> After spending hours scrolling through Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or Flipboard our mind feels tired. We feel intellectually bloated, and yet completely unsatisfied. Why? Because there is more out there. What if I’m missing out on something? What if there is some critical piece of knowledge just three flicks of my finger upwards?
The author seems to be essentially describing an addiction, and suggesting that the compulsions can be ameliorated by placing arbitrary divisions in the consumption stream. I have to admit, it would be interesting to see if there's a difference in consumption behavior between infinite scroll schemes and manual "Next Page" navigation... maybe this has already been studied?
It would probably be overkill to force this on users ("sorry, we're taking away infinite scroll because some of you couldn't control yourselves") but I can see it being potentially useful as an option in apps, available for those who find themselves in need of structure.
Anyway, I'm not entirely convinced it would solve addiction... after all, cigarettes come in discrete units, and we all know how that turned out.
From experience, I can confirm that there is a pretty massive subjective difference between scrolling through a book vs. reading it in page size chunks. When I scroll through something, especially if it is dense, I tend to be continually moving the page so that I keep the sentence I am reading in the middle of the screen. Since I often scan up and down around a point in the text to gain context and solidify the meaning this has led to less retention of knowledge when I scroll through as opposed to page through. There is probably more to it as well though, because I definitely feel that bloated feeling mentioned. What's more, I feel it even during short chapters, when the same amount of text read in paged form would not give me any trouble.
Not sure if this is replicated by others, but this may reveal something fundamental about how I interpret information in printed form.
It won't help everyone overcome their addiction, but some people just need a tiny bit of friction to stop reading. The brief moment where you need to click "Next" instead of scrolling can be enough for you to realize you've had enough. I especially like HN's design, where not only is there pagination but the "next" link doesn't take you to the next page it only gives you a page that says "link expired". if you really, really want to keep procrastinate you need to refresh.
> You reach the end of the feed, and a loading animation appears. More news loads. More pictures appear. You scroll again. The loading animation appears. More content loads. You continue scrolling
Then your mobile browser starts to lag and fucking crashes because it exhausted memory. Not to mention breaking the back button and the footer-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow issue. This thing has to die.
btw, Medium breaks text selection on mobile safari :/
What I hate the most is when I'm using a scrollbar and the infinite scroll adds more content to the bottom of the page and suddenly the scrollbar jerks up because I'm now 30% down the page instead of 15% down the page--then it takes me a minute to find where I was before the infinite scroll event. Happens to me ALL THE TIME. F-ing annoying. A "load more" button with some kind of ---------next page--------- line to delineate the new content would be preferable. The solution is to use the "Page Down" key but that's not always intuitive.
Also when infinite scroll is used on finite data. I have to spend 5 minuets awkwardly scrolling through pages to get to the end of a data set (I'm looking at you Soundcloud).
Before infinite scrolling, there was pagination, which also does not stop the user from digesting an entire database of content. Some infinity scrolling even requires a click; so, on those sites, it's the same amount of clicks to see more content as it is/was with pagination. I dont see infinite-scrolling being the cause of the problem.
I would suggest sites without filtering is the problem.
To get content that is a fixed length and consumable without overindulging, there needs to be a fixed amount of content that 1 person can digest. Otherwise, you just have this database/collection of content that 1 person cant quite possibly read in one sitting... regardless of if there is infinity scrolling, pagination, or some other way to navigate.
Newspapers, in a way, curate what they are going to display each day. It's like a filter in a way. All the content is filtered to show what can fit in X amount of pages.
Websites with this problem, if they want to solve the problem, need better filtering. That might not be the only solution, but i feel like it's a major contender in helping combat the problem of trying to figure out what to consume amongst limitless content consumption.
Ugh, also I hate infinite scrolling when it crashes and makes me reload the page. Like on Facebook I would scroll down and down up to posts from months ago, then it would crash on me, or I accidentally click on some link, which brings me back all the way to the top when I try to get back on it.
I disagree with this premise, that we necessarily need that "end" state in content consumption. As many things in the real world have an end state as (effectively) don't. I can finish a game of Risk, but I will never finish building relationships with my friends. I can finish a pile of tacos, but I will never finish seeking an understanding of my existence. I can finish re-watching all Star Trek series, but I cannot finish learning about the opinions and ideas of others.
