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The article puts forth 10 reasons to think twice before implementing infinite scrolling, but many of them are just a variation of the final reason: Terrible use

The article puts forth 10 reasons to think twice before implementing infinite scrolling, but many of them are just a variation of the final reason: Terrible user experience. For the sake of argument, there are several very successful websites that use infinite scrolling in one way or another. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit just to name a few. Is infinite scrolling on these sites disorienting the user? hard to navigate? rendering a "terrible user experience"? One could certainly argue that the data says otherwise. The article doesn't even suggest that there might be situations where infinite scrolling might befit the site. I'm not a big fan of infinite scroll but black-and-white rants like this often leave out the vital context and nuances in the topic they aim to analyze.

wlesieutre 7y ago
Facebook's is compounded by the mysterious newsfeed algorithm - if you're infinite scrolling a limited set of items in chronological order it wouldn't be as bad. But I've seen things in my newsfeed and then not been able to find them again if I accidentally closed or reloaded my tab. If you noted who posted/shared it you can find it on their profile, but if all you noticed was the headline or image on a shared item it might as well be gone forever once you lose your place in the feed. I wouldn't say that's the main reason I don't check my Facebook feed anymore, but it's one of them.
- tontonius 7y ago
  infinite scrolling of a limited set of items wouldn't be very true to the name ;-) I agree with the problem of finding something again in a long, cryptically ordered list of several hundreds or thousands of items. Not sure a paginated facebook feed would solve that issue though
  - wlesieutre 7y ago
    I mean limited in terms of quantity posted per day; my understanding of Facebook's system is that across all of my friends (or maybe even friends of friends?) there's a lot of stuff posted, and Facebook only picks a subset of to actually show me. I don't know how they decide which things appear in my newsfeed and I don't know what order they're in. Compared to Instagram where I see every single thing that someone I follow posts (might be because I follow so few people on it). If I want to go back and see one of the posts again, I scroll back in time and eventually find it. For losing posts on Facebook I’m not talking about trying to find something from a month ago, I’m talking about things that I swear I saw yesterday and now I can’t find it.
    - SiempreViernes 7y ago
      I often loose things I saw a minute ago by a misclick on a group page or something like that, and when I come back to the feed it’s just gone. Like, I follow some newspapers on fb, an often they only show up once per day, reload the feed and it’s vanished.
  - nicoburns 7y ago
    > infinite scrolling of a limited set of items wouldn't be very true to the name ;-) This is actually what facebook does when you're offline. When it runs out of content to show, it cycles round and shows you the same content again.
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  Yep facebooks algorithm could be totally superceded by "I would like to see .... [ ] only friends [ ] mostly friends, some lists [ ] random [ ] don't care, use your AI/algorithm choose one of the above.
TOGoS 7y ago
The infinite scroll is one of the reasons those websites are so addictive. My lizard brain has a hard time closing the tab when I "haven't reached the end of the page yet." So it may be 'good' for keeping people on the site. But in the grand scheme of things I'd rather the page had a bottom.
- jjuel 7y ago
  This. These sites don't use infinite scrolling because it is a great user experience they do it to keep people on their site. They do it to keep people engaged. The addiction. Most of those sites would actually be better with pages in terms of user experience, but that isn't the experience they are going for.
- badwolf 7y ago
  I think Instagram does a fairly good job of trying to have both. When you've scrolled through all the new posts, you get a green "You're all caught up" break point. You can continue scrolling past it if you want.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
marcosdumay 7y ago
Facebook's feed is horrible. People are lost all the time with it, and it's a huge impediment for the site to be used for anything remotely serious. Ditto for Instagram, but expectations here are more aligned with nothing serious ever getting on the site. Twitter would be better without infinite scrolling, but nobody ever cares about messages down the line, so it's not that bad. I have never noticed that Reddit does it. Is it on the new design only? This may be one of the reasons people do not use the new design.
- bigzyg33k 7y ago
  I'm not certain if the new design does it. The old one certainly doesn't, but RES[1] adds the functionality, and has a large user base. I often mix up native features and what RES has added [1] https://redditenhancementsuite.com/ https://redditenhancementsuite.com/
Chazprime 7y ago
I’d say that Facebook’s feed is very difficult to use, and often finding an item that you were looking at earlier in a session can often be very difficult, if not impossible.
kerkeslager 7y ago
Just because successful websites do it doesn't mean it's a good user experience.
dejawu 7y ago
> leave out the vital context and nuances in the topic they aim to analyze Seems about par for the course for a Hacker Noon post. They're not meant to be read, they're meant to pad the career of the author.
edoceo 7y ago
Reddit has infinite scroll? I still see Back/Next - and three prompts to install their App
- jazzyjackson 7y ago
  The app boasts infinite scroll as a “feature”
- rtkwe 7y ago
  There's a plug-in called RedditEnhancementSuite (RES) that adds infinite scrolling with the URL bar being modified. RES has a pretty large userbase and it's well done so OP probably uses it and just forgot what's base Reddit and what's RES. The new redesign also adds infinite scrolling.
denton-scratch 7y ago
Infinite scrolling depends on Javascript. NoScript prevents it. FaceTwitGram may depend on IS; I don't know, I've never used a FaceTwitGram account. Reddit seems to work fine without Javascript. If I'm forced to enable Javascript for some specific site, I enable it for that site, then (if that's not enough) for it's companion sites, CDN and so on. By this time the site has already caused me resentment. If that's not enough, then usually I've already gone somewhere else. Way too many sites will give you a blank screen just because JS is disabled. But if you insist that I totally drop my pants and enable ALL scripts, you really have to have a compelling reason (e.g. buy product unavailable elsewhere, um err can't think of any other compelling reason; luckily neither my bank nor the taxman mandate 3rd-party scripts). Some UI gimmick such as infinite scrolling is certainly not a compelling reason. The purpose of infinite scrolling is to retain the eyeballs of mobile users - to stop them navigating away from your site. I am old, my eyes are dim, and my fingers are shaky; I use my mobile phone primarily as a phone, and never as a browser. Younger folk may have a different experience.
