Forums vs infinite scroll

[Dragonwinged]

So I'd like to ask everyone, when using social media, do you prefer a Forum type setup like what this is, or an infinite scroll setup, where you just see an endless scroll of comments.

 

Before you answer, I'd also like to say that sites like Youtube and Deviantart, as well as any news site with a comments section would fall into the forums style category.

[AbydosOne]

2 minutes ago, Dragonwinged said:

Before you answer, I'd also like to say that sites like Youtube ... would fall into the forums style category.

Youtube is absolutely "infinite scroll", both search and comments.

Infinite scroll sucks for archiving, and usually has no convenient way of resuming where you left off, and it's an enormous memory sink to keep hundreds/thousands of text items in memory as you keep scrolling (FB actually unloads stuff you've scrolled past, but it's kinda buggy sometimes and prevents you from scrolling back up).

[Kisai]

Youtube does the infinite scroll when it comes to the comments section. So I'll disagree on that.

 

I personally hate how discord works, it's like they took the best parts of IRC and made it as hard to use as possible.

[Ha-Satan]

Infinite scroll apps feel intentionally designed to hijack your brain and turn you into a drooling baby staring at the screen all day. They can fuck right off.

 

I like old-style forums like this where I can talk to people with similar interests at a pace that's actually tolerable and not designed to manipulate me.

[Poinkachu]

I remember furiously hating infinite scroll when I was still using low end PC
I still hate it now.

 

And youtube definitely not forum style.

[porina]

On desktop, main YouTube feed does only show you so much and then stops. So it isn't infinite. I'm not sure about subscriptions feed as I never scroll that far down, since I only look back as far as I've looked already. This also applies to social media where you can have a chronological following feed like on X and Bsky.

[Mark Kaine]

1 hour ago, Dragonwinged said:

So I'd like to ask everyone, when using social media, do you prefer a Forum type setup like what this is, or an infinite scroll setup, where you just see an endless scroll of comments.

 

Before you answer, I'd also like to say that sites like Youtube and Deviantart, as well as any news site with a comments section would fall into the forums style category.

yt is infinite scroll tho?

 

e: not the videos, comments (aka the "social media" part)

 

e2: on mobile videos are infinite scroll! 

 

e3: i don't think you thought your question through because it isn't as black and white (forums vs ???) as you suggested, at all. 

[venomtail]

3 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

yt is infinite scroll tho?

Part of youtube isn't, the main page at least on desktop. On mobile it's infitite. I guess even Youtube's engineers won at some point against managers and designers by how much of a RAM hog an infinite main paige must be if you scroll down far enough with the thumbnails and previews. Even infinite comments, whilst being infinite the recommended video's on the side stop at a certain point.

[Mark Kaine]

Just now, venomtail said:

Part of youtube is, the main page at least on desktop. On mobile it's infitite. I guess even Youtube's engineers won at some point against managers and designers by how much of a RAM hog an infinite main paige must be if you scroll down far enough. Even infinite comments, whilst being infinite the recommended video's on the side stop at a certain point.

yeah... not that it isn't a valid question (it is) but the nuances and different implementations are vast - sometimes one thing makes more sense than the other and devs do *not* always choose what would be ideal lol

[Dragonwinged]

1 hour ago, Mark Kaine said:

yt is infinite scroll tho?

What I mean by the infinite scroll platform is that the comments in your feed are completely standalone topics. Every comment on a youtube video (aside from bots and scam posts) are relevant to the topic of the video. On X, each post can be of a completely different topic without any relation to each other.

[Kisai]

5 minutes ago, Dragonwinged said:

What I mean by the infinite scroll platform is that the comments in your feed are completely standalone topics. Every comment on a youtube video (aside from bots and scam posts) are relevant to the topic of the video. On X, each post can be of a completely different topic without any relation to each other.

That's because of the facebook model it's based on, where they pop "trending" and "paid" posts into your timeline. Twitter even at one point took away the timeline, leaving only "for you" Nobody wants a "for you" page full of crap they're not interested in in lieu of the stuff they already subscribed to. Sucks for the people who have yet to be discovered, but I really don't want to waste my time trying to find the stuff I already committed to seeing by scrolling through piles of slop AI's produced to suck your time away.

 

The only solution to that is to just nope the hell out of media that doesn't let you curate what you view. This includes "ad blocking", while I'm not going to lose sleep over someone blocking ads, I will say that people have no right to complain about the service quality going down when you do. Youtube is just going to start encouraging creators to make members-only content so they get a 30% cut so they aren't reliant on ad revenue. Same as Twitch.

 

 

[emothxughts]

Infinite scroll may as well be created by Satan himself. Hogs memory like crazy, even more so on mobile. Also makes it hard to find a specific comment I'm looking for, like say comment #69 on page 7.