Some activities just go on forever. We learn that certain activities have an end and others don't. The ones that don't we give attention to in a manner proportionate to their importance. In representing content streams as infinite, publishers are simply mimicking the interminable reality of that activity. Future generations will never have learned that there's a daily endpoint to what you can know about your friend's lives, current events, etc. What a silly proposition!
I (wildly) speculate the feeling that an end state is needed springs from weakness/inability in moderating one's impulses. The end state then is really just a crutch to force one to stop some obsessive activity.
Yeah, this was more or less my reaction to this article too. Much before infinite scrolling in apps, there were libraries so overwhelming in sheer volume of content that lead Borges to conceive the universe in the form of "The Library of Babel".
Simply putting a stop to scrolling will not end the feeling of unsatisfaction, it will not end the fear of missing out. Infinite scrolling is the consequence, not the cause of our dissatisfaction.
The author postulates that infinite content scrolling in mobile apps causes "dissatisfaction" and "intellectual bloat" for the user, and concludes that developers should limit content.
An alternative explanation might focus on when and how discipline and self-restraint should be exercised, the ways in which content can be curated, or how and why one might take steps to learn about such things.
As developer we tend to think it's "never the fault of the user". We have to design around human proclivities or else we would be neurologists or something. I agree with the article that this is a problem that could be solved and should be solved.
Unfortunately I think the easiest answer is gamification, sure to create much gnashing of teeth.
I think there are some UX issues with infinite scroll, and probably some cognitive benefit to giving users a predictable end to use of a product, but I don't think many people ever completed a newspaper every day. To me, a daily copy of the Times is just as infinite as my Twitter feed.
I disagree. While nobody may read every single article in a paper, we can comfortably scan all of it and decide which ones are worth reading. That is what the author is referring to, not the act of literally reading everything in your infinite TL...which is what you allude to by saying "I don't think many people ever completed a newspaper every day."
I don't like infinite scrolling either because there is seemingly no end, and no "landmarks" like page numbers that you can refer to to see how far you've gone.
They do not need to be mutually exclusive. A mobile app I maintain, for instance, appends each page as you scroll, but it also displays the page number of the content you are seeing and allows you to jump to specific pages.
I recently came across another issue with infinite scrolling, no access to a websites footer. I found myself annoyed by the issue when was trying to get the RSS feed from some websites which infinite scrolling on their blog posts. The infinite loading of the site actively prevented me from ever seeing the footer, which is where the RSS feed URL was, so I could not subscribe on my mobile (I knew it was in the footer as I could see it on desktop layout). Coupled with the equally annoying no-zoom meta tag I had no easy way to get the URL. Absolutely braindead.
What the OP is saying is that Twitter, Facebook, etc. have turned into soap operas.
Nothing wrong with a "never ending story" and there's a considerable clientele for that in older media too. The LoTR trilogies also have that similar feeling for me - I'm left with a bit of a craving after watching just one.
What is, perhaps, new is the immediacy of the never-endingness. One phone-screenful is all you get at a time.
There are several ways of viewing information, and it would be better if users actually had the choice. This is common in desktop apps like Itunes, or even a file manager where you are given gallery, detail view, scrolling, thumbnails etc.
"A finite list of news. An Instagram feed that can be finished. A Twitter feed that ends."
Isn't this confusing source and outcome? Even if your app (or website) adds an 'end' point, it would only be artificial. The news never ends. Instagram and Twitter never sleep. If you can't be your own gatekeeper (eg, by following a very small number of users on Twitter) then I doubt an artificial 'end' point from another gatekeeper will help you. Rather, I suspect, you'll simply add more apps to your daily reading list - an infinite number of finite apps to keep the infinite consumption option available.
The author got it backwards. Infinite scrolling of HISTORY is not a problem. Twitter feeds end at the TOP, not the bottom. You scroll down endlessly because you are bored.
The column to the right of your feed (where birthdays and events show up) also includes the same links as the footer. Click "More" to get to the Developers page, etc.
