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Comment by uranusjr | Hacker News Reader

> Also, as a user, in most cases, I don’t care that I’m on page 317 of my paginated screen that displays me rows 3170-3179 (assuming 10 rows per page). I really don’t. The page number is absolutely useless in terms of user experience.

But what happens when you do care? There are numerous times I clicked away from a Facebook or Twitter timeline, but then want to go back to that post I was reading and comment. And I can’t, because my back button brings me back to the top of the timeline, not where I left. Pagination would have helped.

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Yes, this annoying endless-scrolling without pagination on reddit is the reason I still use old.reddit.com, even though I think the new one is overall prettier. But you make one wrong click and you're completely lost, back at the top.

Pagination also takes advantage of spatial memory, so it's far far easier for me to find something when pagination is available instead of just search/sort/infinite scroll.

I've actually clicked 10+ pages back in gmail many times to find an email I could only vaguely remember, knowing roughly where in the history it should be, that I was completely unable to find with search due to a misremembered detail.

I don’t like infinite scrolling, but it does have one advantage IMO. It’s that everything you’ve seen is on the page, so, unless the page curls older entries, you can Ctrl-F what you want to find that you just saw.

If you have an account on reddit you can avoid having to use old.reddit.com if you turn off "Use new Reddit as my default experience" in preferences. Not sure how long it's going to last but I'm sure the "old" subdomain is going to stop working around the same time.

Other useful options to uncheck:

allow reddit to log my outbound clicks for personalization

allow my data to be used for research purposes

allow subreddits to show me custom themes

show user flair

show link flair

It’s even worse than that - back button brings you to the top of a _new_ timeline, that often doesn’t have the thing you wanted to go see, even if you scroll to the same point.

Well, pagination would be kind of the dumb way to do that. Smarter would be allowing users to query using a timestamp and then simply jump back to 1st of July 2007 or whatever it is you are looking at. Google photos does this pretty nicely. Using timestamps is also a smarter way to implement pagination if you do actually need it: select * where timestamp < x order by timestamp desc limit 10; Pretty cheap query to run if you have an index on the timestamp and you can just grab the next timestamp from the last result.

I've been doing search stuff for a while and this kind of UX requirement always pops up when you are dealing with junior designers or POs. They're thinking "hmm search" lets have some paging and just blindly copy a broken UX.

HN solved it nicely by just having a load more. I might hit that a few times but rarely more than a couple of times. One weird thing with that is that new articles often get added in between clicks in which case articles from the previous page reappear on the next page.

If I am stupid or using an application that doesn't have easily-Googleable documentation on its search syntax, then using a timestamp-based search filter may well not be possible for me.

Even if it is possible, it may be more work to look up the syntax than it is to zero in on the thing I want by page number.

> here are numerous times I clicked away from a Facebook or Twitter timeline, but then want to go back to that post I was reading and comment. And I can’t, because my back button brings me back to the top of the timeline, not where I left. Pagination would have helped.

YMMV: Not anymore. Clicking back refreshes the facebook feed for me.

On a more serious note: pagination is really helpful when working with inventory or data sets, it's some kind of crumble piece of information to hold in short term memory if you want to get back to a particular item that you saw "somewhere around here, in the 2 000 range".

But the article is more about database performance than UI.

I think in those cases it would be better to implement pagination, but with a "from" ID, such that the first element in that page will be the one with that ID. I remember a post saying that this was faster, and more useful in cases like Facebook where the timeline is always updating. This happens to me all the time when I'm browsing news sites with pagination: I go back in the article history to catch up, then I leave it there a few hours and when I come back and go to the next page I see half of the articles on the previous page on top of the new one.

Facebook and Twitter timelines are bad examples. There is no reason to avoid indexing by date and those services do in fact index by date. Those services may even be able to use custom database engines and build excellent date-based pagination menu from their index — they just don't do it. Infinite scrolling has better user retention (read: "takes more time to navigate") and allows to easily inject advertizing. So Facebook and Twitter will continue to use it regardless of it's technical merits.

The article does not make a point to avoid feature-rich pagination. It is not about infinite scrolling somehow being a great thing either. It is about SQL "OFFSET" operator being a piece of donkey shit. SQL requires OFFSET to have precise starting position and that position can only be determined by iterating over first OFFSET items from database — which generally does not use index. Most backend programmers have no clue and try to use OFFSET as their go-to pagination tool. Their pagination sucks and makes servers hang under trivial load.

In fact, with offset pagination, there's no way you can ever get back to that item, because you didn't reference the item, you referenced page 317. By the time you go back to page 317, there are 28 new items, and the item you care about is now on page 321, or whatever.

Your use case is precisely a use case for keyset pagination. What you're referencing here from Facebook or Twitter is just poor UX

No, that's why you should reference pages from a version of search ID=234 and not search ID=356.

Your back button brings you back to the top of the timeline?

I'm kind of jealous, mine brings me back to what seems to be a completely random position.

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