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  I find noscript way to aggressive. I think ublock has a much nicer compromise version.
  - denton-scratch 7y ago
    Each to his own. I guess I'm just an aggressive dude:-)
neves 7y ago
Infinite scrolling in Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Reddit doesn't exist to improve the user experience, but to make these sites addictive. Different priorities here.
- autoexec 7y ago
  > Infinite scrolling in Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Reddit doesn't exist to improve the user experience In the case of reddit, infinite scrolling is one of the most common reasons I hear used to explain why other users opted out of Reddit's new UI.
- munk-a 7y ago
  Yea, I dislike infinite scrolling because I'm a user, but these sites love infinite scrolling because there is no barrier to continuing to browse, in ye olden days there would be a load time when clicking onto the next page - in the modern world performance is likely not a concern or the next page is already loaded and just swapped out in the current view - but it is still disorienting to the user as that action will usually shift their view. Interestingly the approach I think works the best (except for the poor input experience on anything that isn't a touch screen) is infinite horizontal scrolling since the footer and header elements remain expectedly stable while not overlapping any information the user wants to view... horizontal scrolling is very poorly supported by input devices and using the scroll wheel to move left/right makes the user think too much.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > in ye olden days there would be a load time when clicking onto the next page - in the modern world performance is likely not a concern or the next page is already loaded and just swapped out in the current view - but it is still disorienting to the user as that action will usually shift their view. Oh, but there is a visible load time still. Unless you're browsing on a supercomputer with infinite RAM, after a minute or two of scrolling Facebook you'll realize the performance drops fast with the amount of feed you've loaded, while the load times increase. In my experience, both the page slowdown and load delays are about O(n) with respect to the side of the feed, but I haven't measured it precisely.
magduf 7y ago
>For the sake of argument, there are several very successful websites that use infinite scrolling in one way or another. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit just to name a few. Comcast is a very successful company. Do they have a great user experience?
- tontonius 7y ago
  Sorry, not a US citizen here so no experience of Comcast, although I've heard they're not very popular in that regard. What I meant was that some of the worlds most popular sites employ "infinite" scrolling, and it kind of makes sense on those sites. If they have a great user experience? That's highly subjective. I guess they had a lot better user experience than their failed competitors.
  - magduf 7y ago
    >I guess they had a lot better user experience than their failed competitors. That's like the logic that Microsoft Windows must be great just because it's the most-used operating system. You're completely ignoring all the other factors that are involved in a company or product getting to a dominant position.
jiveturkey 7y ago
eg, flickr. infinite scroll limits the amount of data downloaded over mobile, without forcing you to "click" to next page. it used to be absurdly user hostile but now it's limited to 2 loads before it stops and you are presented with a page index. it's a great compromise with a great underlying UX reason.
- crtasm 7y ago
  That sounds more like lazy loading than infinite scroll.
bryanrasmussen 7y ago
Well there are some arguments to be made that Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are terrible for their users. I am going to assume you are familiar with these arguments because you are on this site. Perhaps infinite scrolling contributes to whatever is so powerfully bad about these sites for their users, if indeed those arguments are correct. Which I have a strong suspicion they are.
ken 7y ago
> many of them are just a variation of the final reason: Terrible user experience. If we're playing Architecture Astronaut, that's true of every possible issue. Compiler crash? Security hole? Deleted all user data? All merely variations of "terrible user experience". > several very successful websites that use infinite scrolling in one way or another. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit just to name a few. Yes, all sites which first took several years to build up a massive user base and benefit greatly from network effects. Most websites are not Facebook. 20 years ago, it was "But Microsoft does it!" -- and the response was "But you're not Microsoft." I'd love to find out how many people use "old.reddit.com" specifically to avoid infinite scrolling. > Is infinite scrolling on these sites disorienting the user? hard to navigate? rendering a "terrible user experience"? One could certainly argue that the data says otherwise. What data, exactly? Yes, I do think it's disorienting, hard, and terrible, and I hear similar complaints all the time. If I had a nickel for every time I clicked something by mistake in Facebook, or clicked "back" and wasn't taken back to what I was looking at before, I'd have ... a big ol' jar of nickels, anyway. > The article doesn't even suggest that there might be situations where infinite scrolling might befit the site. You're right. These are 10 reasons it's bad for users. There's one obvious one that benefits the site: because there's no obvious stopping point, it's great for sites that want to be addictive. People eat more if they have a infinite bowl [1], too. If there's any user benefit to infinite scrolling, I have not heard it. [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15761167 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15761167
GeekyBear 7y ago
My issue is that infinite scrolling, especially on media rich websites, leads to a massive increase in RAM usage for no real increase in functionality.
tripzilch 7y ago
There's a difference between good user experience and addictive user experience, and it's not always good.

