I donāt think thereās any overt manipulation going on here I think itās literally the fact that most interfaces are now phones which are conducive to scrolling versus clicking and tapping. If you compare pagination with scroll on a mobile device, Iām going to get pretty fucking tired of tapping next next to see more stuff.. scrolling is intuitive and the end result is more engagement. This thread alone would not survive the way it has with pagination. I can quickly scroll past stuff I want to skim over and slow down or pause to read things I want to read.. having to click something to see the next tranche of posts would deter me from bothering.
There are people on the hacker news thread you linked that say that the entire thread should be loaded all at once to avoid pagination or scroll issues, but thatās insane, especially if you consider the inclusion of images and media. That might work for something like hacker News where itās text only and you have over 12,000 posts in a single thread and itās still not that much content to have to push through the interweb pipes.. but when Iām paying the cost of bandwidth I sure as shit donāt want to pay for all those cdn hits for basically getting someone caught up on the last few posts of an insanely long thread. Donāt even think about mentioning thread management.. thereās no point in curtailing the number of posts per thread.. thatās basically tantamount to censorship in my opinion.
As for the ctrl-f find function, again people on The hacker news thread seems to indicate that this was not standard and having to learn how to use a double control-f to use the built-in browser find function is asinine, however this is actually standard and Iāve seen it used in many cases where a website specific search function is engaged with ctrl-f and if you want to use the browsers find function you just hit it again. It makes sense from a usability standpoint and allows websites to implement their own specific search features but not preclude the user from opting to use the browsers to find feature.
Ultimately I have come to appreciate Discourse and how it chooses to operate. Of course it might be nice if the user could choose pagination versus scroll.. Iām always in favor of offering choice.. but given the current climate and percentage of mobile devices versus desktops or laptops accessing forums like this one, infinite scroll makes sense IMO.
I agree that search could be better, but given the fact I can pop out to Google or even various AI engines at this point to perform search, I find Iām not often using the built-in search features anyway.
Ahh then ur about to shit your pants in the new year they will be released in full on youtube. and combining a few storyās with the news anchorman in-between stiching them togeather coherently. Aiming for 11 min episodes.
You are allowed to like the interface that you have acclimated to. But I would hope that you can understand that undermining established toolsets in order to force an ideological stance, which ignores those who actively use those tools, and which breaks the standards established by those tools, is a corruption. Browsers have worked a certain way for decades. We expect things, we have reasons to ā because they make sense.
You know what exists that would fix this? A mobile page, or a mobile app ā which is already forced on people. But to force desktop apps to function like they have a tiny touch screen and they are being used as a distraction instead of a tool, that is egregious. I want to be able to copy and paste threads into text editors so that I can edit them. I tried to do that with the local AI guide I wrote and found I had to write an entire script to query the discourse API page by page in order to download the guide I wrote, in an editable format, so that I could post it somewhere else. You know what happened when I had to deal with that? I stopped writing it.
That gives you plain text, with pagination if the output gets exceedingly long.. just cancel the print dialog and there you have it.. easy copy / paste content.
I just tried that with this thread and it gives me an error page. If I try it with the parent URL (5860) it takes me to a paginated display, and if I try to move to the end page by guessing a page number in the URL it times me out saying I am trying to access the page too often. So, how do I copy my text from this thread?
The first screenshot you are showing is a page from 2020. Where is this part of it? Can you find this post and copy everything up to where I started posting about the metric system?
Thanks for pointing out the fix. I think it is clear that even with workarounds, these constraints are specific design decisions which frustrate me, and I see no obvious reason why they exist but for the philosophy of the creator.
Hopefully my position makes sense in this light, and I donāt come off as someone who is relying entirely on emotion or on principled opposition.
I am definitely opinionated, but I like to think that those opinions hold some weight since they are not arbitrary nor trivial.
The beauty of software is that we can (sometimes) change it. Iām writing a little plugin called textify that will let you toggle how threads are output so they will
be text only, no images or media.
no pagination, just dump the entire thread.
omit annoying things such as like counters, reacts, references, etc.
You should be able to just toggle this mode on in your user profile settings.
I skimmed over things as I have enough stress IRLā¦ Still is this forum stuff about being able to skim the website for data collection or AI training or something along those lines? About usability with JavaScript disabled?
