5 ms·

Infinite scroll or not you’ll have this problem on a mutable set of items. You’ll have to dedupe the next “page” either client side or server side. Or something

Infinite scroll or not you’ll have this problem on a mutable set of items. You’ll have to dedupe the next “page” either client side or server side. Or something! It’s one of the reasons that the “I can build XYZ app in a weekend” crowd sounds so silly. I bet Reddit spent dozens of not hundreds of man-months nailing their scrolling behavior. It probably took many iterations of UX, product and engineering to get it right. And even now I bet they have a pile of JIRA tickets buried in their backlog relating to the pagination system. In my experience there is a non linear relation between the more seemless and “easy” something appears and the amount of work that went into it. Things seem “easy” because the developers poured a pile of fit & finish on the system.

marginalia_nu 4y ago
I'd note that Hacker News doesn't have this problem. Although Reddit's design decisions are almost certainly to accomodate their much larger scale.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  I've seen the problem on Hacker News. A story which was at the bottom of my page 1 is also at the top of my page 2.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Yeah, that's fine I think. I mean the problem of the pagination "crashing" due to removed posts.
- krapp 4y ago
  Infinite scroll isn't really useful in a low velocity environment like Hacker News, hot threads being the exception. Hacker News being designed to display trees sorted by karma also makes it difficult, you would have to re-sort the entire page to re-rank every new subtree within the current display. Apparently, this also makes pagination difficult, since pagination is implicitly chronological - what people want from pagination is to easily find the latest items - which karma sort doesn't allow.
Zak 4y ago
IIRC the first version of reddit and the Python rewrite were each more or less built in a weekend. They were neither scalable to millions of users nor heavily optimized to keep users on the site as long as possible. The latter point is relevant to a variety of UX decisions across many products and services. Making it easy, efficient, and pleasant for the user to do what the user wants may not be the overriding concern in the design.

marginalia_nu 4y ago

I'd note that Hacker News doesn't have this problem. Although Reddit's design decisions are almost certainly to accomodate their much larger scale.

Wowfunhappy 4y ago
I've seen the problem on Hacker News. A story which was at the bottom of my page 1 is also at the top of my page 2.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  Yeah, that's fine I think. I mean the problem of the pagination "crashing" due to removed posts.
krapp 4y ago
Infinite scroll isn't really useful in a low velocity environment like Hacker News, hot threads being the exception. Hacker News being designed to display trees sorted by karma also makes it difficult, you would have to re-sort the entire page to re-rank every new subtree within the current display. Apparently, this also makes pagination difficult, since pagination is implicitly chronological - what people want from pagination is to easily find the latest items - which karma sort doesn't allow.

Zak 4y ago

IIRC the first version of reddit and the Python rewrite were each more or less built in a weekend. They were neither scalable to millions of users nor heavily optimized to keep users on the site as long as possible. The latter point is relevant to a variety of UX decisions across many products and services. Making it easy, efficient, and pleasant for the user to do what the user wants may not be the overriding concern in the design.