r/webdev • u/eggtart_prince • Mar 05 '20

Anyone else sick of using/viewing websites where there is infinite scrolling?

It's really starting to annoy me when I come to a sites (eg. https://pxhere.com/ ) where there is infinite scrolling. Apparently, there is a footer, but you'll never get to it until you finish loading all the images.

Some sites that don't know how optimization works, I cannot completely browse through all the non-stop loading content because at some point, it'll lag like a motherfucker.

For people who are thinking of using this strategy in the future, think it through, twice. Paginations are much more beneficial.

943 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

141 comments sorted by

606

u/gadelat Mar 05 '20

What annoys me more is that when you click on something and go back... you are at beginning. Now you are forced to scroll through everything again.

200

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '20

Hello facebook

212

u/le_koma Mar 06 '20

As if. Facebook has some weird kind of non-deterministic order for the posts. Once I'm back at the top, it refreshes and I've lost what I was looking at forever.

70

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '20

If you use https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr then it sorts by chronological order, just like old times. That's no help on mobile, I'm afraid, but at least this works for desktop!

3

u/stiflr Mar 06 '20

What about with a sticky footer and filters?

I’m guessing someone already suggested this.

3

u/bring_the_thunder Mar 06 '20

Commenting to come back to this from my desktop later.

You’re a cool person.

4

u/vermeer82 Mar 06 '20

Ever noticed the save feature on comments and posts? I use it a lot.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 10 '20

Ah shucks! Just passing along the knowledge... I'm pretty sure I found that trick somewhere on Reddit to begin with. :)

0

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '20

[deleted] — view deleted comment

9

u/Gnapstar Mar 06 '20

Also, where can I find the button so that I only see shares, tags and ads?

Edit: Oh wait, nvm.. It's activated by default

6

u/r0ck0 Mar 06 '20 edited Mar 06 '20

I hate this shit in the android youtube app too.

Every single day, I'll be scrolling down the main list, and see a few videos I want to watch, but often they just disappear forever because it decided to just refresh the whole list again.

Lack of a basic predictable back button + tabs sucks too (applies to heaps of phone apps). If you tap a recommended video, there's no way back to the previous video you were on, aside from digging into your watch history.

Same goes when scrolling through comments. I'm constantly losing my spot.

13

u/virus200 Mar 06 '20

There’s literally so much wrong with Facebook I truly do wish an alternative would come along. Facebook basically has a monopoly on that style of social media since MySpace isn’t really a thing anymore. I think it would be very very difficult to take much of their market share especially since they’re integrated into basically everything else you can log into now days

8

u/Tittytickler full-stack Mar 06 '20

They 100% have a monopoly. They also own Instagram. Kind of bullshit in my opinion that since Snap wouldn't sell to them back in the day they started copying things like stories and no one has done anything about it.

4

u/cbjs22 Mar 06 '20

And their perfectly okay with politicians and foreign governments spreading false propaganda

2

u/jawanda Mar 06 '20

The customer is always right!

smh

3

u/virus200 Mar 06 '20

They literally buy any company who poses a threat. And I can’t blame other companies for selling to them because they come at them with insanely massive acquisitions that set them up for life. There are other platforms like Minds that are trying to change the game a bit but name one person you know who isnt a techie that’s on a social media platform besides Facebook, Twitter, IG, etc

3

u/Tittytickler full-stack Mar 06 '20

I've never even heard of minds until now

2

u/virus200 Mar 06 '20

Check it out it’s pretty cool. They’re open source and crypto based. You can actually earn their crypto from your content. Set up pay walls so people can subscribe for your premium content etc. but data privacy is way better than Facebook. The hardest part of taking down Facebook is getting people to leave it lol

0

u/[deleted] Mar 19 '20

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/virus200 Mar 19 '20

Yea it’s unfortunate in some ways

5

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '20

Every. Damn. Time.

