I had proposed this reply to someone else's similar question. I don't think the current app's design is an accident (i.e. it's not pure incompetence). It meet

I had proposed this reply to someone else's similar question. I don't think the current app's design is an accident (i.e. it's not pure incompetence). It meets several objectives: * Minimizes the user-generated content shown on each page (a couple of threads or a couple of comments), so it reduces the amount of traffic to the server and DB as the user browses around. * Oh, and it leaves a ton of space for ads, which (bonus) can be served from a separate ad server, further lightening their load. * Plus, there are Bob Ross-like "happy accidents" like pages jumping back to the top when you go a level up from a thread - going back to your spot can trigger more ads to be shown. The 3rd-party apps subvert all this, and bypass the ads, to boot.