> many of them are just a variation of the final reason: Terrible user experience.
If we're playing Architecture Astronaut, that's true of every possible issue. Compiler crash? Security hole? Deleted all user data? All merely variations of "terrible user experience".
> several very successful websites that use infinite scrolling in one way or another. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit just to name a few.
Yes, all sites which first took several years to build up a massive user base and benefit greatly from network effects. Most websites are not Facebook. 20 years ago, it was "But Microsoft does it!" -- and the response was "But you're not Microsoft."
I'd love to find out how many people use "old.reddit.com" specifically to avoid infinite scrolling.
> Is infinite scrolling on these sites disorienting the user? hard to navigate? rendering a "terrible user experience"? One could certainly argue that the data says otherwise.
What data, exactly? Yes, I do think it's disorienting, hard, and terrible, and I hear similar complaints all the time. If I had a nickel for every time I clicked something by mistake in Facebook, or clicked "back" and wasn't taken back to what I was looking at before, I'd have ... a big ol' jar of nickels, anyway.
> The article doesn't even suggest that there might be situations where infinite scrolling might befit the site.
You're right. These are 10 reasons it's bad for users. There's one obvious one that benefits the site: because there's no obvious stopping point, it's great for sites that want to be addictive. People eat more if they have a infinite bowl [1], too. If there's any user benefit to infinite scrolling, I have not heard it.
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15761167