wlesieutre 7y ago

Facebook's is compounded by the mysterious newsfeed algorithm - if you're infinite scrolling a limited set of items in chronological order it wouldn't be as bad. But I've seen things in my newsfeed and then not been able to find them again if I accidentally closed or reloaded my tab. If you noted who posted/shared it you can find it on their profile, but if all you noticed was the headline or image on a shared item it might as well be gone forever once you lose your place in the feed. I wouldn't say that's the main reason I don't check my Facebook feed anymore, but it's one of them.

tontonius 7y ago
infinite scrolling of a limited set of items wouldn't be very true to the name ;-) I agree with the problem of finding something again in a long, cryptically ordered list of several hundreds or thousands of items. Not sure a paginated facebook feed would solve that issue though
- wlesieutre 7y ago
  I mean limited in terms of quantity posted per day; my understanding of Facebook's system is that across all of my friends (or maybe even friends of friends?) there's a lot of stuff posted, and Facebook only picks a subset of to actually show me. I don't know how they decide which things appear in my newsfeed and I don't know what order they're in. Compared to Instagram where I see every single thing that someone I follow posts (might be because I follow so few people on it). If I want to go back and see one of the posts again, I scroll back in time and eventually find it. For losing posts on Facebook I’m not talking about trying to find something from a month ago, I’m talking about things that I swear I saw yesterday and now I can’t find it.
  - SiempreViernes 7y ago
    I often loose things I saw a minute ago by a misclick on a group page or something like that, and when I come back to the feed it’s just gone. Like, I follow some newspapers on fb, an often they only show up once per day, reload the feed and it’s vanished.
- nicoburns 7y ago
  > infinite scrolling of a limited set of items wouldn't be very true to the name ;-) This is actually what facebook does when you're offline. When it runs out of content to show, it cycles round and shows you the same content again.
stjohnswarts 7y ago
Yep facebooks algorithm could be totally superceded by "I would like to see .... [ ] only friends [ ] mostly friends, some lists [ ] random [ ] don't care, use your AI/algorithm choose one of the above.

