[suid]

I had proposed this reply to someone else's similar question.

I don't think the current app's design is an accident (i.e. it's not pure incompetence). It meets several objectives:

* Minimizes the user-generated content shown on each page (a couple of threads or a couple of comments), so it reduces the amount of traffic to the server and DB as the user browses around.

* Oh, and it leaves a ton of space for ads, which (bonus) can be served from a separate ad server, further lightening their load.

* Plus, there are Bob Ross-like "happy accidents" like pages jumping back to the top when you go a level up from a thread - going back to your spot can trigger more ads to be shown.

The 3rd-party apps subvert all this, and bypass the ads, to boot.