This is the worst. You either have to train your hand-eye coordination to be similar to an Olympic athlete or memorize URLs that only the dev team of certain sites should have burned into their brains
Holy fud, tell me about it. I forgot which site is it, but they put their contact/blog/about links at the end of the page...you know how that turned out.
"There is no reason why Facebook, Instagram or Twitter can’t algorithmically determine which, say 20 posts are important to us, and give the option to only view those."
Content limited digests are actually very popular. http://sidebar.io/2014/1/4 is one example but there are many many. It would be interesting to see how competitive they would be against the big mobile apps but at the very least it's an existing, confirmed, niche.
Many of the complaints here can be solved via a good implementation of infinite scrolling.
The URL should auto-update to reflect the current state of the content that has been loaded onto the page (the only exceptions are when the content is highly dynamic and pagination becomes somewhat meaningless over even short time intervals).
Either manual invocation of the scrolling should be necessary (so access to the site footer is not restricted) or else the site footer should be re-designed so it is still accessible (Twitter, for instance, just puts an information box on the left with links that would normally be in the footer).
It is also very important that clicking on a link on the page and then going back should restore the full state of the page, including scrolling position, at least to the greatest extent possible.
Ideally a visual separator should be inserted between different pages of content. This helps the user maintain context of where they are in the content stream.
Or, it could just be different pages of content and the back button actually works in every instance and the scrolling position is automatically (and accurately) preserved by the browser. As opposed to infinite scroll with updating URLs that inserts 10 different items in your browser history, breaking proper back button functionality to fit the view of what a designer thinks are all the pages you visited while you, as a user, just scrolled a single page and think the back button should take you back to the site you just came from.
What's worse, you're not even able to "replay" a whole night in a moderate Twitter feed.
Simply put, I follow ~30 medium-activity accounts, I go to bed and when I wake up, I can't reach the same point in the timeline again as over 800 tweets have been posted.
Please, for heavens sake, allow the addicted to read their whole timeline. Thanks.
I would have the same problem and then prune my twitter follows down to something more manageable. Then I would slowly build up again and the same problem would occur. Now I just switched on mobile notifications for the follows who I really want to read everything they post, which has really just created another, smaller twitter feed.
What we really need is for the app to keep track of where you left off, cull the new posts into a separate page, giving you something easier to work with and catch up.
Infinite scrolling (in a desktop browser) was why I stopped using Prismatic. The endlessness makes reading the news an uncomfortable, subtly stressful experience.
There's an expectation that curated content should be a high-quality subset of the whole internet, and providing an endless stream of content undermines that expectation.
[+] [-] md224|12 years ago|reply
The author seems to be essentially describing an addiction, and suggesting that the compulsions can be ameliorated by placing arbitrary divisions in the consumption stream. I have to admit, it would be interesting to see if there's a difference in consumption behavior between infinite scroll schemes and manual "Next Page" navigation... maybe this has already been studied?
It would probably be overkill to force this on users ("sorry, we're taking away infinite scroll because some of you couldn't control yourselves") but I can see it being potentially useful as an option in apps, available for those who find themselves in need of structure.
Anyway, I'm not entirely convinced it would solve addiction... after all, cigarettes come in discrete units, and we all know how that turned out.
[+] [-] 1457389|12 years ago|reply
Not sure if this is replicated by others, but this may reveal something fundamental about how I interpret information in printed form.
[+] [-] omaranto|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ricardobeat|12 years ago|reply
Then your mobile browser starts to lag and fucking crashes because it exhausted memory. Not to mention breaking the back button and the footer-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow issue. This thing has to die.
btw, Medium breaks text selection on mobile safari :/
[+] [-] ben336|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjbrunet|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cclogg|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phatfish|12 years ago|reply
With pagination this is literally 1 click!
[+] [-] justindocanto|12 years ago|reply
I would suggest sites without filtering is the problem.
To get content that is a fixed length and consumable without overindulging, there needs to be a fixed amount of content that 1 person can digest. Otherwise, you just have this database/collection of content that 1 person cant quite possibly read in one sitting... regardless of if there is infinity scrolling, pagination, or some other way to navigate.
