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pjeby comments on Official Less Wrong Redesign: Call for Suggestions - Less Wrong
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That's a database performance trick, which means that getting rid of it will increase database load.
What's happening is that, in order to jump a set number forward, databases have to perform the same query each time, but retrieve more and more records. It's like "jump to the start of this user's stuff, and read 10. Now go to the start, read 20, and give me the last 10. Now go to the start, read 30, and give me the last 10...." So performance gets worse and worse as you page through it, because each time the reads are repeating, and getting longer each time.
The "after" trick basically makes it so that every page is "jump to the spot given by the after tag, and read the next 10". Performance doesn't degrade as you get further into the list.
Alicorn's suggestion (of browsing by date) is probably easier to implement, in that the site could probably look up what "after" value to use, based on the date.
There's another reason we want this: Otherwise paging back through recent comments could end up skipping comments if new ones were posted in the meantime!
Ah, I see. Thank you for the explanation.