Infinite scrolling in NESdev

[SNES AYE]

Does anyone else come in here and end up spending way too much time scrolling through topics and reading all the comments, kind of like getting trapped in a “social” media feed or when browsing Netflix? After this post, I’m taking a break and heading somewhere else on the internet for a while! Lol

[Oziphantom]

There are not enough posts for that

[Dwedit]

Aw man, I saw "infinite scrolling" and thought it was talking about game mechanics...

[tokumaru]

Oh, I also though this had something to do with game mechanics...

[segaloco]

Forums are great because they *don't* encourage that. That's why they're the only form of social media I use (unless you count email).

[Pokun]

Yeah it doesn't really happen. If I dig up several old interesting threads it can take time to read it, but nothing stops me from reading them in several sittings. Forums are better for archiving discussions that way.

Aw man, I saw "infinite scrolling" and thought it was talking about game mechanics...

Me too, I read "infinite scrolling on NES".

[Drag]

I can't say that I do, but also, I don't really get stuck infinite-scrolling anywhere anymore in general.

When I come here, I go straight to Quick links > Unread posts, and skim the topic titles to see if anything jumps out at me, and then "mark all read" when done, and that's usually it.

This is not meant to throw cold water on anyone who is immersed and finds themselves browsing tons of topics on here; if you're going to infinite-scroll anywhere, NesDev is a constructive place to do it.

[stan423321]

Please do not implement Discourse-style forced pagination removal - ah.

There are some occasions where past discussion of a subject is inexplicably interesting, but the only option that would prevent getting lost through that is restricting access. Otherwise, everything else is at least as "bad" for me as bulletin boards:

• Individual blogs are close to a tie. FOMO-wise, image hosting is less likely to break by itself, but the blog itself is more likely to expire, and otherwise its structure is more likely to be changed and screw things up. (See The Old New Thing's cursed past navigation, broken internal links, and references to comments which got wholesale purged at points.) Blogs are also less natural for discussion itself if it's actually supposed to be open discussion. Comment boxes are limited and acknowledging some other blogs on one's own is frowned upon.
• "More social" websites, starting with Hacker News and Reddit and ending with eX-itter and most its clones, intentionally screw with the timeline and categorization of things, and encourage deleting messages rather than softer forms of retraction. If you don't look at this thing right now, it WILL change.
• Discord guilds ("servers") are at mercy of its client, which understandably mostly sees itself as instant messaging tool focused on time scheduling and jokes. Fortunately this does not involve automatically deleting messages after two weeks - please wave to my coworkers - but browsing the logs is a pain. If you look at another program on phone, Discord's client is very likely to scroll you back to the present. So better read the whole thing right now!

If you're in a phase where you're stuck on a forum, that's a subject thing, not a forum thing. In the past some of us got stuck on a comics magazine stack or a programming book.

[Pokun]

Yeah pages are important, it makes it easier to tell where you were the last time you stopped reading so you can pick it up again, for the same reason thick books are easier to read than really long scrolls.
The page-free web-browsing trend will probably decline when people realize it isn't very useful, or else all libraries would stock scrolls!


I never understood the point of a blog. They just tends to be impossible to browse or search.


Indeed social media tends to be useless for archiving discussions. I'd never waste time posting anything I would hope to be preserved for the benefit of other users there.
I wouldn't post anything I would not like to the preserved either as everything can be preserved and used against me in some way, and social media has especially bad reputation of selling your information to the highest bidder.


Discord is indeed mostly an instant messaging tool, though I prefer to call it a chat room client. Nowadays chat rooms keeps previous sessions which makes them work more like a forum, but they are probably still very poor for archiving discussions as they are normally just a single long chat feed for each chat room.


Stack overflow-style communities are useful for archiving discussions, though of a very particular question-and-answer kind. I think they are the only really good alternative to bulletin boards and discussion forums for this purpose.