7 ms·

The Infinite Scroll

71 points by zbentley 7y ago

tuxxy 7y ago
Personally, I find the "infinite scroll" to be one of the most devious forms of control developers and product folks have leveraged against individuals. It's extremely manipulative and extremely easy to build. It's just so incredibly asymmetric with who it benefits -- and it's clearly not the users.
elpool2 7y ago
When I hear "infinite scroll" I think of the way Facebook or Reddit just keeps loading new content as I scroll. But this article is really mostly about the sorry state of advertising on the web, and talks about sites that just have an infinitely long list of chumbox ads at the bottom of the page. No content, just infinite ads. The use of infinite scroll by Facebook or Reddit is controversial in its own right, but this is really a different kind of "infinite scroll" that I didn't even existed, I guess because I use an ad-blocker.
- ImpressiveWebs 7y ago
  Reddit doesn’t use infinite scroll. I think you mean Twitter, no?
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    It does, unless you're on old.reddit.com.
    - OrderlyTiamat 7y ago
      With res you can have infinite scroll on old.reddit.com as well. Which I actually like, but res comes with more shortcut bases behaviors so that may have something to do with it. I feel like the entire package gives me more control over how I browse reddit, not less.
    - ImpressiveWebs 7y ago
      Yep, I forgot about the new design. Tried it again just now, what a train wreck! I didn’t realize it has infinite scroll, only tried it briefly before.
    - mcherm 7y ago
      Sure, but why WOULDN'T you choose to use old.reddit.com ?
      - AdmiralGinge 7y ago
        There's loads of reasons not to! Monks who are trying to exercise their patience skills would find it very useful for example. Those who stress test input devices for peripherals companies will surely be a fan of the much increased need to click to read a thread as well.
  - qqssccfftt 7y ago
    Twitter doesn't actually have infinite scroll. It caps eventually.
  - Dahoon 7y ago
    It does and it even have links in the footer that you can't reach.
- bryanrasmussen 7y ago
  why would anyone keep scrolling when they reach the ads at the bottom of the page?
  - skohan 7y ago
    I know some sites and/or ads are deliberately designed to make advertising hard to distinguish from content. It's probably the kind of thing which has a very low success rate, but an even lower cost so it ends up getting implemented.
- skohan 7y ago
  I've noticed that a lot of shopping sites have gotten rid of infinite scroll in favor of a "load more" button on the bottom of the page. I wonder if this is motivated by product reasons, or if it's done to solve technical problems.
  - totony 7y ago
    instinctively i would say a load more button would sell more than infinite scroll since it limits the information shown to the user, which mean he's more likely to act (e.g. less "paralysis by analysis")
    - wruza 7y ago
      Actually if analysis was quick enough, I’d prefer to see all items at once. But what they do is re-xhr on every filter click, making it impossible. What’s wrong with just loading a big json of all items in a given group and allow me to sort/filter/compare quickly to find good ones? Their funny “web 2.0 framework” is at least 5 times heavier than the entire product base gzipped, and still uses web 1.0 style to operate. The only 2.0 thing about that is how flipping quick their backend paralyzes their clients.
jakecopp 7y ago
Even this site had a popup that the article dislikes so much!
- saagarjha 7y ago
  At least they're self-aware: > There are a few sites that look and work better—the ones that people pay for, generally, or ones built with the luxurious snowdrift margins of Medium—but mostly there are sites like this one and others that are even worse.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
_bxg1 7y ago
I cannot fathom how the "toe-fungus" ads still make money. Doesn't every internet user, at this point, have an instinctual spam sense? I don't even see the individual ads; they're just noise. I actually assume that even if I were interested in the headlines, clicking the link wouldn't even take me to that content but to malware and scams. But I don't actually know that because, again, they are so blatant that I've never actually clicked one. The most likely explanation is that it's older people who didn't grow up on the internet and still don't use it that much. If so, I wonder how the industry will change when nobody's left who's gullible enough to click? Will the quality of ads increase, at least, to where they represent real products? Or will scammers just get more creative?
- kumarvvr 7y ago
  Sadly, I have caught myself looking at those ads and clicking them a few times. The draw is something similar to browsing Reddit. Endless bullshit and nonsense, but titillating and addictive.
CaliforniaKarl 7y ago
I used to pay for a digital-only subscription to the San Jose Mercury News. Then one day, some ad (or combination thereof) appeared that caused the text to shift every second: On odd-numbered seconds, the text would reflow slightly; on even-numbered seconds, the content would return to ‘normal’. This behavior made the page effectively unreadable. Reader modes didn’t exist for me at the time (or I just wasn’t aware of them). Reloading would sometimes fix the issue; sometimes not. The issue began to occur once in every five articles viewed, and I gave up: When my subscription came up for renewal, I threw the notice away.
