Convince me that infinite scrolling is worse than pages

Community General Discussion
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I’m being serious. I want to hear those of you who are practically screaming to get page numbers back explain your reasoning properly.

I don’t want “infinite scrolling sucks”, “I don’t like reddit”, or even “it’s harder to navigate”. If you believe it’s harder to navigate, tell me why it’s harder to navigate. If you just don’t like how it looks visually, we can agree to disagree as at the end of the day that’s a pretty minor thing to squabble about.

Obviously you can tell that I’m “defending” infinite scrolling here. I’m open to hearing legitimate reasons why it’s not a good thing compared to the old system, but the reason for this post is that I’m seeing a lot of comments hating on the idea of it who just don’t realize some other function of the new forums handles the issue they were complaining about in the first place. So give me a reason that makes sense.

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Why are you scrolling? You know the thin blue line to the right? You can click to the end of the post and it will take you to last comment or you can click at any point there even drag the cursor if you want that too.

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I can honestly say that i don’t hate it in theory. What i might dislike is the repetitive nature of continuous scrolling. But thats something that can be dealt with through various methods. ie; blue line to the right

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I’ve had a single thread take up 3 GB RAM. One thread. The more you scroll, the more RAM gets eaten. A lot more RAM. And the more resources taken by the thread as it grows that much larger, the slower your browser gets.

This gets several magnitudes worse on phones whose performance tanks as you scroll down further, especially when you factor in phones have significantly less RAM than PCs do.

Edit: Had a thread get up over 10 gigabytes of RAM on its own. 8.5 GB of that was prior to the forum switchover so no embedded pics or vids to skew the results.

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You said too much. Opinions are opinions. Ogres have layers. Not like a cake. Like an onion.

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If I want to get to the bottom of a thread, I don’t. I know that. But some folks have issues with the function of it for one reason or another, so I’m trying to see if there’s any actually reasonable ones floating around.

Did clicking the next page button once every couple minutes really stop you from continuously scrolling when you stop and think about it? It’s a second worth of a break from it. You’d spend more time reading a single post before scrolling more than you would clicking “next”.

I suspect this has more to do with people embedding stuff or some other unknown than it has to do with infinite scrolling. For the sake of testing, I closed everything and opened a new chrome window. I opened the 2k+ post thread about guild permissions and let it autoscroll all the way down to 500+ posts. You know how much my RAM usage increased by then? less than 50MB. Doesn’t matter how many posts there are, that was never going to get to 3GB, something else was causing it for you.

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Honestly, although I’m mostly indifferent, I did enjoy pages more because once the content was loaded, it was loaded. I dislike scrolling down quickly and being hit with a constant Blizzard loading symbol because I’m trying to get through a thread quickly. It’s just irritating to deal with. And honestly, going through a thread that’s taken off and seeing the amount of infinite scrolling I’d have to go through just kills my motivation to read through the whole thing.

For some reason, pages simply made reading threads more enjoyable because it felt less sloppy. But, that’s just me.

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It’s not, people just afraid of change.

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yes, a second worth break. however i use down arrow most of the time. the continious uploading involved in scrolling is the key to its “Infinite” scrolling. where as hitting next took a few seconds.
and as i said, i was stating what i might dislike, there is no need to be critical on my hypothetical opinion.
:star::mage:

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I use the blue scroll thingy.

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/shrug I like the new forums.

Once I got used to the scrolling everything about it is better. If the scrolling bothers you just use the little blue bar instead of the browser scroll bar. It tells you what post you’re on out of how many and what day that post was made.

And the topic browsing is straight up better for keeping tabs on threads, you can see how recent the last post was and how many replies have been made since the last time you were in a thread. And in threads you can see replies to posts on the actually post the reply is to.

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Y’know posts that start with things like “Convince me” or “prove me wrong” immediately make me want to not, as it were.

If it’s meant to evoke counter-argument, it ain’t working on this gnome, sorry.

:australia:…:koala:…:australia:

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It made you counter one way or another.

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Fair enough, although for my end of the same stick – loading a new page on the old forums was much more intrusive than having some greyed out lines for a quarter second before the content fills in. Every single page I had to close my eyes because the entire screen would flash bright white for a split second during the loading process and it actively made viewing the forums uncomfortable. The infinite scrolling got rid of that. (I didn’t have this issue for anywhere other than here. In any case it just trades manual full-page loading to automated partial loading, yes?)

That, and if you’re trying to get to a specific point, you can use the blue scrollbar instead of manually trying to go all the way down. Or if you want a specific post, notifications can get you there if it’s a reply to you, or bookmarks can get you there if you had the foresight to mark it beforehand.

I realize this is just your own thoughts and not you trying to claim it as a reason it’s bad, but I have to ask, what about seeing a lot of scrolling is worse than seeing 20+ pages? The amount of reading is the same, yes? And you can always skip ahead just like most people did already in larger threads.

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Wasn’t for me. If a thread was at 20 pages, I just went to the last three pages and went through it. Checked what the relevant conversation was. If it had been derailed significantly, I didn’t even bother. Made my life easier.

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here is a thread that gives opinions about why they dislike scrolling.

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You can still do that in the current forums, yes? By clicking near the bottom on the blue line or by using the ‘End’ key?

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This kills the toaster.

Also it’s easier to remember that your post specifically was on page 4, rather than a little past the midpoint.

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Yeh. Infinite loading wheel keeps popping up though. That’s why, as you had pointed out as well, I’m not using it as some kind of reason. I’m just saying for my own personal itch / twitch, I prefer the old format.

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I get why it bothers some people. In larger threads it’s like diving into a vast ocean with nothing around to grab onto. People like order. Some kind of filing system.

I get it, but honestly it took me a very short amount of time to get used to the new way. In such massive threads I was rarely reading every post anyway. My usual way of browsing is to scoot through quickly waiting for something interesting to catch my eye. Like an oft quoted piece of text, or a brewing debate. And I can still do that with the infinite scroll.

1 Like