Facebook and Twitter timelines are bad examples. There is no reason to avoid indexing by date and those services do in fact index by date. Those services may ev

Facebook and Twitter timelines are bad examples. There is no reason to avoid indexing by date and those services do in fact index by date. Those services may even be able to use custom database engines and build excellent date-based pagination menu from their index — they just don't do it. Infinite scrolling has better user retention (read: "takes more time to navigate") and allows to easily inject advertizing. So Facebook and Twitter will continue to use it regardless of it's technical merits. The article does not make a point to avoid feature-rich pagination. It is not about infinite scrolling somehow being a great thing either. It is about SQL "OFFSET" operator being a piece of donkey shit. SQL requires OFFSET to have precise starting position and that position can only be determined by iterating over first OFFSET items from database — which generally does not use index. Most backend programmers have no clue and try to use OFFSET as their go-to pagination tool. Their pagination sucks and makes servers hang under trivial load.