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The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes

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Re: The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes

#241

Post by ToValueFunfetti »

iamnothere wrote: post #212
7402 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"No loud music between 10pm and 7am." That's on private property when it can be heard by others. Laws have all kind of restrictions on the time/place/manner of self-expression when what is being expressed has a negative effect on others. What you can't do is have laws that would say loud opera after 10pm is OK but loud Country & Western isn't.

“No writing at home between 10pm and 7am.” Would that be allowed? I imagine you agree the answer is “no”. What, specifically, is the difference? Because the answer lies there. Hint: the physical world is very different from the virtual world, and has different limitations. Hint #2: if I crank up the amp to 1000db and shout into it, it’s obviously not a question of speech anymore. This is obviously an extreme example…

Speaking as someone who agrees with you, it's much better to just make your point than to lay it out in hints like this. It's condescending and annoying. No offense intended, just a note.

Re: The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes

#242

Post by iamnothere »

contextfree wrote: post #235
bigmadshoe wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just use cursor based pagination. How is this any different whether it’s infinite scroll or separate pages?

I guess the argument is that, while it's the same whether the user asks for "give me page 3" or "give me scrollbar Y coordinate 2160", the user is more likely to do the first or at least to care about the correctness of its result?

Why does the user need to see a page number? You could just show a “forward” and a “back” button. Keep records of what they’ve seen recently so you can replay prior pages. If they view too many pages just silently drop earlier pages; it’s a feed, not a perfect paginated list.

Re: The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes

#243

Post by harshreality »

ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #234
scoofy wrote: post #81

We can all agree that the internet was great and now it is less great, but the second someone articulates a very, very simple rule, the "well ackchyually" crew comes out of the woodwork. Infinite scroll is very obviously unnecessary. It is very obviously intended to keep people on an app longer than they would otherwise use it. You can lazy load into a finite scroll. Just make people click something every once in a w…

Not only it's unnecessary, it also bad GUI. In apps with infinite scrolling your position doesn't get its own state, so if you eg. go view a post & return to Instagram timeline it opens at the beginning. If you use media more thoughtfully as opposed to mindless scrolling, it just doesn't work. With pagination you could say return to IG after a week, go through 5 pages of whoever you're following, check out a post, go…

They can randomize (with bias for hot/recent content) entries on each page, but paginate them. FOMO will keep people clicking next even once they recognize some entries.

Re: The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes

#244

Post by iamnothere »

svachalek wrote: post #115
xigoi wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Infinite scroll makes the problem much easier, even if it’s still a problem. The only action you need to support is loading more results, which you can do by loading all results and filtering out those already shown. With pagination, the user may say “give me page 3” and you have no idea what was on pages 1 and 2, if they were even loaded.

You can implement pagination exactly the same way. It's a UX decision that has nothing to do with underlying queries, although it typically maps. The typical infinite scroll that I've seen implemented does not work the way you describe though, it's just pagination without controls. The reason it works is because it's pushing content you never asked for anyway and it just keeps pushing. Without any sense of pages you'…

Just use really long pages and require them to hit next page after viewing 100 items, then start showing the next batch of feedslop. How is that changing anything?

Users know that they are scrolling endlessly, they just don’t care. Adding a “more” button every now and then isn’t going to change that.

Re: The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes

#245

Post by iamnothere »

ToValueFunfetti wrote: post #241
iamnothere wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“No writing at home between 10pm and 7am.” Would that be allowed? I imagine you agree the answer is “no”. What, specifically, is the difference? Because the answer lies there. Hint: the physical world is very different from the virtual world, and has different limitations. Hint #2: if I crank up the amp to 1000db and shout into it, it’s obviously not a question of speech anymore. This is obviously an extreme example…

Speaking as someone who agrees with you, it's much better to just make your point than to lay it out in hints like this. It's condescending and annoying. No offense intended, just a note.

Fair enough, I just get bored of being the lone voice refuting these obvious talking points.

To be honest I suspect much of the support for this bill here is inorganic, and I do feel extreme contempt for the people pushing it.

In the end I’m not really trying to convince these posters—they have obviously made up their mind—but rather to entertain and educate the nonaligned audience.

Re: The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes

#246

Post by iamnothere »

ckosidows wrote: post #214
peder wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Infinite scroll is very obviously unnecessary All the different flavors of yogurt in the grocery store are unnecessary. We only need 2.

This is a false equivalence. I don't use a product _because_ it's got an endless scroll. I use a product and then they add that "feature" without giving me an option. I would, and have, turned it off when possible. But it's not currently possible to do so on apps like Reddit. In no way is this like yogurt. If I don't like that one yogurt has trace amounts of heroin in it, I can buy a different yogurt. If I don't like…

Fortunately social media contains neither heroin nor nicotine. All clear!

Re: The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes

#247

Post by etdznots »

This seems like an arms race that will be very hard for the state to win, meta is prepared to spend billions throwing engineers phds and compute at making the most addicting platform possible within the bounds set by the law, while this kind of law would make it hard for small entrants into the market, I’m not against trying to do things that are reasonable to prevent addictive behavior, but I hope these rules are gated on size somehow so that indie developers and random websites don’t get caught in the dragnet of needing to comply, like what happened with the UK moderation bill.

Re: The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes

#248

Post by xigoi »

vitally3643 wrote: post #78
xigoi wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, pagination makes it impossible to keep your place in the list if it changes between page loads.

Did you think HN has an unusable and bad interface? It seems to be a remarkably popular website despite having hard pages that change order on every refresh.

> Did you think HN has an unusable and bad interface?

In thems of pagination, yes, which is why I prefer to use https://hckrnews.com/.

Re: The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes

#249

Post by xigoi »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #104
xigoi wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, pagination makes it impossible to keep your place in the list if it changes between page loads.

> On the contrary, pagination makes it impossible to keep your place in the list if it changes between page loads. Well, that's obviously false. There are two styles of pagination: https://yourblog.zox/archives?page=4 https://yourblog.zox/archives?before=2019-06-03&count=10 That second style will never change (unless you insert entries into the past). The first style will change. But it hardly makes it impossible to…

The second style makes it impossible to sort by anything other than time.

Re: The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes

#250

Post by xigoi »

nkrisc wrote: post #59
xigoi wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, pagination makes it impossible to keep your place in the list if it changes between page loads.

How are you going to keep your place if the order changes anyway? What is your place if the order has changed? If the order changes, all bets are off regardless of pagination or infinite scroll.

When asked to load more items, simply take the entire list (which may have changed) and remove the items already shown on the screen.
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