[ken]

Also from the article: "when was the last time you googled for SQL and then went to page #18375 to find that particular blog post that you were looking for?"

The key difference in use cases here is that one is searching my stuff, and one is searching everywhere. Nobody wants page #18375 of everything. People do occasionally want page #3175 of their own stuff.

[astine]

Even when I'm searching other people's stuff, I don't always just want to browse through it linearly. Sometimes I want to skip around. Meaningful keys such as timestamps would be better than just page groupings, but page groupings, so long as they are stable, are still useful. Sometimes I do want to skip to page #18375 because I know that I've already browsed pages #1 through #18374 on a previous visit and I want to start where I left off. You can't typically do that with infinite scroll.

[altfredd]

Unfortunately, the "so long as they are stable" constraint is incompatible with idea of mutable database backend. SQL pays massive performance price for OFFSET and it's results are still neither fast nor stable.