Newspapers, in a way, curate what they are going to display each day. It's like a filter in a way. All the content is filtered to show what can fit in X amount of pages.
Websites with this problem, if they want to solve the problem, need better filtering. That might not be the only solution, but i feel like it's a major contender in helping combat the problem of trying to figure out what to consume amongst limitless content consumption.
[+] [-] jar00|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcgwiz|12 years ago|reply
Some activities just go on forever. We learn that certain activities have an end and others don't. The ones that don't we give attention to in a manner proportionate to their importance. In representing content streams as infinite, publishers are simply mimicking the interminable reality of that activity. Future generations will never have learned that there's a daily endpoint to what you can know about your friend's lives, current events, etc. What a silly proposition!
I (wildly) speculate the feeling that an end state is needed springs from weakness/inability in moderating one's impulses. The end state then is really just a crutch to force one to stop some obsessive activity.
[Edit: removed disparagement of Star Trek DS9.]
[+] [-] guspe|12 years ago|reply
Simply putting a stop to scrolling will not end the feeling of unsatisfaction, it will not end the fear of missing out. Infinite scrolling is the consequence, not the cause of our dissatisfaction.
[+] [-] mcgwiz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamesk_au|12 years ago|reply
An alternative explanation might focus on when and how discipline and self-restraint should be exercised, the ways in which content can be curated, or how and why one might take steps to learn about such things.
[+] [-] KaoruAoiShiho|12 years ago|reply
Unfortunately I think the easiest answer is gamification, sure to create much gnashing of teeth.
[+] [-] MRSallee|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] r0h1n|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] userbinator|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] randomdata|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] da_n|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] garthdog|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aufreak3|12 years ago|reply
Nothing wrong with a "never ending story" and there's a considerable clientele for that in older media too. The LoTR trilogies also have that similar feeling for me - I'm left with a bit of a craving after watching just one.
What is, perhaps, new is the immediacy of the never-endingness. One phone-screenful is all you get at a time.
[+] [-] 7952|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JacobAldridge|12 years ago|reply
Isn't this confusing source and outcome? Even if your app (or website) adds an 'end' point, it would only be artificial. The news never ends. Instagram and Twitter never sleep. If you can't be your own gatekeeper (eg, by following a very small number of users on Twitter) then I doubt an artificial 'end' point from another gatekeeper will help you. Rather, I suspect, you'll simply add more apps to your daily reading list - an infinite number of finite apps to keep the infinite consumption option available.
[+] [-] Justsignedup|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ebauch|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] isnotchicago|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apompliano|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ethana|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JetSpiegel|12 years ago|reply
What could possibly go wrong?
[+] [-] minimaxir|12 years ago|reply
The results are not good.
[+] [-] KaoruAoiShiho|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nilkn|12 years ago|reply
The URL should auto-update to reflect the current state of the content that has been loaded onto the page (the only exceptions are when the content is highly dynamic and pagination becomes somewhat meaningless over even short time intervals).
Either manual invocation of the scrolling should be necessary (so access to the site footer is not restricted) or else the site footer should be re-designed so it is still accessible (Twitter, for instance, just puts an information box on the left with links that would normally be in the footer).
It is also very important that clicking on a link on the page and then going back should restore the full state of the page, including scrolling position, at least to the greatest extent possible.
Ideally a visual separator should be inserted between different pages of content. This helps the user maintain context of where they are in the content stream.
[+] [-] JohnTHaller|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mschuster91|12 years ago|reply
Simply put, I follow ~30 medium-activity accounts, I go to bed and when I wake up, I can't reach the same point in the timeline again as over 800 tweets have been posted.
Please, for heavens sake, allow the addicted to read their whole timeline. Thanks.
[+] [-] triangleman83|12 years ago|reply
What we really need is for the app to keep track of where you left off, cull the new posts into a separate page, giving you something easier to work with and catch up.
[+] [-] sanityinc|12 years ago|reply
There's an expectation that curated content should be a high-quality subset of the whole internet, and providing an endless stream of content undermines that expectation.