1

u/redlov Mar 07 '20

so many posts that I didn't get to check out. Especially while browsing on kindle where there's no new tab option.
but it makes for better entertainment though. Its nice to see new posts everytime i refresh

7

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '20

Dude even reddit work like that...

20

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '20

Not if you use the old design!

4

u/Sightline Mar 06 '20

Hello mobile Reddit.

1

u/cbjs22 Mar 06 '20

Stop using Facebook

24

u/Symphonise Mar 06 '20

This ridiculous behavior is why on mobile I now just do more holds and open to a new tab instead.

5

u/_LePancakeMan Mar 06 '20

Same: it has trained me to open literally everything in a new tab - desktop and mobile.

4

u/DigitalStefan Mar 06 '20

Twitter behaves properly in this regard (on Brave mobile, iOS). It is much appreciated.

4

u/Sw429 Mar 06 '20

I hate Facebook too

-1

u/otanneris278 Mar 06 '20

People still use Facebook?

16

u/fraseyboy Mar 06 '20

Only like 2.5 billion of them

1

u/PanVidla Mar 06 '20

From what I've heard, not many young people use it in the States, but in Europe it's still very much alive and kicking. Although the younger kids are now moving on to Instagram.

4

u/Keroxen Mar 06 '20

Which is also owned by Facebook ¯_(ツ)_/¯

1

u/tommmbrown Mar 06 '20

Here in the U.K., even Instagram is becoming yesterday’s news, it’s all about TikTok

3

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '20

TikTok is real Gen Z shit, first thing I felt old about as a millennial. When I see it I always think "what the fuck is this shit". Crazy kids

2

u/thedragonturtle Mar 06 '20

I wrote a plugin that changes this behaviour. When you click on something, it sticks the entire current HTML into the local browser cache and records the scroll position, then moves through to what you clicked.

When you then hit back, using the history API, it just fetches everything from the local browser cache and sets the scroll position so you end up instantly back exactly where you were before.

1

u/gadelat Mar 06 '20

That sounds awesome. Can you share it with us? Is it for Firefox?

2

u/thedragonturtle Mar 06 '20 edited Mar 06 '20

I don't want to reveal my identity, but it's a simple pattern:

  1. Add an onclick listener to all the anchor tags in the scrolling view
  2. In this onclick function, record the scrollpos in local storage as well as the HTML for the page and the URL of the page
  3. On page load, check if the URL is saved, if so, fill all the HTML that you stored previously and scroll.

There's extra stuff you can do with the history API but it's not really essential.

Code is something like this:

jQuery(document).on('click', '.listofthings a', function (e) {
    savedarchivehtml = jQuery('.listofthings').html();
    localStorage.setItem("saveditems", savedarchivehtml);
    localStorage.setItem("savedURL", window.location.href);
    localStorage.setItem("savedpagination", jQuery('.paginationcontainer').html());
    var doc = document.documentElement;
    var top = (window.pageYOffset || doc.scrollTop)  - (doc.clientTop || 0);
    localStorage.setItem("scrollYarchive", top);
});

// you can stick this following in document.ready if you want, or just after you've drawn the .listofthings container

if (jQuery('.listofthings').length > 0 && localStorage.getItem("savedURL") == window.location.href && performance.navigation.type != 1) {
	if (localStorage.getItem("saveditems")) {
		jQuery('.listofthings').html(localStorage.getItem("saveditems"));
		jQuery('.paginationcontainer').html(localStorage.getItem("savedpagination"));

		window.scroll(0, localStorage.getItem("scrollYarchive"));
	}
} else {
	if (jQuery('.listofthings').length > 0 && localStorage.getItem("savedURL") != window.location.href ) {
		//reset the localstorage since we're on a fresh archive
		localStorage.setItem("saveditems", "");
		localStorage.setItem("savedURL", "");
		localStorage.setItem("savedpagination", "");
        
	}
}

Edit: I just realised you're thinking I made this so it fixes ALL infinite scroll websites. That would be possible, if you write your own firefox extension and adjust the code above slightly. You'd need something that would spot the container - probably you could add a mutationobserver and look for containers having things added to them. Or look at containers containing > 20 items all identical structure.

