Not being used by social media, I don't come across infinite scrolling much. But where I do it's most annoying. Discourse: how dare you take over my ctrl-f keyboard shortcut.
You could use the browser's built-in search functionality by choosing Edit -> Find in This Page from your browser's toolbar, but in this case it would be pointless as the results would be inconsistent as most data you've come past is not present.
I'm curious how much worse the performance would be if they did not apply this specific optimization.
Here's a thread with 618 replies, for example: https://users.rust-lang.org/t/crate-of-the-week/2704
> I'm curious how much worse the performance would be if they did not apply this specific optimization.
Pages without continuous scrolling that can have large numbers of posts or entries don't typically show all by default. There are all the usual options - paging, allowing the user to choose the number per page, etc. They're all imperfect workarounds, and all better (for me) than continuous scrolling.