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Comment by davb | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised at how many people here seem to like infinite scroll. I personally can't stand it.

Imagine having a book where no matter how much you read, it never seems to end. No milestones, no sense of progress. Just page after page after page.

It just feels... icky.

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I wish to join your infinite scroll haters club.

To paraphrase Jeff Goldblum's "Ian Malcolm" in Jurassic Park:

"Yeah, but your front-end developers were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."

I personally find infinite scroll to be far worse than cleanly paginated pages in every regard. YMMV, I guess.

Every time I've witnessed infinite scroll being implemented into a project I've been involved with, the decision was not made by the developers.

The hangup with pagination is even if it can be done well, most people associate it with a full page reload, often very slow, often because of ads.

The xkcd on infinite scrolling is very relevant here[1]. It even uses the same book comparison!

I don't hate infinite scrolling as much as I used to, but I think that's just because I'm not a heavy user of any sites that have infinite scrolling.

[1] https://xkcd.com/1309/

It's worse than that. At least with the book you get to turn the page. This is more like having a book, and knowing there's other pages, but you can never get to the bottom of the page you're on.

It's like a springloaded scroll that spools out of an opaque cylinder case like some sort of measuring tape. One mis-step and you have to spend minutes slowly pulling it back out again.

Meanwhile all the stuff you have already read is sitting around in a big mess, doing nothing but taking up space and getting in the way.

I think it solves a business problem rather than a problem that consumers necessarily feel. Google have good reasons (lessen effects of SEO & boost ad impressions) for not wanting all of their traffic to go to the very top results or the first page.

Infinite scroll encourages users to keep going. It's similar to how certain demographics will scroll through Pinterest for hours. It removes the boundary where someone might say "OK, that's the last page I'm going through."

I think the main problem is that somehow 10 or 20 items on a page got to be standard and that is just annoying. 200 items on a page seems like a good number to me. Scrolling is often easier, but I want it to stop.

OTOH, there are many, many ways to mess up pagination UI as well. Not showing how many pages there are is one that often annoys me, because one time I will go through a bunch of pages of stuff is if I am quickly visually scanning to find something I saw before but couldn't track down with search or bookmarks all that quickly for some reason. If I know what I am looking for is on one of 15 pages then there is a good chance I can find it quickly, but with 50 pages it might be more effective to keep trying my luck at search (or just give up).

The worst offender here is Salesforce. Ten items by default, click "Show more" to see ten more goddamn items.

Another reason to hate it, which my wife runs across all the time on Facebook - she scrolls by dragging the scroll-thumb down with her mouse. Once she gets near the bottom, the page jumps as the extra content gets loaded, and she has to find her place again.

This is the key reason why I hate it too.

I have a ton of respect for Aza Raskin, who has pushed this, and I respect that infinite scrolling was a neat solution for some problems of the 2004 web. But I'm not sure those problems are the biggest problems today, and I mostly I feel like "fixing scrolling" is working on the wrong problem, when we could instead be working on "ditching scrolling."

The addendum to Fitt's Law is key here: The current location of the pointer is an infinite target.

Or, to paraphrase, dragging is usability hell.*

If I'm flipping through pages, I want to click or tap one thing, I don't want to have to manipulate things by clicking one spot, holding a button, finding another target and releasing.

I know clicking and dragging is intuitive and easy for all of us, but compared to one simple click at the current mouse location, it's a usability eternity.

My approach would be to display all search results from the first page of Google cleanly on one screen. Maybe two columns wide if necessary, or fit to the screen in a tumblr style way. Not infinite scrolling, not any scrolling. I can keep my mouse on top of a little set of forward and back arrow buttons in the corner and flip through results that way. Or I could just use arrow keys or taps on a mobile device.

* Sure, dragging is the only sensible approach in some cases, maps and canvases and 3D object manipulation, sure. But if it can be designed away.

So I could see click and drag if your search results were not linear, but a two dimensional graph. Maybe you get that graph by... going right or left puts more priority on different terms in the search box, or going up and down adds different commonly included words to your search, I don't know.

The best alternative I have come across so far is implemented at http://www.zdnet.com/ At the bottom of the page, there is a button "View More Articles". Plain and simple.

I think it's a good fit on mobile.

The mobile browser performance is still much lower than on the desktop, so you don't want to render too large a DOM at once.

Loading a new page over the network can easily take 10s, if you need to reactivate the 3G connection from a low-power state. Of course you can use a single-page-app approach to help that bit.

Scrolling in one direction is one of the easiest (and most fun) interactions you can do on a touch screen - clicking is much harder.

To me it really depends on what I'm looking. E.g if I'm looking at clothes online I just really wanna look at everything at bunch click the few I wanna see and be done with it, not having to be clicking and reloading and what not. If I'm looking at something like a blog or news it makes more sense since it helps me realize how old something might be.

There is a great story on AB testing @ etsy where it actually decreased search conversion. Designers love it, but customers hate it..

Probably because of the inferiority complex the infinity characteristic imposes on you. Makes you feel inadequate for not completing something. It's ironic as it had already existed in a sense - with TV. It never ends either and powerfully attracts people to continue watching.

This reminds me of Gabriel García Marquez's novel _The Autumn of the Patriarch_, which has no paragraphs and infinitely long sentences.

That's a great analogy - hwo did you find reading that book? I love his other books, but Autumn of the Patriarch took a LOT of mental effort.

I've only read Chronicle of a Death Foretold and Memories of My Melancholy Whores from him, I started The Autumn of the Patriarch, but I couldn't bear it and gave up the book early.

I hate reading something and not knowing the full length upfront - I want a rough gauge of how long I will be spending on an article.

There's an elegant way to add some sort of progress indicator to infinite scroll. I just haven't figured it out yet :)

Have a little screen overlay that displays how much memory your browser is using. As it climbs higher and higher, you'll know that you are making progress.

You're so funny. I guess they will make a fix number of items in the memory for the DOM.

They do have a page list on the bottom and show which page you are on.

Sure but a progress bar or "page" counter at the top would alleviate that somewhat.

... isn't that part of what a scrollbar is for?

This demo actually has pages.

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