Yeah, I understand that everything can’t be loaded at the sam time, but this is not the solution. The reason to browse by chronological order, from oldest to newest, is so that I don’t miss posts. But on everey single microblogging app, decentralized or ran by a lunatic wit too much money, there is the barrier between the last few new posts, and where you last left reading.
The eorst part: this loads the newest first, and prefers to push you to the top, requiring you to search where you actually left off.
How about we just have a button to “go to the newest” that throws you to whatever has been published within the 5 minutes, and assume if you’re browsing from bottom to top, you want more to be shown, but properly chronologically.
I feel these ecmxist precisely because endless scrolling doesn’t. These load more, but I’m not sure the apps ever unload, so for the optiomization I understand why they have implemented this as they have BUT for me that way is just an excuse to be lazy with garbage cleaning. And these also might be one of the biggest reasons why the trending stuff doesn’t stick on Mastodon; Mastodon users don’t sort by popular, and while scrolling by chronological order, these things create obstacles for seeing all things posted.
I don’t think it has anything to do with laziness. Endless scrolling has been around for a long time and is really easy to implement.
They do this for one reason - because on average, this method costs less in data served to the average user than something like endless scrolling. They serve up the most popular comments to you thinking that is what the majority will want. Then they put a button to load more because only a small percentage actually use it, and that saves them money.
They don’t load the comments in order because they don’t want you to click the button, so making the results of the button inconvenient will detract more people from using it. It’s all about trying to subtly convince you to trust that the comments that they served up originally are the only important ones so that you don’t even bother to click the see more link. Enshitification at its finest.
As a UX designer, the first part is part of the reason. Companies actually “want” you to continue to scroll and to click the view more button. Every time you view more, they get more ad revenue and more data.
Endless scrolling is an accessibility and data conservation nightmare. It’s also arguably grey UX, as it encourages scrolling addiction. Having the user have to make a decision to load more saves the user data, and keeps the page from shifting context without user input. Global apps should consider the needs of the bulk of the world, which is still on pay-for-data plans.
The answer tends to be to also implement server-side sort and filtering that includes “show new.”