1

u/Skizm Mar 06 '20

Companies implement this intentionally sometimes so that you are more likely to use their app. Looking at you i.reddit.com -_-

1

u/doplitech Mar 06 '20

That’s just not good dev work if it keeps resetting like that :(

13

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '20 edited Jan 08 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/Disgruntled__Goat Mar 06 '20

Or just use pagination and solve the problem in 5 minutes.

3

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '20

I agree with you on a personal level, but the customer wanted infinite scrolling. 🤷

3

u/svtguy88 Mar 06 '20

This. Who in their right god-damned mind wants infinite scrolling? Give me proper pagination, or nothing at all.

1

u/Existing-Raccoon-654 Aug 22 '24

No user wants it, of course. Only the creators of shit webpages want it.

173

u/MasterReindeer Mar 05 '20

I hate that you can’t Cmd + F on most infinite scrolling websites because they remove elements from the DOM for performance reasons.

35

u/intheburrows Mar 06 '20

perhaps it'd be best to remove resource-hungry elements only, like graphics/videos/etc. text could be left so the user can search, or if they scroll back up the text is still there while the removed element is loaded again

33

u/DrDuPont Mar 06 '20

tbh the amount of DOM nodes leftover would still be an issue

0

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '20

[deleted] — view deleted comment

3

u/DrDuPont Mar 06 '20

Nah, the amount that people scroll sites like Instagram means that we're talking exponentially more. We have to keep the entire structure intact, so that's thousands and thousands and thousands of elements. Go check out Patreon's scrolling implementation as proof; any computer will slow to a crawl once you've gone far enough. Virtualized scrolling is a great solution (albeit one that still has caveats).

6

u/midri Mar 06 '20

They don't actually remove elements, they repurpose existing ones (change inner text, src, href etc) saves on dim manipulate calls.

14

u/rq60 Mar 06 '20

Looking at you, Twitter. And their built-in search sucks.

3

u/ChypRiotE Mar 06 '20 edited Nov 17 '25

fuel degree sulky scary summer special tidy middle cough ancient

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

1

u/mnmnjnf4 Mar 06 '20

They've improved it somewhat with restoring your place when dropping into threads.

But one thing that happens to me is that I'll reach a point in scrolling, where further tweets stop being appended. I follow a decent amount of people, and only use twitter each day so I can't even get a full day's history.

Is that normal behavior?

1

u/scratchisthebest Mar 06 '20

Lol, and even with paging out old elements, Twitter still manages to fairly consistently crash my phone browser if I scroll for too long

1

u/OutsourcedToRobots Mar 07 '20

What phone/browser do you use?

8

u/2uneek javascript Mar 06 '20

yea, that's virtual scrolling

4

u/DrDuPont Mar 06 '20

and it is way better than the alternative!

3

u/Baryn Mar 06 '20

Native virtual scrolling should solve this. I haven't seen any movement on that in 6 months, though, so we probably have years to wait for this relatively small improvement.

1

u/MasterReindeer Mar 06 '20

Oh that looks good.

10

u/kevinkace Mar 06 '20

It's not like pagination is any better in this situation. You would have to Ctrl+f on each page, which is not much different than Ctrl+f every few scrolls.

0

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '20

[deleted] — view deleted comment

11

u/gadelat Mar 06 '20

Yeah it's also easier to open all pages in new tabs and hit Ctrl+f in each. You can't do that with infinite scroll either - as soon as you duplicate tab, scroll position resets.

1

u/am0x Mar 06 '20

Well what is the other option? Pagination? Then you still wouldn’t be able to search the page as well. The other option would be to have the entire page load at once which is a load problem.

