alt Hacker NewsNot only it's unnecessary, it also bad GUI. In apps with infinite scrolling your position doesn't get its own state, so if you eg. go view a post & return to Instagram timeline it opens at the beginning. If you use media more thoughtfully as opposed to mindless scrolling, it just doesn't work.
With pagination you could say return to IG after a week, go through 5 pages of whoever you're following, check out a post, go back knowing you stopped at 5th, and continue from there. You can also set a limit (I'll check 10 pages tops and then go to sleep), which is helpful even with algorithmic feed.
I'm sure they can screw up pagination too if they wanted, but typical implementations don't have this issue
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Stateless infinite scroll is just lazy/incomplete implementation though - there’s no reason you can’t keep your place via permalink. Just pop the state into history using the uuid of each card as it shows in the viewport, then when the user returns using that url, drop them in at that point in the feed with some reasonable before/after preloaded.
They can randomize (with bias for hot/recent content) entries on each page, but paginate them. FOMO will keep people clicking next even once they recognize some entries.