several days and meanwhile they used your website on a different device.
- inigyou 2mo agoIf implementing this idea, it wouldn't just be page 3 any more, it would be page numbered 3 excluding IDs 75833,6857362,2737,... Reddit page links include both the number of the first item on the page (only cosmetic) and the last item on the previous page (which actually determines what is displayed).
- nkrisc 2mo agoThat’s not “keeping your place” in an ordered list if the order has changed between the requests for pages 3 and 4.
- bigbuppo 2mo agoAh yes, let me just look at Instagram for the ideal model of infinite scroll UX. You can't even scroll up to something you've actually subscribed to that you didn't mean to scroll past without it tossing it into the memory hole and replacing it with something you don't care about.
- thaumasiotes 2mo ago> On the contrary, pagination makes it impossible to keep your place in the list if it changes between page loads. Well, that's obviously false. There are two styles of pagination: https://yourblog.zox/archives?page=4 https://yourblog.zox/archives?before=2019-06-03&count=10 That second style will never change (unless you insert entries into the past). The first style will change. But it hardly makes it impossible to keep your place in the list; if you come back three years later, you'll find that that link goes to a random location, but if you come back next week, that link is going to go to a place that is very close to the place you left off, requiring minimal adjustment to find your place again.
- xigoi 2mo agoThe second style makes it impossible to sort by anything other than time.
- gnoll_of_gozag 2mo agoand places other than reddit dont need it
- masfuerte 2mo agoIf it's the only thing you make available. If you want other options you can add other options.
- esafak 2mo agoSo you'd rather something like Slack was paginated? I think that would be disastrously bad.
- asadotzler 2mo ago[dead]
- drdexebtjl 2mo agoSlack isn’t infinite. At some point there are no more old messages or no more new messages depending on which way you’re scrolling. The problem is infinite content.
- iamnothere 2mo agoPagination works just as well with infinite content.
- drdexebtjl 2mo agoGood. Use pagination instead.
- esafak 2mo agoWhat good does it serve to have to constantly hit 'next page' in the middle of a real-time conversation? That's a bad UX.
- drdexebtjl 2mo agoMaybe re-read the thread? A real-time conversation is not infinite content, it’s chronological and it ends when there are no more new or old messages. You shouldn’t use pagination, and I don’t expect this law or any similar law to enforce pagination on real-time conversations.