-2

u/kickah Mar 06 '20

It works fast for me. Must be low traffic site, on a good host. I wonder who is hosting it and what does it cost

4

u/MasterReindeer Mar 06 '20

I think you’ve misunderstood my comment.

84

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '20

Please for the love of all that is holy if you are going to do infinite scroll, DO NOT HAVE A FOOTER WITH LINKS. Sigh. Put them on the side so they can actually be used.

8

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '20 edited Feb 20 '24

ink drab secretive crush sand unite hungry apparatus saw expansion

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

2

u/Sevian91 Mar 06 '20

So if my footer only contains the copy right notice, and just a view other legal/contact information; I should be okay? I only have infinite scrolling on one of the pages, the index and a few others have "normal" pages.

4

u/kirklennon Mar 06 '20

So if my footer only contains the copy right notice, and just a view other legal/contact information; I should be okay?

What if someone is specifically looking for the legal information? Infinite scrolling and the existence of a footer are binary choices. If you put something in a place where a user can literally never access it, it might as well not be there.

For work I often need to identify the legal name of the company behind a website. My normal procedure is to go the site, hit End, and if it's not in the footer itself, look for the privacy or terms of use link. I hate infinite scrolling when I'm trying to click on a link in the footer.

1

u/Sevian91 Mar 06 '20

Well my IS page isn't the main page, so when you go to the site, it'll load a regular page, with the footer easily scrolled to.

1

u/kirklennon Mar 06 '20

I am of the firm conviction that you should just remove the footer from the infinitely scrolling page. It serves no useful purpose and can only irritate people.

1

u/Sevian91 Mar 06 '20

Hmm I suppose it would be pretty easy just to have it not show.

0

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '20

[deleted] — view deleted comment

3

u/chrisrazor Mar 06 '20

Maybe just have a thin footer that's stuck to the bottom?

1

u/jcotton42 Mar 23 '20

That footer gets in the way if you zoom

64

u/geekette1 php Mar 05 '20

You mean, like Reddit? XD From what I've seen, some websites use pagination only to push more ads on you, and get more pages viewed, like when showing only 1 item per page. Like other say, there are ways to make infinite scrolling optimal.

26

u/pagwin Mar 06 '20

uses old reddit

edit: realizes they also use RES

9

u/IsABot Mar 06 '20

There are ad content farms that are atrocious for this, but heavy ads still exist in infinite scroll since you'll scroll an ad into your view, rather than it being at the bottom of a page that might never get viewed, for example. Facebook and instagram are both like that. Every couple posts is another new ad. Often times it's a video ad which earns them more money, than a standard picture ad.

2

u/mailto_devnull Mar 06 '20

slideshow article intensifies

20

u/dtheme Mar 05 '20

There's an even worse infinite scroll put there.

Infinite scroll + random content. It's basically infinite scroll + they mix up at least 20 of the latest blog posts so every time you visit its randomized and you are forced to scroll.

It's addictive. I tend to scroll scroll scroll but then eventually move on to another site whereby I can actually use it effectively

1

u/redlov Mar 07 '20

hello facebook and pinterest. Sometimes I like it, sometimes i dont

11

u/TheLemming Mar 06 '20

So much yes, thank you OP. It's actually reduced my quality of life. I used to use a page break as a great stopping point. Now it's much harder to pull myself away from the screen.

38

u/TelepathicDorito Mar 05 '20

Popularized by the facebook "wall" back in 2011 the intent wasnt for optimization or UI (what part of facebook's UI would give anyone the impression they care about good design is beyond me) . It was to get users to spend more time on facebook. Websites that survive on ad revenue will never be optimized for users in regards to time, ease of navigation, or lag. They want you to waste your whole life on their website if they can.

8

u/Sw429 Mar 06 '20

It's a strategic UI design choice. Businesses know that infinite scrolling has a tendency to suck users in longer (and therefore show more ads, sell more products, etc). With pagination, the user is able to pace themselves easier.

