Much bigger sin: Boing Boing style "endlessly load more content with Javascript" nonsense.
If you're browsing on an (arguably flawed in its implementation) iOS device where page state gets unexpectedly dumped all the time (e.g, tab switching, browser crashes, "multitasking" switches out to an IM client), this style of "pagination" is utterly pants. I end up having to manually edit the URL to advance through content like Boing Boing and Tumblr just to be sure that when Safari or Chrome inevitably next dump my page state I won't have to start from the very top again.
Yeah, I can't stand infinite scroll pages. It becomes impossible to pass a link to someone to a specific section of entries. It generally breaks the back button -- when I click a link and then go back to an infinite scroll page, it has dropped all the dynamic content and has to reload it, and then I have to scroll back to where I was (which may have involved several minutes of scrolling and loading content).
Perhaps it's irrational, but it also frustrates me that such pages have no bottom. I think people got used to a model of a page where it has a top and a bottom, and now it's a bit weird to interact with. One of my favorite examples is Facebook's implementation, which leaves several useful navigation links in the page footer. These links taunt you as you tried to scroll to reach them, only to have more news content appear in your view and push the footer off screen again. (I think they've since duplicated those footer links in other locations so you can reach them, but it doesn't change the fact that this broken UI model presents options and then sucks them away before you can click on them.)
Infinite scroll pages are harder to read with a pointing device withouth a scroll wheel, because the scroll bar jumps randomly when reaching the bottom.
Yeah, paginating articles and paginating archives are two totally different things. Paginating articles (as the article linked describes) is not a good user experience. But not paginating archives, otherwise known as endless scrolling, in my opinion, is not good.
Endless scrolling can work if you use it in conjunction with replaceState to make sure that the URL reflects that the user is looking at. Outside of that, though, definitely annoying.
Boing Boing at least have fixed this. Even though the page still scrolls forever, at the bottom of each "segment" the "Older Entries" link no longer disappears when the additional content loads, allowing for optional pagination :)
If you're browsing on an (arguably flawed in its implementation) iOS device where page state gets unexpectedly dumped all the time (e.g, tab switching, browser crashes, "multitasking" switches out to an IM client), this style of "pagination" is utterly pants. I end up having to manually edit the URL to advance through content like Boing Boing and Tumblr just to be sure that when Safari or Chrome inevitably next dump my page state I won't have to start from the very top again.