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Comment by elpool2 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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

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.

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