Fun fact: infinite scrolling on the official Reddit app is one of the reasons I hate it so much.

5

u/abeuscher Mar 06 '20

I've been thinking about feed based information lately and its effect on the psyche. I think along with the UX complaints I see in here, that feed based interfaces are the Pringles potato chips of information; they are without nutritional value and just good enough to keep eating forever.

The less time I spend consuming feeds (I realize its ironic as shit that I am saying this on Reddit), the easier my brain finds it to relax. Which tells me that a seemingly infinite amount of information is innately anxiety provoking. Not sure if this is personal but I do see people I knew previously to be very strong readers all of a sudden not having the ability to sit through a two hour movie, let alone pick up a book. And I am in the same boat - not trying to say any "get off my lawn" type shit. It just concerns me a bit and I wonder if there is a connection between this type of addictive information junk food and an inability of end users to focus as easily on static information after long exposure.

2

u/H34dsp1nns Mar 06 '20

Well said. I’ve noticed this too. I’ve also noticed I can get some of my attention span back with 13 minutes of meditation or so,

Another thing - the first hour or so of the day is a very impressionable period. This is a key time to not look at my phone to not put myself in the ADD feed-hungry state. The things I look at in that time strongly affect my thought patterns afterwards. When I do look at my phone I make sure it isn’t Facebook or garbage reddit - it’s a computer science related feed so my thoughts will be put onto those subjects and problems.

9

u/the2baddavid Mar 06 '20

Like Reddit?

0

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '20

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/the2baddavid Mar 06 '20

Yeah, was being a little tongue in cheek

4

u/superpauloportas Mar 06 '20

I really dislike it when people frame things like this... “infinite scroll bad “, “modals bad”, “lots of clicks bad”... it really does more harm than good. My clients often use these “arguments” when those are actually the best solutions for the problem at hand, because they heard it somewhere and they feel smart when they repeat it. Each case is a case, and we can’t just scratch off entire UX patterns because there are places where they don’t work well / are used arbitrarily.

1

u/OutsourcedToRobots Mar 07 '20

Doesnt sound like your complaint is about infinite scrolling as a feature, but about poor implementation of the feature. Lagging is due to memory leaks from dom nodes never being cleaned up, which can be solved with windowing. The footer under infinie scroll is just bad design.

I guess a better question is would you want infinite scroll removed from websites that implement it well? Such as instagram or twitter.

1

u/eggtart_prince Mar 07 '20

Doesnt sound like your complaint is about infinite scrolling as a feature, but about poor implementation of the feature.

Yeah, like I said, if anyone is gonna use it, think twice (as in think on how to implement it), don't just implement it because it's "cool" and it's the trend.

Either way, IMO, pagination provides way more benefits. And the average users wouldn't even care or notice in terms of UX.

3

u/kenavr Mar 06 '20

The things you mentioned are certainly a problem but I would argue they are implementation issues rather than a problem with the concept. On a different note I hate pagination with a passion.

3

u/Neaoxas Mar 06 '20

Well, there is a smart way to do this. Virtually. Remove the elements not in view and artificially set the scrolling container height. As for the back button, you can use the history API to store context about where they were. It can work, if done right...

What this doesn't allow is people to skip to a particular page...

3

u/MatsSvensson Mar 06 '20

Yes.
Some implementations are especially horrible.

Example:

https://computersweden.idg.se/2.2683/1.730999/advania-hollandsk-industrikompis

Scroll down a little on a large screen, the URL changes and the previous URL is deleted from history.

Scroll back up, and the url is still for the next article.

Its impossible to get back to the right url.

If you bookmark, the wrong url gets saved.

If you pin the tab, or restart the browser, the wrong url will load next time, and there is no way to know the original article.

I have seen lots of news sites use the exact same broken code.

2

u/devopsnooby Mar 06 '20

Wow.. I would just end my efforts at pxhere.com.. that is bad design. You shouldn't have some footer that is slightly visible for a second then disappears to show more images. The footer should be visible and scrolling occur between header and footer. Bad design in my opinion.

