You have to wade past a ton shit you’d never purposely look at, get side tracked along the way, and still never see everything you originally set out to see. It’s a never ending loot box for content.
You have to wade past a ton shit you’d never purposely look at, get side tracked along the way, and still never see everything you originally set out to see. It’s a never ending loot box for content.
I do not accept “infinite scroll” as shorthand for all that bullshit. I don’t like infinite scroll much myself, for other reasons, but this is the Fediverse. There are plenty of people around here looking at pages containing nothing but things in chronological order posted by people they chose to follow, and choosing to load more by scrolling down.
I think the difference with the Fediverse is there is an end. There is old content. You catch up to where you left off. It’s not truly an “infinite scroll” in the way OP is referring to.
With stuff like Reddit, they organize to where it all feels recent, it’s all relevant, and it’s all new. Every time you refresh, new psuedo-random (algorithmic) content takes it’s place. They almost prevent you from seeing old content. The “infinite scroll” is more like “infinite content”.
In this way, they put people in an endless loop. People always have something to find, and because of the infinite scroll, you’ll always have a good chance of finding “rares”. It’s exhausting once you notice it.
At least I can tell I’ve opened Lemmy too many times today because all of the recent posts are marked as read.
I have no doubt they do.
Have you tried it though? I find that it’s not lootbox-like in any way, although to some extent I suppose it depends on who you follow.
Tried it? You can’t escape it, lol.
I’ve got my feed set up. It works about as well as it can. Lemmy is a particularly good place for it, low content, less users, and no ads.
As a core concept, I wouldn’t have a problem with it, provided we actually had way more levers to adjust the algorithms.
In larger settings it’s a complete nightmare, even on sites that aren’t trying to generate ad revenue.
Even as someone who lived through the static webpage and forum era and loved it, reverting to that feels like going backwards in progress. But without finer controls over the algorithm, the general application of scrolling is ass and detrimental to good life/screen time balance. There should be some kind of middle ground or new structure.