The Infinite Scroll | Hacker News Reader

The Infinite Scroll

cjr.org

71 pointszbentley47 comments

The author described the modern web browsing experience to a tee. It's awful and one of the reasons my web browsing is limited to very few sites and I'm careful on what I click on.

The modern web browsing experience is clearly not what TBL had in mind when he started developing the web.

Newspaper sites seem to want you to do everything but actually read the story you've clicked on to read.

Take this for example: https://www.mirror.co.uk/lifestyle/health/coronavirus-doesnt...

Before we even get to the story, they're trying to draw you away to other content. Then we have a video and then we have a newsletter signup form. And an ad. Of course we have an advert. This is the modern web.

Following this, we have a few short paragraphs that are actually the story we came to read. A huge image, then more links to take you away from the story. Another handful of short paragraphs, another link to take you away from the story and this repeats until we get to the end of the story we came to read. Some comments follow the story (with a bunch of more links to take us away between the two, of course) and then what feels like an infinite scroll of sponsored links.

I think the Daily Mirror is possibly one of the worst (one of many reasons I don't ever visit this site except by mistake or in the case of this comment) but I'm finding more and more websites are almost impossible to read. Which is why I don't really spend much time on the web these days. I'd say the majority of my web browsing habits come via youtube these days.

HN is usually pretty reliable for decent content that is easy to consume, but beware if you click on a link found via Google or DDG (or other mainstream search engines)

> The author described the modern web browsing experience to a tee. It's awful and one of the reasons my web browsing is limited to very few sites and I'm careful on what I click on.

NoScript is pretty useful for this. If a website doesn't work without JavaScript, odds are very good the author's incentives are something other than to convey information, so the content is probably not worth consuming anyway.

I'll give that a try!

And in many cases (including this article), Firefox's Reader View will fix websites that don't work without JavaScript. As a bonus, it also removes all "design".

It's kind of shocking how often I use Reader View now, particularly on mobile. If stripping a page of all design elements is a feature, how is that design not intrinsically user-hostile?

I used to use NoScript religiously, but since the move to `quantum` I couldn't seem to get it to work right. Either I couldn't understand the icon system or or was buggy. Has it improved since then?

Quantum deprecated the old method of Add-On development in favor of Web Extensions. NoScript didn't have a Web Extensions version initially and has been working out the transition ever since. But that was 2 years ago...

There was a hiccup during the Firefox WebExtension switch, but it has been working fine for a long time now. I even use it on mobile, which is a lifesaver.

I switched to uMatrix when NoScript wasn't working with Quantum yet. I think I like it better than NoScript now anyway, and have never gone back.

> Before we even get to the story, they're trying to draw you away to other content. Then we have a video and then we have a newsletter signup form. And an ad. Of course we have an advert. This is the modern web.

This the the modern newspaper. Newspapers have some of the most useless, hostile web sites out there. It’s one of the biggest reasons why they’re dying. They’re squandering their brands and public trust and actively driving readers away by providing a horrifically bad product.

The article makes it sound like this is just the way “the web” is these days, like there’s some force of nature compelling newspapers to build awful products. But there isn’t. They are choosing to build their businesses around advertising networks.

It’s not fair to the web to say newspaper sites are typical or the only option. Much of the web isn’t like that though. There are plenty of blogs and web apps that are a joy to use. And there are plenty of journalism businesses that succeed without ad network revenue - e.g. The Economist, the Athletic, Daring Fireball, Stratechery.

When I hear "infinite scroll" I think of the way Facebook or Reddit just keeps loading new content as I scroll. But this article is really mostly about the sorry state of advertising on the web, and talks about sites that just have an infinitely long list of chumbox ads at the bottom of the page. No content, just infinite ads. The use of infinite scroll by Facebook or Reddit is controversial in its own right, but this is really a different kind of "infinite scroll" that I didn't even existed, I guess because I use an ad-blocker.

Reddit doesn’t use infinite scroll. I think you mean Twitter, no?

It does, unless you're on old.reddit.com.

With res you can have infinite scroll on old.reddit.com as well.

Which I actually like, but res comes with more shortcut bases behaviors so that may have something to do with it. I feel like the entire package gives me more control over how I browse reddit, not less.

Yep, I forgot about the new design. Tried it again just now, what a train wreck! I didn’t realize it has infinite scroll, only tried it briefly before.

Sure, but why WOULDN'T you choose to use old.reddit.com ?

There's loads of reasons not to! Monks who are trying to exercise their patience skills would find it very useful for example. Those who stress test input devices for peripherals companies will surely be a fan of the much increased need to click to read a thread as well.

Twitter doesn't actually have infinite scroll. It caps eventually.