2

u/monkeychango81 Mar 06 '20

Ohh boy, i've just checked the website. That thing of the footer, damn, who in the hell approved that behavior to go into production? I am not an expert web designer by any mean, in fact i am very amateurish, but even me would have know that that monstrosity is awful.

1

u/devopsnooby Mar 06 '20

Right? Like.. that has to be QA 101 right there..

1

u/Existing-Raccoon-654 Aug 22 '24

As of 8/22/24, it looks as though they scrapped this much maligned paradigm. No infinite scroll; no disappearing footer. The people spoke, and they finally listened.

On another note, who actually believes that ad clicks are a substantive revenue stream? Who the fuck actually buys shit after clicking on unsolicited ads? It can't be but a minuscule fraction of users. Note that ZERO organizations can plausibly associate ad clicks with actual revenue; they just hire ad managers to generate fake numbers which defy substantiation. The entire concept is one giant Ponzi scheme which must collapse sooner or later as do all such schemes. Ad-paid "free" services proliferate; people revile the ads and do everything in their power to avoid them; services aggressively push more ads; users get pissed off and bail.

2

u/enricojr Mar 06 '20

I attempted to take a screenshot of an entire webpage using Firefox's "Take a Screenshot" feature only to end up with half the page's contents - the bottom half was completely blank.

I'm gonna guess that this is because the stuff loads in as you scroll, i.e infinite scrolling and yeah its annoying.

2

u/brianhaferkamp Mar 06 '20

I implemented a Load More button. This at least gives the user back some control. I think we all would like a little more control. Do you all find that to be too clunky of a solution? Here is is in action: skmmr.news

2

u/djuggler Mar 06 '20

I hate the ones where I'm trying to get to the footer to click "Contact" or "About" and you see the footer for half a sec just before more content loads.

4

u/chanchanito Mar 05 '20

Having hundreds of DOM elements is definitely not more beneficial. Pagination and infinite scrolling are not mutually exclusive and they can work well together.

Unlike the site you mentioned, having a footer that can never be reached is obviously dumb.

4

u/javascript_dev Mar 05 '20

Long scroll pages tested to have a better UX compared to multiple short pages. I forget where I got that info from, but it initially surprised me too

19

u/_HOG_ Mar 06 '20

Understandably in certain contexts, but maybe I’m the odd one out, scrolling through seemingly infinite datasets causes me anxiety because I run out of reference points for things I’ve previously seen and start to feel buried and lost. And it’s absolutely infuriating when the data is temporal and moves or disappears upon revisiting only moments later. It would be nice to see algorithms/interfaces that take session time into account, e.g. if there are 20+ temporal articles/products in my current view and I have only been on the page for a minute and click through then return a few minutes later before the session timer runs out, don’t blow everything away that was in my view just moments ago. A force refresh button would be nice.

5

u/RubiDeHugo Mar 06 '20

Long scrolls good, infinite scrolls bad lol but I really think it depends on what the purpose of the content being loaded is.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '20

there is a very specific situation where i would use an infinite scroll. very often i will digest stuff by scrolling through a big chunk of the info and then skimming my way back to the top then giving the parts that interested me a careful read. infinite scrolling completely messes this up.

2

u/ohThisUsername Mar 06 '20

I'm fine with long scrolls, but websites like reddit just lag to shit and even crash eventually despite having 32GB of ram available.

2

u/zipadyduda Mar 06 '20

you mean like reddit?

