Broken Software

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commander

Infinite scrolling was always a stupid idea (self.broken_software)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by commander to c/broken_software

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What happened to pagination? I have to scroll deep to find anything new, and I lose my place every time I come back. Now instead of clicking (or tapping) once to go to the page I need, I have to scroll over a dozen times each time to get back to where I was.

It's fucking stupid and only serves to take further advantage of the "instant gratification" crowd. i.e. the useful idiots wasting away on twitter.

It's part of their conditioning to only focus on the "new" and the "now", never what came before. That way they can constantly "consume" their entire lives and never look back and appreciate what they've always had.

It's very effective. The design damage that twitter has done to the internet is going to take generations to overcome.

I'm glad Lemmy didn't follow through with (all) the bad design decisions that went into reddit. The forced double-spacing is incredibly stupid, but at least clicking the title of a thread opens the thread instead of the link.

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[–] Limonene@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago

I hate when there is infinite scrolling, and the site puts important links on the bottom. You have to hold down the "end" key to see them, while the page churns with tons of requests as you look through the links.

Web design is really shit today. It's always been shit, but now it's responsive shit.

[–] deadcream@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 month ago

Pagination is still compatible with infinite scrolling, in fact it is probably already loaded in pages, they are just displayed together. Restoring current position is a bit more complicated than with separately displayed pages but still possible (though probably not when fully reloading page? IDK how it works on web).

You are right that social media want to show you "new" stuff and thus deliberately don't remember scroll position. However there are technical challenges here too. How do you reliably implement pagination if the order of posts can change at any moment or new posts can be added or removed in the middle of the list (which happens when they are sorted by score, or using some other more sophisticated algorithm)? You can save only the "current" post's id, but then after restoring position the posts around it would be different because the algorithm had reodered them. The only way it can work as you expect is when there is no algorithm at all and posts are always sorted by submission time.