Comment by w23j | Hacker News Reader

Comment by w23j | Hacker News Reader

So this might be the place to ask this. The list of articles by Matt Levine on Bloomberg has button at the end that loads 20 older articles, when you click on it. Now since Matt is on parental leave I want to read some older articles, let's say from 2014.

Am I correct, that to do that I need to click 6 (years) * 200 (work days) / 20 (articles per click) = 60 times and wait for the page load to do that?! Is there really no other way to access these articles? Aren't they effectively unaccessible for most users because of that?

(I found a way to manipulate a JS variable to get to the older articles, but this is clearly not the inteded use.)

The same seems to be the case for the youtube videos of a very active vlogger. You can easily access current videos or the first ones, but not like from 4 years in the past.

I am asking this, because I always wonder if I am just to dumb to see the obvious easy way to use these sites or if there just is no way to do it?

It is a pattern, and even places like Twitter and Reddit are affected. Many of them, you can't even click 60 times, you're limited to X items and then that's it after that, even if it is your own writing! I think it is laziness and incompetence in systems design more than anything nefarious, although a lack of regard for the user can be considered a dark pattern in itself.

HN and dilbert.com are shining example of how to do it RIGHT. They provide calendar archives, filtering by tag, predictable URLs.

I keep this in mind when designing my systems. Because I think it is important for the user to own their data, my forum systems makes user profile downloadable by default, in the smallest possible format readable by both software and humans: text (with some tokens).

There isn't an easier way. Every time I see any variant of the infinite scroll pattern which has come into vogue over the last decade, I feel the same complaints inside my head. True pagination was really nice. I miss when it was the default.

Similarly- Is there a way to get a list of all his longform pieces (not the daily newsletters)?

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