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Comment by Dolimiter | Hacker News Reader

Your response is excellent.

But something is missing here, an awareness of when infinite scrolling is good vs bad. Infinite scrolling is good when the information is ephemeral, and changing all the time. Dating profiles, twitter stream, live updates.

But infinite scrolling is bad when the content is fixed. Like a forum. There is a cognitive clue when paging through a forum, how far you have read, where you are.

All your answers are technical based. But they don't answer the UI problem that scrolling through the discourse forums gives people a cognitive headache.

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Agreed. I think the discourse developers are not considering psychology and HCI, but only the technical aspects. That the implementation of infinite scroll in Discourse gives you the same information that you get in a paginated view, does not mean that infinite scroll is at least as good.

"post x/y" tells you how far you are in the page, but only if you think about it. There's no longer any intuitive connection between the scroll bar and page position. The End key stops working intuitively, sends you to the end of currently loaded posts and then loads more posts so 1 second after pressing it you're not at the end of anything. Then there's the lag as you hit the top or bottom of currently loaded posts; even if you don't want to read any more, you get more. That's clever if you're a tabloid magazine because it entices the reader to read more, but the impression I get is it's not productive.

For maximum usability, why shouldn't the app support both infinite scroll and paginated, and let the USER choose (by url slug or GET param)? (Or by user setting if logged in)

> For maximum usability, why shouldn't the app support both infinite scroll and paginated, and let the USER choose (by url slug or GET param)?

I've always thought we could do this as there is no technical reason why we couldn't offer both.

But honestly we receive very few complaints about it from users of the software. It seems here on HN that infinite scrolling is not super popular, but we are not getting the same feedback from our users.

I suspect all you'd have to do for the other option is disable automatically swapping out pages when the bottom or top of a page is reached. Leaving the box with up and down arrows, adding a second set of double arrows, and using that for jumping N posts forward or back, or to the beginning and end.

I think javascript in-place loading of different pages is great (avoids reloading a lot of boilerplate and dependencies). What I don't agree with is the automatic altering of page contents based on where I am on the page, absent any indication (like clicking a button) that I want to change pages.

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