[Avocado Diaboli]

I think the results of that poll are gonna be very skewed. Asking people on a forum if they like forums more than other modes of conversation isn't gonna give you an unbiased set of replies.

 

I feel like what a lot of social media that have implemented an infinite scroll mechanism have forgotten is that categorization is important. This forum could be turned into an infinite scroll free-for-all as well by taking away subforums and pagination (limiting the number of topics per page load to 25), leaving just an endless list of topics with no way to meaningfully differentiale between them. Bonus points if they also added status updates into the mix.

 

Much of social media just puts everything in the same pot so you can go from cute cat videos to gruesome war footage in an instant, with at most an ad for some shit you don't need in between. I guess what it comes down to is that if you like structure and mental compartmentalization, you like forums more. If you just want to mindlessly browse, some infinitely scrolling feed of whatever seems appealing. 

 

Discord seems to have a particularly moronic way of dealing with this. I haven't used it in a while, but when I first used it, it was just IRC, meaning that it lacked structure and having any sort of long-form conversation was a chore, because there were a billion people in the same channel and staying on topic for long seemed like an impossible task. Then came direct replies, which made following a conversation even worse. As far as I know, Discord eventually also added forum channels, because even they realized how utterly useless the regular chat channels were at facilitating discussions on servers that have ballooned to thousands of concurrent users.

 

What I personally also really hate is the reddit style of comments, where every single comment spawns its own discussion thread, creating this endless fractal nightmare of replies. This can lead to two threads on the same topic going in completely different directions, sometimes with conflicting information in both and nobody bothering to read everything before replying to the one thread where they think they have something to add to.

 

So, yeah, I like structure, that's why I like discussions to be topical, categorized, monodimensional and chronologically sequential. Because that's how I also talk in a group of friends in real life.

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

 

 

What I personally also really hate is the reddit style of comments, where every single comment spawns its own discussion thread, creating this endless fractal nightmare of replies. This can lead to two threads on the same topic going in completely different directions, sometimes with conflicting information in both and nobody bothering to read everything before replying to the one thread where they think they have something to add to.

 

I personally hate the "collapse thread" aspect of reddit. So what happens is you get one or two replies to something, and then there's a "25 more" link. 

 

Seriously? That's the kind of BS you pull when you're farming ad revenue. And Slashdot long did that first by making the internal karma system hide "0" and "-1" replies by default, and if you are registered on the system your karma starts at 1 on a reply instead of 0. At some point in the last few years they just removed anonymous posting entirely.

 

Same problem with the listicles (lists on a website that are broken up page-by-page so the 200 ads on the page refresh.)

 

Infinite scroll solves one problem by introducing another. So when it comes to ads, the back end just inserts the ads at random while you scroll, and KEEPS refreshing them so eventually your device runs out of memory. A properly built infinite scroll would not have any dynamic third party content to keep from having to constantly refresh the page/app, because those javascripts and json's are not unloaded when you delete the element that loaded them. No what happens is the more you scroll an infinite scroller (Eg twitter, facebook, youtube mobile) the more the device's RAM get's exhausted, because storing actual pages on the storage of the device as a cache would just quickly vaporize the storage on smaller devices.

 

 

[Needfuldoer]

Infinite scroll is one of the worst UI "innovations" to come out of the Web 2.0 era. 

[GarlicDeliverySystem]

I prefer forums, especially for things where you want to actually archive things or have a more structured discussion on things. Reddit is borderline with those already, but Discord is about the worst offender. Shame really, because a lot of Devs went away from classic forums for their games towards Discord. Absolute nightmare imho.

 

Discord has its uses as a text and voice chat program, but it is not a substitute for a well-structured forum.

[Mark Kaine]

19 hours ago, Dragonwinged said:

What I mean by the infinite scroll platform is that the comments in your feed are completely standalone topics. Every comment on a youtube video (aside from bots and scam posts) are relevant to the topic of the video. On X, each post can be of a completely different topic without any relation to each other.

that's not infinite scroll, that's idiotic. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

[Mark Kaine]

5 hours ago, GarlicDeliverySystem said:

I prefer forums, especially for things where you want to actually archive things or have a more structured discussion on things. Reddit is borderline with those already, but Discord is about the worst offender. Shame really, because a lot of Devs went away from classic forums for their games towards Discord. Absolute nightmare imho.

 

Discord has its uses as a text and voice chat program, but it is not a substitute for a well-structured forum.

in like 95% i agree,  but there are discords that - somehow - manage to be more informative and at least as well structured than your average forum.

 

thing is discord isnt really suited for that kind of thing,  but if members, owner and moderators are on the same foot and want it, it does work ...

 

RPCS3 as an example of a more well known discord where its actually perfect.