Instead of disappearing, items can be shown e.g. grayed-out.

You could then refresh to remove the grayed-out items, but in practice you wouldn't need to.

Another approach is to use a "hold" button, which suspends all external updates.

Also not ideal if you are operating on limited data connection (takes forever to load) or are trying to continuously load an expensive webpage.

Yeah that's one of my biggest gripes with Quora, you can totally lose content that you wanted to read or respond to through any act of carelessness that leads to a page load or even the page bugging out.

do a search on thingiverse.com and then scroll down. if you search a big enough topic every 20 or 30 seconds as your scrolling it jumps up and you lose your place.. i'm not sure how to avoid this feature, but it is truly annoying