eh78ssxv2f 7y ago
Does anybody has examples of websites that do this? It would be useful to see this in action.
JensRex 7y ago
I can't scroll this website at all.
- rmetzler 7y ago
  I had the same issue, I reloaded the site and it worked. I guess this is a race condition in JavaScript and it works when it's cached in the browser cache.
- zwaps 7y ago
  I also can not scroll this website. What a failure hahaha
  - tomhoward 7y ago
    It just takes a while for the content to load.
- fmajid 7y ago
  Reader mode to the rescue.
- frogpelt 7y ago
  I couldn't for several seconds. It was amazingly ironic. Then after it finally loaded, I scrolled to the bottom to make sure there was one.
- audessuscest 7y ago
  Same issue, how ironic.
kumarvvr 7y ago
I hated the infinite scroll in Facebook and I abhor it in the new Reddit site. For one, I cannot react the 'footer' of the page anymore. In addition to that, there is a definite performance tax due to the loading content.
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  And I like own my scrollbar not have it change scale and scroll magically.
- rideontime 7y ago
  Okay. Did you have any thoughts about the article?
welly 7y ago
The author described the modern web browsing experience to a tee. It's awful and one of the reasons my web browsing is limited to very few sites and I'm careful on what I click on. The modern web browsing experience is clearly not what TBL had in mind when he started developing the web. Newspaper sites seem to want you to do everything but actually read the story you've clicked on to read. Take this for example: https://www.mirror.co.uk/lifestyle/health/coronavirus-doesnt-scare-infectious-disease-21658432 https://www.mirror.co.uk/lifestyle/health/coronavirus-doesnt... Before we even get to the story, they're trying to draw you away to other content. Then we have a video and then we have a newsletter signup form. And an ad. Of course we have an advert. This is the modern web. Following this, we have a few short paragraphs that are actually the story we came to read. A huge image, then more links to take you away from the story. Another handful of short paragraphs, another link to take you away from the story and this repeats until we get to the end of the story we came to read. Some comments follow the story (with a bunch of more links to take us away between the two, of course) and then what feels like an infinite scroll of sponsored links. I think the Daily Mirror is possibly one of the worst (one of many reasons I don't ever visit this site except by mistake or in the case of this comment) but I'm finding more and more websites are almost impossible to read. Which is why I don't really spend much time on the web these days. I'd say the majority of my web browsing habits come via youtube these days. HN is usually pretty reliable for decent content that is easy to consume, but beware if you click on a link found via Google or DDG (or other mainstream search engines)
- coldpie 7y ago
  > The author described the modern web browsing experience to a tee. It's awful and one of the reasons my web browsing is limited to very few sites and I'm careful on what I click on. NoScript is pretty useful for this. If a website doesn't work without JavaScript, odds are very good the author's incentives are something other than to convey information, so the content is probably not worth consuming anyway.
  - welly 7y ago
    I'll give that a try!
rapnie 7y ago
Aza Raskin, the inventor of Infinite Scroll, seriously regrets this invention. He is now co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology (humanetech.com) and trying to improve the negative sides of tech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aza_Raskin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aza_Raskin
- Etheryte 7y ago
  While the sentiment is admirable, I don't think it's anything to beat yourself up over. History has shown time and again that some inventions will happen when their prerequisites are filled — if he hadn't built it, sooner or later someone else would have. Simultaneous uncoordinated inventions of similar nature throughout history are a good example of this.
Dahoon 7y ago
Funny. The site doesn't even work in my installation of Firefox. I can't scroll.....
- once_inc 7y ago
  Chromium is struggling here too. Bit ironic given the title of the article.
- NoGravitas 7y ago
  Yeah, I opened it in Firefox, with the usual adblockers and so forth, and couldn't actually scroll the article at all. I switched to Reader View and was able to read it.
rchaud 7y ago
This article really should have included pictures and maybe a short GIF. The description is clear to anyone who's run into these day after day, but the visuals would really drive home how badly this type of UX reflects on the web property's brand. Surprisingly, for an article named "infinite scroll", there was no mention of actual "infinite scroll" mechanisms on sites like Reddit, Quartz and Techcrunch, where scrolling below a a certain point will auto-load the next article or paginate to the next series of posts.

