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Comment by jonstaab | Hacker News Reader

I've seen this argument more and more lately, and it's starting to bother me because some places work great with infinite scrolling (twitter, serial comic strip viewers).

This article offers a small disclaimer at the end, but otherwise says things are impossible, when they simply aren't. #1 is easily solved by removing offscreen content once it's been scrolled past, and autoloading in both directions. Numbers 3-4, 8, and 9 (several of which are redundant complaints) are definitely the worst part of infinite scroll websites, but are pretty easily fixable with client-side routing.

The problem is people implement infinite scroll in terms of finite-scrolling documents, when there are a number of other dynamics to take into account. It's like saying "Don't make video games because you can't play them with a remote".

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> some places work great with infinite scrolling (twitter, serial comic strip viewers).

I would contend that Twitter does not work great with infinite scrolling. In fact, I kept envisioning Twitter as I read the article. One of my biggest grievances with Twitter (shared with much of modern computing because multi-device computing doesn't have something like PAO [1], which would keep all my devices' views the same) is that I can't easily resume reading my Twitter stream between devices. I can't even easily navigate to "show me the stream at 11am today," which would be a viable workaround for multi-device views. If I want to find a last-read point, I just need to sit with my finger on the page down key until I see something familiar.

Ultimately, my user experience with infinite scrolling is simple: I give up and stop bothering to try to be thorough in my consumption of Twitter content. I wonder if Twitter has the necessary metrics to realize that infinite scroll can hurt engagement. I doubt it.

[1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao

I'd contend Twitter's problem isn't infinite scrolling, it's eschewing chronological sorting in favor of algorithmic. There is no objective order to most content on twitter, so deep linking to a place in the feed is impossible, whether you use pagination or infinite scroll. Which is why infinite scroll works - it solves the problem of defining what page 2 even is. Not defending algirithmic sorting of course.

>some places work great with infinite scrolling (twitter [...]

First time I've ever heard someone refer to infinite scrolling on Twitter as great. I can't tell you how many times I accidentally scrolled to the top of twitter because I accidentally tapped too high on my iPhone and it jumped to the top, losing my place, which was dozens of "pages" down. It's the reason I never use twitter for more than a couple of minutes.

If there are MULTIPLE views for a type of data, an infinite scroll consumer is a valid 'secondary' view.

In the case of Twitter I think I'd find it WAY more useful to have a view that breaks things down by month or week, with the old items gaining permanent addresses on such pages, and actions that break out of the infinite scroll re-directing to those permanent places.

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