I don't see why pagination has to go away any time soon? I can't stand Facebook auto loading more content, I end up dragging too far when it has auto loaded and I have not noticed, I spend more time looking at the scroll bar than the content!
I think the analogy of the forum posts are bad as well where people don't read the previous 4 pages, I think the issue more with forums is that there is a large thread to follow and it generally has to be followed from the beginning. You have generally landed on page 20 of a forum post because it has an answer to a query you put into a search engine. You don't land on page 20 from the forum itself!
In this I am a firm believer that if it ain't broke, don't try to fix it. Why should I as a developer over think about maintaining page position when clicking the back button or showing different paginated content to search engines for indexing? I don't feel like I am putting a lot on the user and I always know where I am with paginated content.
I think the analogy of the forum posts are bad as well where people don't read the previous 4 pages, I think the issue more with forums is that there is a large thread to follow and it generally has to be followed from the beginning. You have generally landed on page 20 of a forum post because it has an answer to a query you put into a search engine. You don't land on page 20 from the forum itself!
In this I am a firm believer that if it ain't broke, don't try to fix it. Why should I as a developer over think about maintaining page position when clicking the back button or showing different paginated content to search engines for indexing? I don't feel like I am putting a lot on the user and I always know where I am with paginated content.