I love infinite scroll, and hate pagination. All lists should be some combination of these: infinite scroll, filterable, sortable. Pagination should never be involved. If I want to get to something on page 2, I scroll. For anything else, I’m going to sort and filter.
If the thing I want is on page 17, and I see 1, 2, 3…79…159, 160, 161, I’m still just going to want to filter. The absolute best pagination is set up in a way that lets you binary search drill down for what you’re looking for, but even that is something I’d almost never prefer over filtering
hard disagree. i had an experience just this morning looking for some pictures from an event i participated in, and the infinite scrolling was absolutely infuriating. they didn't have an index to filter on, and when i clicked on a picture to download it and navigated back, it took me to the top of the page. i had to scroll through about a dozen loading indicators to get back to where i was. sure, this was a bad implementation, but adding it to every single list of results on the web is asinine trend chasing and bad UX.
If the thing I want is on page 17, and I see 1, 2, 3…79…159, 160, 161, I’m still just going to want to filter. The absolute best pagination is set up in a way that lets you binary search drill down for what you’re looking for, but even that is something I’d almost never prefer over filtering