This is caused by pagination. Without pagination, there's no pages that can get out of sync.
More specifically it's caused by offset pagination. The kind of pagination where you track "user is 90 items deep into the list" or "user is 3 pages into list and each page is 30 items"
Alternatively, index based pagination works by going "the last item the user viewed was id=12345". With this model refreshing the view won't cause a change, but the downside is you lose an easy way to tell the user how many "pages" deep they are. Even though "pages" is a flawed metaphor in a dynamic stream of data, users still like to see "you're on page 3 of 1 million"
Also this is only considering "append-only" style lists. Like comments sorted by time, or a list of versions of software, etc. If your list is dynamic, like the pages of Hacker News, where isn't ordered consistently but is instead a dynamic order or has mutable items, pagination will still be inconsistent.
More specifically it's caused by offset pagination. The kind of pagination where you track "user is 90 items deep into the list" or "user is 3 pages into list and each page is 30 items"
Alternatively, index based pagination works by going "the last item the user viewed was id=12345". With this model refreshing the view won't cause a change, but the downside is you lose an easy way to tell the user how many "pages" deep they are. Even though "pages" is a flawed metaphor in a dynamic stream of data, users still like to see "you're on page 3 of 1 million"
Also this is only considering "append-only" style lists. Like comments sorted by time, or a list of versions of software, etc. If your list is dynamic, like the pages of Hacker News, where isn't ordered consistently but is instead a dynamic order or has mutable items, pagination will still be inconsistent.