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Discussion on: Why I hate Infinite Scrolling

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ryan profile image
Ryan • Edited

It's one thing I appreciate about Twitter. The menu links are at the bottom of a sidebar. Then you can scroll through the main feed forever without worry.

I like the seamless experience of infinite scroll. If I read one item, I'm more likely to read another if I don't have to work for it. But I don't like truly infinite scroll. If I am invested enough to scroll down for dozens of pages, I probably want a page link (or better yet a cursor) so I can pick up wherever I leave off. I think it should be limited.

Going back to Twitter, here's one thing I don't like. Sometimes I will look at a user's profile. I'll scroll down for a while and read a lot of their tweets and say "I like this person, I should follow them". But the follow button is all the way back at the top of the page. D'oh!

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

I think it definitely works on sites like Twitter, but they've confused things by adding features which mix up the order of posts, promoting things and putting "in case you missed it" posts up at the top. Combine this with the fact that retweets are shown in the order they were retweeted but your "likes" page is shown in the order the posts were made, means that even though I've been using it for years, I've basically given up on assuming any kind of order.

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jsn1nj4 profile image
Elliot Derhay • Edited

At least Twitter mostly still goes by post date.

Facebook made that a separate feed that you need to practically dig for to find now; it's not actually an option for the news feed itself anymore.

Everything there is filtered through their algorithm that decides what you're mostly likely to enjoy, and posts will show up in the feed again at a later time if there's activity on them from friends.

All that plus reloading the entire feed when exiting the Post comments (on the mobile app specifically), making it hard to find the same post again if you're trying to share it.

I really hope Twitter doesn't go any farther than it has away from a linear feed. There is at least some sense left in how they built it.