TOGoS 7y ago

The infinite scroll is one of the reasons those websites are so addictive. My lizard brain has a hard time closing the tab when I "haven't reached the end of the page yet." So it may be 'good' for keeping people on the site. But in the grand scheme of things I'd rather the page had a bottom.

jjuel 7y ago
This. These sites don't use infinite scrolling because it is a great user experience they do it to keep people on their site. They do it to keep people engaged. The addiction. Most of those sites would actually be better with pages in terms of user experience, but that isn't the experience they are going for.
badwolf 7y ago
I think Instagram does a fairly good job of trying to have both. When you've scrolled through all the new posts, you get a green "You're all caught up" break point. You can continue scrolling past it if you want.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

marcosdumay 7y ago

Facebook's feed is horrible. People are lost all the time with it, and it's a huge impediment for the site to be used for anything remotely serious. Ditto for Instagram, but expectations here are more aligned with nothing serious ever getting on the site. Twitter would be better without infinite scrolling, but nobody ever cares about messages down the line, so it's not that bad. I have never noticed that Reddit does it. Is it on the new design only? This may be one of the reasons people do not use the new design.

bigzyg33k 7y ago
I'm not certain if the new design does it. The old one certainly doesn't, but RES[1] adds the functionality, and has a large user base. I often mix up native features and what RES has added [1] https://redditenhancementsuite.com/ https://redditenhancementsuite.com/

Chazprime 7y ago

I’d say that Facebook’s feed is very difficult to use, and often finding an item that you were looking at earlier in a session can often be very difficult, if not impossible.

kerkeslager 7y ago

Just because successful websites do it doesn't mean it's a good user experience.

dejawu 7y ago

> leave out the vital context and nuances in the topic they aim to analyze Seems about par for the course for a Hacker Noon post. They're not meant to be read, they're meant to pad the career of the author.

edoceo 7y ago

Reddit has infinite scroll? I still see Back/Next - and three prompts to install their App

jazzyjackson 7y ago
The app boasts infinite scroll as a “feature”
rtkwe 7y ago
There's a plug-in called RedditEnhancementSuite (RES) that adds infinite scrolling with the URL bar being modified. RES has a pretty large userbase and it's well done so OP probably uses it and just forgot what's base Reddit and what's RES. The new redesign also adds infinite scrolling.

denton-scratch 7y ago

Infinite scrolling depends on Javascript. NoScript prevents it. FaceTwitGram may depend on IS; I don't know, I've never used a FaceTwitGram account. Reddit seems to work fine without Javascript. If I'm forced to enable Javascript for some specific site, I enable it for that site, then (if that's not enough) for it's companion sites, CDN and so on. By this time the site has already caused me resentment. If that's not enough, then usually I've already gone somewhere else. Way too many sites will give you a blank screen just because JS is disabled. But if you insist that I totally drop my pants and enable ALL scripts, you really have to have a compelling reason (e.g. buy product unavailable elsewhere, um err can't think of any other compelling reason; luckily neither my bank nor the taxman mandate 3rd-party scripts). Some UI gimmick such as infinite scrolling is certainly not a compelling reason. The purpose of infinite scrolling is to retain the eyeballs of mobile users - to stop them navigating away from your site. I am old, my eyes are dim, and my fingers are shaky; I use my mobile phone primarily as a phone, and never as a browser. Younger folk may have a different experience.

stjohnswarts 7y ago
I find noscript way to aggressive. I think ublock has a much nicer compromise version.
- denton-scratch 7y ago
  Each to his own. I guess I'm just an aggressive dude:-)

neves 7y ago

Infinite scrolling in Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Reddit doesn't exist to improve the user experience, but to make these sites addictive. Different priorities here.

