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Comment by fitzroy | Hacker News Reader

> a feature that simply makes your product easier to use

Except it doesn't. You lose context and are now drowning in an endless morass of lazy-loaded blocks and widgets, all hiding under invisible elements. Nothing has a permanent URL, so there is zero accountably if the user was shown something that they need to reference - unless it benefits the platform. And of course, it will eventually all force reload when the page complexity exhausts the available memory, or at least when it becomes too exhausted to reliably serve ads.

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You can do permanent urls with infinite scrolling. Nothing that prevents you from putting the page number in the url

agree. pressing a button to go to next page is like a chore. The scrolling in itself is kind of addictive, you swipe with your finger and everything moves like you're moving a parchment or something.

X posts have a permanent url.

I think they meant how you can’t get a permalink to your feed/timeline view-state[1], so other people can see exactly what you see (not just what’s in the viewport but also the surrounding/offscreen content and broader context).

[1]: something like a link specifying the contents of my feed at a specific date+time and scroll-position.

…whereas with old-school SSR paging it’s right there in the querystring paging params (page-size, page-index or item-offset, and an optional results anchor for stability).

I’ll concede that a well-designed infinite-scrolling (or “click to load more inline” button) feature could use history.pushState to dynamically update the browser’s address with new query params but I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen anyone do that - which is a shame.

Offset / page index is not exactly stable especially for the most common case of newest-first.

“Anchor + Offset” is stable because the anchor param should uniquely identify a specific record from which the offset is applied; a sort-order, direction, and page-size may also be optimally specified.

No it's not stable. You also need the query/filter, and a snapshot of the state of all posts at the exact moment you want to grab the link, since posts can be created/deleted/changed. That's also assuming that your anchor still exists and wasn't deleted or changed.

The only stable way to share what you're seeing is with a screenshot.

The reason infinite scroll is bad has nothing to do with the technicalities of the HTML behind it. You could always implement a technical solution for these technical issues but that wouldn't fix the real problem.

It's addictive. There is no "one more page and I'm done" because the page never ends and you're never done. You get to the bottom, more content loads automatically and people say "this looks interesting, let me scroll some more". That's why it's doom scrolling because all you do is scroll, no need for any other input. The bait is always there right in front of you and I'll bet that the algorithm make sure the first couple of posts that load every time you get to the bottom are the "juiciest" ones to make sure you take that bait and keep scrolling.

Pagination hides the juicy bait. It's still there waiting for you but it's hidden until you ask for it. That's a big difference.

It's very much a slot machine, maybe the next short video will be interesting. Maybe not, who knows, but you keep scrolling through shorts and binge watching.

Actually newest first shouldn't be a problem, you need only to point to "last seen date" (up to ms precision)

An algorithmically "curated" TL, yes that's harder

It is when you do "?after=uuid" or "?after=timestamp".

That's called a screenshot.

Google search or a traditional paginated forum doesn't provide that either. No guarantee that page 15 of thread X will contain the same posts as it does now when the moderators wake up and delete the flame war.

I agree with all that. Many times I see someone Vagueposting about stuff, and I wish I could see their feed.

All Facebook posts have a permanent URL that you can copy.

They do, but if you scroll past a post in your feed, and then try to scroll back to find it, there is very little guarantee that it will still be there.

When I worked at Meta there was a lot of employee pressure to implement a "deterministic feed", where scrolling back-and-forth would produce the same set of posts, but leadership constantly sandbagged the idea (nobody actually wants determinism, people prefer to be surprised/delighted, etc)

god I hate infinite scrolling so much

you can't jump to the specific place on the website, you can't remember where something has been to have a map in mind, you can't go to "about" section or some sort of site settings

says you

> now drowning in an endless morass of lazy-loaded blocks and widgets

> so there is zero accountably if the user was shown something that they need to reference

You just sound angry...

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