I think it could be pretty great if infinite scrolling was a possibility for suggested/related topics under each topic. I believe it would likely help users find more related content quickly/easily and improve engagement for most communities.
From a user experience perspective, I think it would be a win - provided it does not overload the server. Though, if it is quite resource intensive, I’d imagine some constraints could be put in place such as a maximum amount of results that can be scrolled through. This would allow having a larger list of related topics, while only loading a small portion of them initially.
I understand the appeal, but I’m not totally sold on the possible improvement. It might increase the numbers of topics read, sure, but could it be detrimental to the writing engagement, or is this one supposed to be proportional to the read topics volume? The more you read the more chance you have to stumble upon something you want to contribute to?
I fear some kind of attention exhaustion. I’m really not sure but I imagine the click between two topics could be important, like a breathing pause.
I’m also skeptical about the linearity it would involve, probably nostalgia of the multiple choices adventures.
Well, as long as it’s an option…
Yeah fair points @Benjamin_D. I’d say from experience, the more actions you require a user to do in order to find more interesting/related content, the less engaged the users will be.
Have had several cases like this on other similar projects and having the ability for users to find more related content from the first page they land on significantly increases engagement and decreases bounces.
Especially for new visitors (generally the majority for a public forum) who we’d ideally want to be intrigued enough to join the community.
As for burn out, the idea would be that visitors/users would scroll until they find something interesting enough to check out. The top x results might not contain anything the user/visitor finds interesting, so this would allow them to easily look for more.
This is more so the case seeing, as far as I know, Discourse suggested topics aren’t based on similar topic titles/content. As you can see in the suggested topics for this topic, none of them seem very related to the subject of ‘suggested topics’. At least for me.
There should be more meaningful quality engagement for users who are in topics that they are very interested in also.
If infinite scrolling could be a concern that it could distract people from replying to a topic, another option would be a ‘suggest more’ button underneath the suggested topics.
