So, if you're a horny teenager, you scrool down for a huge amount of time to find "the video" that will get you off... and you hear your mom coming up the stairs, Control+w (close tab), and when she goes downstairs again, you press Control+shift+t (reopen last closed tab), you're back at the beginning, and have to search for that video again? That sucks.
Endless scrolling sucks. You go down and down and down, and something breaks (eg. bad wifi), and you lose your position, since refresh takes you back to top.
Also: something breaks, you press F5, and now the feed is gone, or is in a completely different place than it was before refresh.
Infinite scroll should be labeled as dark pattern. Its only benefit is to the companies exploiting intermittent rewards; for users, it's just bad ergonomics and bad experience.
But a dark pattern? Definitely not. I have had multiple projects this year where the feedback from UX workshops has overwhelmingly been to use infinite scroll. This is feedback from real users, customers, and clients.
We need to be careful to align the website UX to the correct target users. Are you building something for a very technical market or power users, such as software engineers? Sure, ensure you don't interfere with the experience.
However, if you're targetting business or social users, you need to base your decisions on their priorities. This means the optimal path for their primary use cases. This means optimizing for the 98% of the times the user just scrolls down the feed, not the 2% of the time they scroll a bit and refresh.
and yet, that's the same behavior of the social media sites; you will spend more time (=more ads shown to you) there because you are searching for that damn video again
1. browsers have some sort of cache[1] that allows them to restore closed/previously visited pages without doing a page reload. granted, it's not very reliable, but it'd probably work most of the time as long as you're not memory constrained or visiting too many pages in-between.
2. if the infinite load mechanism also updates the url (via the history api), then this wouldn't be an issue.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Firefox/Rel...
(I still don't particularly like Discourse's implementation of infinite scroll because their custom scroll thing is awful to use.)
But sites were small and even loading all the page again was not that bad.
By the way, Rails Tutbolinks [1] are a way to get the same result with the server rendering only the html body and the js code in the browser swapping it with the current one.
> Turbolinks intercepts all clicks on <a href> links to the same domain. When you click an eligible link, Turbolinks prevents the browser from following it. Instead, Turbolinks changes the browser’s URL using the History API, requests the new page using XMLHttpRequest, and then renders the HTML response.
I don't have a Turbolinks application to check but I found this https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks/issues/313
and this
https://www.mskog.com/posts/instant-page-loads-with-turbolin...
The behavior you describe is possible but it's not the default and requires adding other libraries.
I worked on a porn site that was basically an endless-scroll video gallery. Clicking a thumbnail opened the video in a modal overlay. All pages on the site were modal on top of the gallery in the background. You could deep link to a page and the gallery would load in behind it.
It worked really well and had great UX.
This generalizes to any website that has some sort of overall state between page transitions, like soundcloud.com playing a track as you click around.