Ask HN

It makes sense when you are trying to expose the viewer to ads. But it seems that almost every site with lists, stores, stories, photos, etc, force you to reach an artificial bottom, find the 'next' button and click that. I remember when the internet was slow, we used tabs to load long pages in the background, so that by the time we finished one page, we could then switch to the next page, and just scroll down. But with a default maximum list per page size, seems awkward and almost infuriating. Scrolling is a completely different mechanical action than clicking, and switching to click, then waiting for the next page load, just seems disruptive. Visually and mentally. I'm asking web designers to comment, because we seem to be regressing. There used to be more choices in the past, for instance view all, or 100 items per page, instead of some enforced default like 20. Our brains seem to be greatly able to scan unbelievably quickly thorough long lists and find exceptions, or retain an image, or key word. Splitting a long list into pages, is frustrating, and time consuming, and I find it often causes me to stop looking. Especially when a site Search engine doesn't answer your question, or you don't know what you're looking for in the first place. There are exceptions of course, and some sites have infinite scroll, etc. But they seem to be rare.

The title was supposed to be:

Why is there a predominance of websites that use pages instead of scrolling?