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I've never figured out what the problem was that infinite-scroll was supposed to fix. Unfucking the Back button is nice, but it feels kind of like expecting praise because you've decided to stop beating your wife.

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Paging is an implementation detail that's forced on users, like flipping the cassette to side B. It's really great for reading a stream of content without having to think about previous or next, especially when referencing items that would otherwise be on a previous page. DuckDuckGo is a good example.

That said, it's also abused a lot...

Anyone who has encountered a book is familiar with the concept of pages. I doubt that people would prefer their books printed on a single strip of paper. Why do the same for websites. Not to mention that bookmarks are broken in both scenarios (single sheet books and infinite scrolling webpages).

Couldn't agree with this more. Infinite scroll and expandable sub-lists on index pages make it impossible to use those pages in a meaningful way. If there is ever any value to looking back to previous stuff in the list you need it broken into smaller chunks like pages so that you can find the thing you wanted. And if there isn't any value then why make it available at all?

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