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Why is the list constantly changing anyway?

Because other people keep adding new posts (and upvoting existing posts, which changes their order).

While that's true I think that once the feed has been observed in a certain way the advantages of stability outweigh the advantages of showing a tweaked version the second time it is loaded.

The user expectation is that if you refresh the page, you will see fresh content.

Not if you’re on page 2

mine isnt?

if i refresh the page it should be almost the same. maybe a couple new things at the very top, but i should still be able to find the thing i was just looking at.

by comparison, facebook auto-reloads while you're halfway down a page, and wont show you any of the same things. its an incredibly poor experience

Yeah, this is terrible UX that we somehow normalized.

At the very least we should be able to scroll backwards after a page refresh to see previous posts.

I get frustrated by this so much, because sometimes I come across a post with a video or something I want to see, but I leave it for a few minutes to take care of something, and then when I come back it auto reloads and I can't find it anymore, the back button won't work, scrolling through the timeline is futile, it's just gone.

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