autoexec 7y ago
> Infinite scrolling in Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Reddit doesn't exist to improve the user experience In the case of reddit, infinite scrolling is one of the most common reasons I hear used to explain why other users opted out of Reddit's new UI.
munk-a 7y ago
Yea, I dislike infinite scrolling because I'm a user, but these sites love infinite scrolling because there is no barrier to continuing to browse, in ye olden days there would be a load time when clicking onto the next page - in the modern world performance is likely not a concern or the next page is already loaded and just swapped out in the current view - but it is still disorienting to the user as that action will usually shift their view. Interestingly the approach I think works the best (except for the poor input experience on anything that isn't a touch screen) is infinite horizontal scrolling since the footer and header elements remain expectedly stable while not overlapping any information the user wants to view... horizontal scrolling is very poorly supported by input devices and using the scroll wheel to move left/right makes the user think too much.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > in ye olden days there would be a load time when clicking onto the next page - in the modern world performance is likely not a concern or the next page is already loaded and just swapped out in the current view - but it is still disorienting to the user as that action will usually shift their view. Oh, but there is a visible load time still. Unless you're browsing on a supercomputer with infinite RAM, after a minute or two of scrolling Facebook you'll realize the performance drops fast with the amount of feed you've loaded, while the load times increase. In my experience, both the page slowdown and load delays are about O(n) with respect to the side of the feed, but I haven't measured it precisely.

magduf 7y ago

>For the sake of argument, there are several very successful websites that use infinite scrolling in one way or another. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit just to name a few. Comcast is a very successful company. Do they have a great user experience?

tontonius 7y ago
Sorry, not a US citizen here so no experience of Comcast, although I've heard they're not very popular in that regard. What I meant was that some of the worlds most popular sites employ "infinite" scrolling, and it kind of makes sense on those sites. If they have a great user experience? That's highly subjective. I guess they had a lot better user experience than their failed competitors.
- magduf 7y ago
  >I guess they had a lot better user experience than their failed competitors. That's like the logic that Microsoft Windows must be great just because it's the most-used operating system. You're completely ignoring all the other factors that are involved in a company or product getting to a dominant position.

jiveturkey 7y ago

eg, flickr. infinite scroll limits the amount of data downloaded over mobile, without forcing you to "click" to next page. it used to be absurdly user hostile but now it's limited to 2 loads before it stops and you are presented with a page index. it's a great compromise with a great underlying UX reason.

crtasm 7y ago
That sounds more like lazy loading than infinite scroll.

bryanrasmussen 7y ago

Well there are some arguments to be made that Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are terrible for their users. I am going to assume you are familiar with these arguments because you are on this site. Perhaps infinite scrolling contributes to whatever is so powerfully bad about these sites for their users, if indeed those arguments are correct. Which I have a strong suspicion they are.

ken 7y ago

> many of them are just a variation of the final reason: Terrible user experience. If we're playing Architecture Astronaut, that's true of every possible issue. Compiler crash? Security hole? Deleted all user data? All merely variations of "terrible user experience". > several very successful websites that use infinite scrolling in one way or another. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit just to name a few. Yes, all sites which first took several years to build up a massive user base and benefit greatly from network effects. Most websites are not Facebook. 20 years ago, it was "But Microsoft does it!" -- and the response was "But you're not Microsoft." I'd love to find out how many people use "old.reddit.com" specifically to avoid infinite scrolling. > Is infinite scrolling on these sites disorienting the user? hard to navigate? rendering a "terrible user experience"? One could certainly argue that the data says otherwise. What data, exactly? Yes, I do think it's disorienting, hard, and terrible, and I hear similar complaints all the time. If I had a nickel for every time I clicked something by mistake in Facebook, or clicked "back" and wasn't taken back to what I was looking at before, I'd have ... a big ol' jar of nickels, anyway. > The article doesn't even suggest that there might be situations where infinite scrolling might befit the site. You're right. These are 10 reasons it's bad for users. There's one obvious one that benefits the site: because there's no obvious stopping point, it's great for sites that want to be addictive. People eat more if they have a infinite bowl [1], too. If there's any user benefit to infinite scrolling, I have not heard it. [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15761167 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15761167

GeekyBear 7y ago

My issue is that infinite scrolling, especially on media rich websites, leads to a massive increase in RAM usage for no real increase in functionality.

tripzilch 7y ago

There's a difference between good user experience and addictive user experience, and it's not always good.