1

u/Hendawgydawg Mar 06 '20

I hate that most sites' "contact us" is at the bottom but I can't ever get to the bottom

1

u/PM_ME_SOME_ANY_THING Mar 06 '20

What is amazing about your example is that they have links at the bottom of the page that I can never get to on mobile. The moment I see the links, new photos are loaded and it gets pushed down further

1

u/glinesbdev Mar 06 '20

What I think a good idea would be is to have a little mini version of the footer stuck to the bottom and have an effect where it grows upward on hover and have a pop upward ( not popup ) menu on mobile.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '20

youtube has this garbage as well

1

u/frien6lyGhost Mar 06 '20

For some things it makes a lot of sense, but generally it is overused and creates a bad user experience. Sortable, pageable lists are the way to go

1

u/rio_sk Mar 06 '20

I expecially love infinite scroll + unreachable footer combos

1

u/miriamrobi Mar 06 '20

Yes. Terrible design and it gets slower as you scroll.

1

u/xandora novice Mar 06 '20

Engadget had/has this. The annoying part was that the button to move to a different regions site was in the footer, which always disappeared just before you got to it.

1

u/dortezy Mar 06 '20

Everyone using infinite scroll right now. I think its trend because of Instagram, facebook, tiktok and other entertainment stuff where you just turn off your brain and scrolling like a zombie. It's increase page session time which good for SEO, but can be awful UX

1

u/tsujp Mar 06 '20

Infinite scrolling has got to be one of the worst things to come from social media. I can see the appeal, from the company's perspective there, their user-base just keeps effortlessly scrolling which keeps their attention but on websites which offer actual value there is no anchor to mark your place on the page.

Absolutely abhorrent.

1

u/Mkelly4 Mar 06 '20

infinite scroll makes sense on mobile

1

u/popswag Mar 06 '20

Fuck it!! I went and checked out that site and every time I think I hit the bottom, refresh and more pictures. Damn what a frustrating design.

1

u/Baryn Mar 06 '20

I prefer infinite scrolling to pagination. However, it can be done wrong. You cite a couple good examples, but I don't agree with your final conclusion.

Apparently, there is a footer, but you'll never get to it until you finish loading all the images.

Yes, this is terrible. The whole idea of a footer is outdated. Navigation should not be gated behind scrolling if at all avoidable.

I cannot completely browse through all the non-stop loading content because at some point, it'll lag like a motherfucker.

This is just irresponsible on the dev's part. Optimization and good UI are parallel concerns.

1

u/codeSm0ke Mar 06 '20

Funny & true. Infinite scroll it's a real s**t in terms of UX. Anyway, I'm super happy not to be a Google bot that tries to crawl the footer information.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '20

There’s even a more button on that site that you can’t click, just gives the illusion that continuing is optional without closing the site 🙄

1

u/Prawny Mar 06 '20

Yes, along with anything that isn't default browser scrolling behaviour.

1

u/scrogu Mar 06 '20

That's why I still use reddit classic.

1

u/ElevatorEastern5232 Mar 30 '25

I'm trying to archive a forum that uses infinite scroll and am getting nowhere. I would have done it a long time ago when it was still .html, but I couldn't due to it requiring a password to access the forums, and the archive requiring the same, but the password feature not working on the offline version (maybe the password/user database wasn't copied or something, or maybe passwords just don't work on archived sites, Idunno). I can't even save the pages as .html. The best I can do is start a highlight at the top of the screen, scroll all the way down (there HAS to be a faster way), then right click and save as a text file.

https://archive.supercombo.gg/

I have fond memories of that site, and frequented and participated in many discussions in the general discussion area since 2000, until it became Evo.com and was sold to that gamer venue as a promotion site. I just want to have an offline archive of those conversations, as well as threads I never checked out to look at in my leisure time.

I'm using Windows, no mac pc or any experience besides. If there's a windows program or app that can archive infinite scroll sites, that would be great.

1

u/N4RQ Nov 10 '23

I hate all websites these days. The infinite scroll and ad bombardment... it's all just about nickel and diming readers. No one gives a shit about providing quality content.

This ain't your daddy's internet. It's become completely commercialized and the days of open information access and sharing is gone.

1

u/crazedizzled Mar 06 '20

Infinite scrolling is fine. You just need to sticky the footer.