It does and it even have links in the footer that you can't reach.

why would anyone keep scrolling when they reach the ads at the bottom of the page?

I know some sites and/or ads are deliberately designed to make advertising hard to distinguish from content. It's probably the kind of thing which has a very low success rate, but an even lower cost so it ends up getting implemented.

I've noticed that a lot of shopping sites have gotten rid of infinite scroll in favor of a "load more" button on the bottom of the page.

I wonder if this is motivated by product reasons, or if it's done to solve technical problems.

instinctively i would say a load more button would sell more than infinite scroll since it limits the information shown to the user, which mean he's more likely to act (e.g. less "paralysis by analysis")

Actually if analysis was quick enough, I’d prefer to see all items at once.

But what they do is re-xhr on every filter click, making it impossible. What’s wrong with just loading a big json of all items in a given group and allow me to sort/filter/compare quickly to find good ones? Their funny “web 2.0 framework” is at least 5 times heavier than the entire product base gzipped, and still uses web 1.0 style to operate. The only 2.0 thing about that is how flipping quick their backend paralyzes their clients.

Personally, I find the "infinite scroll" to be one of the most devious forms of control developers and product folks have leveraged against individuals. It's extremely manipulative and extremely easy to build.

It's just so incredibly asymmetric with who it benefits -- and it's clearly not the users.

I cannot fathom how the "toe-fungus" ads still make money. Doesn't every internet user, at this point, have an instinctual spam sense? I don't even see the individual ads; they're just noise. I actually assume that even if I were interested in the headlines, clicking the link wouldn't even take me to that content but to malware and scams. But I don't actually know that because, again, they are so blatant that I've never actually clicked one.

The most likely explanation is that it's older people who didn't grow up on the internet and still don't use it that much. If so, I wonder how the industry will change when nobody's left who's gullible enough to click? Will the quality of ads increase, at least, to where they represent real products? Or will scammers just get more creative?

Sadly, I have caught myself looking at those ads and clicking them a few times.

The draw is something similar to browsing Reddit. Endless bullshit and nonsense, but titillating and addictive.

I used to pay for a digital-only subscription to the San Jose Mercury News. Then one day, some ad (or combination thereof) appeared that caused the text to shift every second: On odd-numbered seconds, the text would reflow slightly; on even-numbered seconds, the content would return to ‘normal’.

This behavior made the page effectively unreadable. Reader modes didn’t exist for me at the time (or I just wasn’t aware of them). Reloading would sometimes fix the issue; sometimes not.

The issue began to occur once in every five articles viewed, and I gave up: When my subscription came up for renewal, I threw the notice away.

I hated the infinite scroll in Facebook and I abhor it in the new Reddit site.

For one, I cannot react the 'footer' of the page anymore.

In addition to that, there is a definite performance tax due to the loading content.

And I like own my scrollbar not have it change scale and scroll magically.

Okay. Did you have any thoughts about the article?

Aza Raskin, the inventor of Infinite Scroll, seriously regrets this invention. He is now co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology (humanetech.com) and trying to improve the negative sides of tech.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aza_Raskin

While the sentiment is admirable, I don't think it's anything to beat yourself up over. History has shown time and again that some inventions will happen when their prerequisites are filled — if he hadn't built it, sooner or later someone else would have. Simultaneous uncoordinated inventions of similar nature throughout history are a good example of this.

Even this site had a popup that the article dislikes so much!

At least they're self-aware:

> There are a few sites that look and work better—the ones that people pay for, generally, or ones built with the luxurious snowdrift margins of Medium—but mostly there are sites like this one and others that are even worse.

Funny. The site doesn't even work in my installation of Firefox. I can't scroll.....

Chromium is struggling here too. Bit ironic given the title of the article.

Yeah, I opened it in Firefox, with the usual adblockers and so forth, and couldn't actually scroll the article at all. I switched to Reader View and was able to read it.

This article really should have included pictures and maybe a short GIF. The description is clear to anyone who's run into these day after day, but the visuals would really drive home how badly this type of UX reflects on the web property's brand.

Surprisingly, for an article named "infinite scroll", there was no mention of actual "infinite scroll" mechanisms on sites like Reddit, Quartz and Techcrunch, where scrolling below a a certain point will auto-load the next article or paginate to the next series of posts.

Does anybody has examples of websites that do this? It would be useful to see this in action.

I can't scroll this website at all.

I had the same issue, I reloaded the site and it worked. I guess this is a race condition in JavaScript and it works when it's cached in the browser cache.

I also can not scroll this website.

What a failure hahaha

It just takes a while for the content to load.

Reader mode to the rescue.

I couldn't for several seconds. It was amazingly ironic.

Then after it finally loaded, I scrolled to the bottom to make sure there was one.

Same issue, how ironic.

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