Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My lizard brain is no match for infinite scroll

alexanderell.is

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 459 posts

Re: My lizard brain is no match for infinite scroll

#341

Post by prawn »

unexistential wrote: post #200

I feel exactly as the author feels, and it's heartening to see so many comments here talking about this problem. What baffles me is outside of HN and the occasional news story or opinion piece, people seem to be just unbothered. People (or at least my friend and acquaintance circle) seem to keep using these platforms, posting on and what the infinite scroll feeds them as if there's nothing out of the ordinary about i…

I imagine a lot of people feel helpless if they think that using these apps is part of the mix of being socially relevant, but there are limited ways they can change how those apps work. Or they feel it replaces their idle TV watching and so aren't bothered that it's endless and passive.

Instagram is important in my industry and I detest the infinite scroll, but multiple times a day I carry past the "caught up" point and get partway into suggestions and ads before I realise. I'd love a feature to switch it back to how it used to work, but that's very unlikely!

Re: My lizard brain is no match for infinite scroll

#342

Post by phit_ »

Nimitz14 wrote: post #337
janmarsal wrote: post #306

Thankfully my monkey brain is stronger than my lizard brain when it comes to things like infinite scroll, modals and other horrible UI features that nobody in their right mind should add to any website. Even just a couple of minutes of twitter usage makes me rage quit the whole website. Why do you pause my video when I scroll down it's just a politician speaking I don't need to see it only listen WHY YOU DO THIS? I'm…

> Why do you pause my video when I scroll down it's just a politician speaking I don't need to see it only listen WHY YOU DO THIS? So you think the standard should be to keep a video playing even if one's scrolled past it? Are you insane?

not op, but yes when I actively unmuted it, it should keep playing

Re: My lizard brain is no match for infinite scroll

#343

Post by shakna »

Nimitz14 wrote: post #337
janmarsal wrote: post #306

Thankfully my monkey brain is stronger than my lizard brain when it comes to things like infinite scroll, modals and other horrible UI features that nobody in their right mind should add to any website. Even just a couple of minutes of twitter usage makes me rage quit the whole website. Why do you pause my video when I scroll down it's just a politician speaking I don't need to see it only listen WHY YOU DO THIS? I'm…

> Why do you pause my video when I scroll down it's just a politician speaking I don't need to see it only listen WHY YOU DO THIS? So you think the standard should be to keep a video playing even if one's scrolled past it? Are you insane?

There's a bit more subtlety and tradeoff here.

For example, I doubt most people watching a video on YouTube would like the video to stop playing when they scroll down. If they wanted to pause it, they'd pause it. They also probably don't want the video to transition to the next, whilst they're reading threads.

If you're in an infinite loop stream however, you do probably want it to pause or stop, without intervention, as you've scrolled away and dismissed the video.

However - you may not want that to happen whilst you're still in-thread with the video. If you're looking at comments on the video, you probably still want it to continue. But if you reach the bottom of the thread, you probably don't want to have it pause and have to find the start of the thread to continue playing it, just because you scrolled an inch too far.

Re: My lizard brain is no match for infinite scroll

#344

Post by srik »

Beltalowda wrote: post #340
janmarsal wrote: post #306

Thankfully my monkey brain is stronger than my lizard brain when it comes to things like infinite scroll, modals and other horrible UI features that nobody in their right mind should add to any website. Even just a couple of minutes of twitter usage makes me rage quit the whole website. Why do you pause my video when I scroll down it's just a politician speaking I don't need to see it only listen WHY YOU DO THIS? I'm…

> I'm also one of those people who randomly clicks and "paints" the text on every website I use. On Reddit this means that I manage to close the thread by accident all the time because someone thought it would be a good idea to open the threads in a modal that closes when you click outside of it. I thought I was the only one with this habit hah! IMHO this "close modal when clicking outside of it" is a UX pattern you…

I share your affinity to the older reddit ui but why bother using an addon for redirecting when you can opt out of the redesign in settings instead.

Re: My lizard brain is no match for infinite scroll

#345

Post by ninesnines »

sodality2 wrote: post #24

I'm still young so maybe my mind hasn't matured enough to where I can combat this well. So I went heavy-handed - I have a button on my desk that when I press it, my server's DNS server (through which all my devices and router resolve) begins rejecting requests to reddit, instagram, twitter, hackernews, news.google.com, etc. For the next two hours, there is nothing I can do outside of SSH'ing through my mobile device…

How do you implement this? I am a relatively new programmer and would love to to implement this on my own phone/ workspace

Re: My lizard brain is no match for infinite scroll

#347

Post by Beltalowda »

srik wrote: post #344
Beltalowda wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm also one of those people who randomly clicks and "paints" the text on every website I use. On Reddit this means that I manage to close the thread by accident all the time because someone thought it would be a good idea to open the threads in a modal that closes when you click outside of it. I thought I was the only one with this habit hah! IMHO this "close modal when clicking outside of it" is a UX pattern you…

I share your affinity to the older reddit ui but why bother using an addon for redirecting when you can opt out of the redesign in settings instead.

This way I don't need to sign in or remember cookies.

Re: My lizard brain is no match for infinite scroll

#348

Post by danuker »

mr_mitm wrote: post #338
janmarsal wrote: post #306

Thankfully my monkey brain is stronger than my lizard brain when it comes to things like infinite scroll, modals and other horrible UI features that nobody in their right mind should add to any website. Even just a couple of minutes of twitter usage makes me rage quit the whole website. Why do you pause my video when I scroll down it's just a politician speaking I don't need to see it only listen WHY YOU DO THIS? I'm…

This is something I also noticed a lot and find it equally infuriating. I can only guess why things are like this: you and most users on HN have at least a rudimentary understanding, often an expert understanding, of how a browser works under the hood. You know what a server is, what HTML is, what a browser history is, how cookies work, etc. But some manager wants to tap into the huge market of technically illiterate…

> something like the Twitter interface.

Good. The fact that they alienate power users means the platform will not be preferred by power users, and most of the content on it will have dubious value.

I am thankful to HN's existence for this reason. It is among the last outlets where I can get quality content.

Re: My lizard brain is no match for infinite scroll

#350

Post by oblio »

danuker wrote: post #348
mr_mitm wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something I also noticed a lot and find it equally infuriating. I can only guess why things are like this: you and most users on HN have at least a rudimentary understanding, often an expert understanding, of how a browser works under the hood. You know what a server is, what HTML is, what a browser history is, how cookies work, etc. But some manager wants to tap into the huge market of technically illiterate…

> something like the Twitter interface. Good. The fact that they alienate power users means the platform will not be preferred by power users, and most of the content on it will have dubious value. I am thankful to HN's existence for this reason. It is among the last outlets where I can get quality content.

> Good. The fact that they alienate power users means the platform will not be preferred by power users, and most of the content on it will have dubious value.

It doesn't work like that. Stratechery explains why. Aggregators aggregate users and even power users like to talk to/be listened to by a lot of people.

So Twitter and Youtube and the like don't even need to target power users, in general. They need to target the greater population, and once that population is captive, if you want to have any kind of audience as a publisher, you're wrangled to where the users are, you're captive, too.

Apple does the same thing with devs. They primarily target not super sophisticated middle to upper class users with decent disposable incomes. Since they "own" a huge amount of these users, developers have to build applications for them if they want to make money. And then developers are second class citizens on Apple platforms. Apple removes an API overnight? Better get cracking to fix your app ASAP. Apple doesn't support modern CI/CD platforms? Have Amazon stack up consumer desktops in a warehouse to kind of work around that.

Post reply on HN