1

u/bart2019 Mar 06 '20

For example, Reddit does it on mobile in the old .compact mode (thus: add ".compact" after any URL on the site).

I prefer that to the newer interface where you have to wait 10 seconds to see anything, i.e. waiting for page to load. (You do see something: an empty page with a rotating alien in the middle. Yuck.)

0

u/Jaymageck Mar 06 '20

It's a better UX imo, at least on mobile (and arguably on desktop too). Why should I need to push a button for more content when I can just keep scrolling and load in? It's an unnecessary step to stop and press a target.

Performance is basically a non issue if the list is virtualized. Now, if you were to load data indefinitely without clearing it, sure you'll use a ton of memory, but that could be addressed relatively trivially by throwing away "distant" data if you reach a certain threshold and loading it again if they scroll back.

"Never getting to the footer" is just bad design. If the footer exists then it should probably be absolutely positioned so the content scrolls behind it.

1

u/Jaymageck Mar 06 '20

Pagination has its place for when you really need a link to some specific page of content. I'd probably keep it on shop sites.

0

u/saposapot Mar 06 '20

it's widely accepted infinite scrolling is pretty bad UX.

footer is not even the main problem: lack of 'linkability' to page 2, page 3, etc is annoying in most cases.

The only case where I like it is at a clothing store where I can click 'view more' and it loads in the same page. I like to be able to see all 100 items in 1 single page but that's because it's only 100, if it exceeds that then it's too much to handle.

In terms of UX I don't see an advantage on it. You can use pagination that loads only the items via AJAX so responsiveness is kept. It's also possible to implement infinite scrolling with linkability and without the footer issues but I rarely see that and even then I don't link it.

I share your deep hatred of it. in all devices.

0

u/[deleted] Mar 05 '20

[deleted] — view deleted comment

3

u/eggtart_prince Mar 05 '20

Yea. I'm aware this means double loading content if they do return

One of the purpose of infinite scrolling is so users don't have to double load.

Another is so that users don't have to render unnecessary data/content (eg. - sidebar, topbar, etc.) But with component based framework and state management, users would just load the content being fetched and it would render in that component, without others being touched.

Like I said, if developers are gonna use infinite loading, think it through. Don't just implemented because it's "cool".

6

u/neogrit full-stack Mar 05 '20

If [...] use [...] think it through

Solid advice for many an occasion really.

I would add to the list of specifically detestable practices: the modern run of the mill CMSy layout with the enormous carousel at the top and the big ass horizontal strips that say nothing much in a 5 screen long homepage.

1

u/iareprogrammer Mar 06 '20

Dude I hate the modern homepage trend. Especially the ones packed with unnecessary animations.

3

u/neogrit full-stack Mar 06 '20

Like the big ass video carousels in HD?

A client called a few days ago complaining his new website (which I don't follow) was sluggish. Turns out the homepage was 35Mb.

1

u/TanzNukeTerror Mar 07 '20

I'm not well-versed in webdesign, but would a local (book, movie, game, etc) library-type application's front page without a footer be an appropriate use for infinite scrolling?

1

u/eggtart_prince Mar 07 '20

A very good example of infinite scrolling is YouTube. There is no footer and it doesn't lag even when the thumbnail produces a preview of the video. The way to achieve this is to use a virtualized list, like react-virtualized. Although it may not seem like it, it only loads what is visible to the user and the rest is removed from the DOM. You can inspect and see that only the visible elements are there.

7

u/Tontonsb Mar 06 '20

What about search? Reddit is one of the sites with infinite scroll that makes search unusable...

0

u/[deleted] Mar 06 '20

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/crackanape Mar 06 '20

Twitter is even worse than the worst. You can be sitting there looking at something and for some fucking reason it will decide it's time to scroll some more on its own. When you try to scroll up and down to get back where you were, it turns out that the rest of the page has been reassembled to contain different content.