71 points by zbentley 7y ago

Personally, I find the "infinite scroll" to be one of the most devious forms of control developers and product folks have leveraged against individuals. It's extremely manipulative and extremely easy to build. It's just so incredibly asymmetric with who it benefits -- and it's clearly not the users.

elpool2 7y ago

When I hear "infinite scroll" I think of the way Facebook or Reddit just keeps loading new content as I scroll. But this article is really mostly about the sorry state of advertising on the web, and talks about sites that just have an infinitely long list of chumbox ads at the bottom of the page. No content, just infinite ads. The use of infinite scroll by Facebook or Reddit is controversial in its own right, but this is really a different kind of "infinite scroll" that I didn't even existed, I guess because I use an ad-blocker.

ImpressiveWebs 7y ago
Reddit doesn’t use infinite scroll. I think you mean Twitter, no?
- saagarjha 7y ago
  It does, unless you're on old.reddit.com.
  - OrderlyTiamat 7y ago
    With res you can have infinite scroll on old.reddit.com as well. Which I actually like, but res comes with more shortcut bases behaviors so that may have something to do with it. I feel like the entire package gives me more control over how I browse reddit, not less.
  - ImpressiveWebs 7y ago
    Yep, I forgot about the new design. Tried it again just now, what a train wreck! I didn’t realize it has infinite scroll, only tried it briefly before.
  - mcherm 7y ago
    Sure, but why WOULDN'T you choose to use old.reddit.com ?
    - AdmiralGinge 7y ago
      There's loads of reasons not to! Monks who are trying to exercise their patience skills would find it very useful for example. Those who stress test input devices for peripherals companies will surely be a fan of the much increased need to click to read a thread as well.
- qqssccfftt 7y ago
  Twitter doesn't actually have infinite scroll. It caps eventually.
- Dahoon 7y ago
  It does and it even have links in the footer that you can't reach.
bryanrasmussen 7y ago
why would anyone keep scrolling when they reach the ads at the bottom of the page?
- skohan 7y ago
  I know some sites and/or ads are deliberately designed to make advertising hard to distinguish from content. It's probably the kind of thing which has a very low success rate, but an even lower cost so it ends up getting implemented.
skohan 7y ago
I've noticed that a lot of shopping sites have gotten rid of infinite scroll in favor of a "load more" button on the bottom of the page. I wonder if this is motivated by product reasons, or if it's done to solve technical problems.
- totony 7y ago
  instinctively i would say a load more button would sell more than infinite scroll since it limits the information shown to the user, which mean he's more likely to act (e.g. less "paralysis by analysis")
  - wruza 7y ago
    Actually if analysis was quick enough, I’d prefer to see all items at once. But what they do is re-xhr on every filter click, making it impossible. What’s wrong with just loading a big json of all items in a given group and allow me to sort/filter/compare quickly to find good ones? Their funny “web 2.0 framework” is at least 5 times heavier than the entire product base gzipped, and still uses web 1.0 style to operate. The only 2.0 thing about that is how flipping quick their backend paralyzes their clients.

jakecopp 7y ago

Even this site had a popup that the article dislikes so much!

saagarjha 7y ago
At least they're self-aware: > There are a few sites that look and work better—the ones that people pay for, generally, or ones built with the luxurious snowdrift margins of Medium—but mostly there are sites like this one and others that are even worse.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

_bxg1 7y ago

I cannot fathom how the "toe-fungus" ads still make money. Doesn't every internet user, at this point, have an instinctual spam sense? I don't even see the individual ads; they're just noise. I actually assume that even if I were interested in the headlines, clicking the link wouldn't even take me to that content but to malware and scams. But I don't actually know that because, again, they are so blatant that I've never actually clicked one. The most likely explanation is that it's older people who didn't grow up on the internet and still don't use it that much. If so, I wonder how the industry will change when nobody's left who's gullible enough to click? Will the quality of ads increase, at least, to where they represent real products? Or will scammers just get more creative?

kumarvvr 7y ago
Sadly, I have caught myself looking at those ads and clicking them a few times. The draw is something similar to browsing Reddit. Endless bullshit and nonsense, but titillating and addictive.

