If you use Facebook, the interactions aren’t exactly of the same nature. I mean, how many topics are posted with all the responses just consisting of users tagging other users or posting some meme/gif image response?
You can see some with discussions, but they to a degree support some threaded discussion in the comment section, whereas Discourse is against that. Facebook images are a fixed height in comments and you can only append one(embedded from a link or the comment itself is an image alone).
The example I linked to isn’t like that, as you scroll upwards(because you’ve been linked to a post deep into that thread), the images will make the content jump without you scrolling. So you’re reading a post for a moment, and then it’s lost because the images are loading in and pushing content down, you scroll down to find that post, but it gets pushed again as more images load in, it was a bad experience.
Regarding the news feed which is more of an infinite scroll(comments tend to be a subset and sorted by some metrics due to the individual comments with their own sub-threads not having any time relationship with other comments), that’s again unrelated content/posts, more like scrolling through topics.
Thanks for the link. That included a bunch of images and Discourse is handling that much better with fixed dimensions for images as they’re loading in so content isn’t forcing updates to layout repeatedly.
I’m not fussed about lack of pagination myself too much(I know some users get upset about it when you move from an existing paginated forum to Discourse, see Blizzard for example(who did a pretty amazing job customizing Discourse btw). I also came across a thread on here that brings up issues regarding pagination such as how it affected monetization via ads for someone(posts 82/89). Discourse has plenty of positives though, other alternatives aren’t really able to compete at the same level, so we’ll see how it goes.