Comment by axiosgunnar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by axiosgunnar | Hacker News Reader

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How is infinite scroll an antipattern?

It‘s simply like having an automatic transmission in an ICE car.

The motor type is an implementation detail the user does not want to care about.

I want to press the pedal and the car accelerates. What happens in the background does not concern me.

Same for websites.

If I see a list that is larger than the height of my screen, I want to be able to keep scrolling until I decide to stop.

I do not care that the creators of the website have structured their database so that the current DB would return 573738 entries.

I also do not care that the way the developers decided to present the application to me (via a browser) means that every row entry is a HTML element and showing 573738 HTML nodes at once would slow down the browser.

I just want to keep scrolling (and will stop after a few hundred rows anyways).

Having these kind of ivory tower fringe opinions like „infinite scroll bad“ is gate-keeping by middle-aged backend devs that panic at the speed and impact of the frontend world, plain and simple.

I wouldn't call it an antipattern either - it literally does exactly what the programmer wants, but it's definitely a dark pattern.

Most of us humans have an urge to finish things, but infinite scroll by definition never finishes. This increases engagement of users by utilizing their psychology, which is basically the definition of a dark pattern.

There is an argument to be made that it also increases usability, so it's inception probably wasn't malicious. But it's definitely another product of today's addiction driven design philosophy if you just look at the psychological effect it has on users

Infinite scroll is a tool.

Your problem is with pointless dark-pattern ridden attention-grabbing social media using that tool (and rightfully so!).

Now imagine a useful application, like an email program.

Infinite scroll is useful there.

Imagine having a paginated inbox!

Imagine an email program that, knowing how many total items there are in the inbox, gives you finite scroll! Even if it only streams metadata for nearby items, so if you suddenly drag the bar it has to wait for a network round-trip to show content, one of the problems with infinite scroll is that the scrollbar no longer shows a reliable absolute position.

A better case for infinite scrolling would be chat history, where you'd want an entirely separate UI widget for "jump to date", with bidirectional infinite scroll that unloads distant content, and a way to grab permalinks. Missing any one of those features, or the fact that messages will never be re-ordered for marketing purposes, infinite scrolling becomes a hinderance.

I prefer a paginated inbox, its that way in gmail for me (maybe I turned on some setting years ago?).

The pagination is a nice break and lets me know I am done, everything on back pages has been previously processed.

A paginated inbox can be extremely useful. Pagination gives you a "You are here" context: you are on page 3 of 20. That context is great in use cases such as "I need to review everything in this Inbox". If you just finished 3 of 20 in that case you know you are roughly 15% done. If for some reason you are interrupted and need to close the app and come back you know that you can probably start right where you left at on page 4 of 20.

Finite scroll is a compromise that you get some amount "you are here" context from scrollbar thumb size and position. If you are interrupted you can generally visually guess about where you left off, maybe.

Infinite scroll is terrible tool for an inbox because you no longer have such context. Scroll too far and the scrollbar thumb changes size because new items came into view. Most infinite scrolls entirely hide the scrollbar thumb because it is precisely so useless. Try to resume where you were in your inbox after an interruption and you have no idea how far to scroll down, and you can't just use the scrollbar thumb and hit an approximate spot. You have no context for where you are, you are lost in an infinitely scrolling maze of items all alike.

Even if infinite scroll wasn't a dark pattern (and it is, there's enough behavioral psychology studies now that have gathered enough evidence that infinite scroll feeds addictive behaviors), it is a terrible tool to work with if you are trying to get stuff done. It has none of the context of "you are here" and "here's how you can come back to where you were if you need to leave". Both of those things contribute to why it is such a dark pattern. Both of those reasons are strong reasons why it is an anti-pattern anywhere you expect people to work/to get stuff done. Pagination is great for getting work done and infinite scroll is awful. Finite scroll is alright compromise between the two for some apps.

Imagine an email program that isn't built with web technology. It could actually display all the items in your mailbox, with a normal and usable scroll bar, without "infinite scroll". I distinctly remember applications being able to display lists in the before-times.

Dark pattern would probably a better naming. Infinite scroll works, you're right. For example every file-browser or mail-program, which show you the visible portion on screen and at same time scrolling through all items. On the web infinite-scroll is often used to load and reload stuff and you often cannot link to an item directly.

Wait, is there a way to make Gmail scroll? Always had an issue with pagination in Gmail.

It does break searching for content within a web page.

Ok, but the content wouldn't be there (and thus searchable) either if the website used pagination, no?

In that scenario, I search the page, and if it's not found, I go to the next page and search there. Repeat to the end.

That algorithm breaks on infinite scroll.

What form of book do you prefer to read? One with pages or a scroll which leave confused at all time on what part of the thing you are on or have read?

In fact I do prefer to read books as a large seamless HTML file rather than a paginated PDF file that has cuts (new pages) at arbitrary positions.

Now, of course the ideal way to read a book is probably a navigation/outline sidebar on the left, and then the content of the current chapter in the main pane.

Kind of like the Rust book: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/

so you have no problem with a scrollbar that jump to the next chaper when you shift it by a couple of pixels then?

Of course why would you have a problem with that, the only navigation one should perform while reading is change chaper, who wants to go to abitrary paragraphs.

what?

?

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