CaliforniaKarl 7y ago

I used to pay for a digital-only subscription to the San Jose Mercury News. Then one day, some ad (or combination thereof) appeared that caused the text to shift every second: On odd-numbered seconds, the text would reflow slightly; on even-numbered seconds, the content would return to ‘normal’. This behavior made the page effectively unreadable. Reader modes didn’t exist for me at the time (or I just wasn’t aware of them). Reloading would sometimes fix the issue; sometimes not. The issue began to occur once in every five articles viewed, and I gave up: When my subscription came up for renewal, I threw the notice away.

eh78ssxv2f 7y ago

Does anybody has examples of websites that do this? It would be useful to see this in action.

JensRex 7y ago

I can't scroll this website at all.

rmetzler 7y ago
I had the same issue, I reloaded the site and it worked. I guess this is a race condition in JavaScript and it works when it's cached in the browser cache.
zwaps 7y ago
I also can not scroll this website. What a failure hahaha
- tomhoward 7y ago
  It just takes a while for the content to load.
fmajid 7y ago
Reader mode to the rescue.
frogpelt 7y ago
I couldn't for several seconds. It was amazingly ironic. Then after it finally loaded, I scrolled to the bottom to make sure there was one.
audessuscest 7y ago
Same issue, how ironic.

kumarvvr 7y ago

I hated the infinite scroll in Facebook and I abhor it in the new Reddit site. For one, I cannot react the 'footer' of the page anymore. In addition to that, there is a definite performance tax due to the loading content.

quickthrower2 7y ago
And I like own my scrollbar not have it change scale and scroll magically.
rideontime 7y ago
Okay. Did you have any thoughts about the article?

welly 7y ago

The author described the modern web browsing experience to a tee. It's awful and one of the reasons my web browsing is limited to very few sites and I'm careful on what I click on. The modern web browsing experience is clearly not what TBL had in mind when he started developing the web. Newspaper sites seem to want you to do everything but actually read the story you've clicked on to read. Take this for example: https://www.mirror.co.uk/lifestyle/health/coronavirus-doesnt-scare-infectious-disease-21658432 https://www.mirror.co.uk/lifestyle/health/coronavirus-doesnt... Before we even get to the story, they're trying to draw you away to other content. Then we have a video and then we have a newsletter signup form. And an ad. Of course we have an advert. This is the modern web. Following this, we have a few short paragraphs that are actually the story we came to read. A huge image, then more links to take you away from the story. Another handful of short paragraphs, another link to take you away from the story and this repeats until we get to the end of the story we came to read. Some comments follow the story (with a bunch of more links to take us away between the two, of course) and then what feels like an infinite scroll of sponsored links. I think the Daily Mirror is possibly one of the worst (one of many reasons I don't ever visit this site except by mistake or in the case of this comment) but I'm finding more and more websites are almost impossible to read. Which is why I don't really spend much time on the web these days. I'd say the majority of my web browsing habits come via youtube these days. HN is usually pretty reliable for decent content that is easy to consume, but beware if you click on a link found via Google or DDG (or other mainstream search engines)

coldpie 7y ago
> The author described the modern web browsing experience to a tee. It's awful and one of the reasons my web browsing is limited to very few sites and I'm careful on what I click on. NoScript is pretty useful for this. If a website doesn't work without JavaScript, odds are very good the author's incentives are something other than to convey information, so the content is probably not worth consuming anyway.
- welly 7y ago
  I'll give that a try!

rapnie 7y ago

Aza Raskin, the inventor of Infinite Scroll, seriously regrets this invention. He is now co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology (humanetech.com) and trying to improve the negative sides of tech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aza_Raskin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aza_Raskin

Etheryte 7y ago
While the sentiment is admirable, I don't think it's anything to beat yourself up over. History has shown time and again that some inventions will happen when their prerequisites are filled — if he hadn't built it, sooner or later someone else would have. Simultaneous uncoordinated inventions of similar nature throughout history are a good example of this.

Dahoon 7y ago

Funny. The site doesn't even work in my installation of Firefox. I can't scroll.....

once_inc 7y ago
Chromium is struggling here too. Bit ironic given the title of the article.
NoGravitas 7y ago
Yeah, I opened it in Firefox, with the usual adblockers and so forth, and couldn't actually scroll the article at all. I switched to Reader View and was able to read it.

rchaud 7y ago

This article really should have included pictures and maybe a short GIF. The description is clear to anyone who's run into these day after day, but the visuals would really drive home how badly this type of UX reflects on the web property's brand. Surprisingly, for an article named "infinite scroll", there was no mention of actual "infinite scroll" mechanisms on sites like Reddit, Quartz and Techcrunch, where scrolling below a a certain point will auto-load the next article or paginate to the next series of posts.