Same problem on Firefox for Windows here. To make matters even worse, there was a bug where the back button just kept me cycling between two different sections of the page. I kept hopping back and forth no matter how many times I hit back, and could never go back to HN.

Please, please, don't break the user experience this way.

You can hold the back button until it extends a menu that lets you go back more places. Still not enough for some sites but often a good rescue.

I've seen this on a number of list sites and a few more general publishing sites - as you scroll past each point your history is updated. I've taken to either opening such links in a new tab ("true back" then returns to being a single operation: close tab) or not opening them at all.

Just a note to Chrome users, when you click and hold on the back button, you can see a history - just click the site you want to get back to.

Unless you play with a page long enough that it becomes your entire visible backward history, requiring multiple hold-and-click rounds to get the hell away from a single page.

The same functionality is also available on Firefox (both desktop and android).

Yes, the back button was broken on macOS/Chrome for me, too, with an endless cycle between the first two sections. If I didn't click it, it shouldn't be in my history.

I can understand people are annoyed by this, but do we really need 2/3ds of the comments here reiterating the same point? Someone already made it, upvote it or skip the article for all I care, but I'd rather read a discussion about the piece than people's buttons not working.

I think it’s acceptable because the alternative is authors who make this exceedingly dumb and user-hostile choice would have to see the upvotes to recognize how much people hate this. Instead, if authors read a bunch of complaints about this happening with their work, perhaps they’ll learn not to do it because they’d rather read more interesting comments about their work. When 2/3 of the comments are complaining about how an author rendered user back buttons useless out of either carelessness or ignorance, I’d hope the author would pay attention.

The link is the topic of discussion. On a place like HN the article's technical aspects are as valid of topics as the article's content. Additionally the overwhelming majority of the posts I've seen on HN don't have threads like this, so it's not like it's an epidemic. It only pops up for links that are doing something dumb.

Also on Safari (iPhone).