3 ms·
What is the point of sites doing this in the first place? Is it to show more ads below the content?
by WD-42 3y ago
What is the point of sites doing this in the first place? Is it to show more ads below the content?
- hunter2_ 3y agoAfter seeing two Facebook posts of quite different length each having a "more" link that revealed only a few more words, I came to the conclusion that it has nothing to do with a clean layout and everything to do with the algorithm getting a stronger signal from the user that they're actually reading a given post, not just stalling their doomscroll for unrelated reasons such as an IRL distraction. If I want to see a little less of a certain type of post, but not to the extreme of unfollowing a given poster, I'll try to avoid clicking "more" in hopes of training the system.
- JoshTriplett 3y agoFor some sites, it may be a performance optimization, to not load content users aren't going to see.
- Terr_ 3y agoI absolutely hate that on ("new") Reddit comments, because in many cases it really is something I want to see, or at least text-search through. And the weird thing is that they're trying to pinch pennies over text.
- JoshTriplett 3y agoYeah, I agree. The one that annoys me even more is github's "Load more..." in the middle of long PR/issue threads. That's really obnoxious when trying to search. And it only loads 50 comments at a time, so you have to hit it repeatedly.
- tomsmeding 3y agoTo be fair, loading and rendering a huge comment thread _is_ kind of slow and a thing you don't want to do when you just want to see the latest comments at the end. But there'd be little against a second button that just loads everything, potentially at the top of the page for searchers like you.
- w-ll 3y agoi feel like 99% of the time, the entire content is loaded, and then theres extra stuff to hide it. takes a few inspectes and deletes. but its there
- steezeburger 3y agoI think it's often used in metrics to count as a reading.
- xeckr 3y agoIt depends. Check for event listeners on the button if you want to know the answer for a specific site.
- lelandfe 3y agoI have worked on sites that do this (sorry) Filtering spam from engaged traffic is a big one. News sites tend to do it in the vein of TikTok: users can quickly scroll to the next post if bored, instead of leaving. Some e-commerce sites do it to product descriptions and their ilk for the modern equivalent of keyword stuffing.
- lewiscollard 3y agoIt may well be in some part because of what you say. But I _think_ one of the points is to allow playing video with sound. Current popular browsers only allow websites to do this after a user-initiated action on the site, such as a click. I've seen cookie bars misused to trigger autoplaying videos in the past in this way. See, e.g., https://developer.chrome.com/blog/autoplay#new_behaviors https://developer.chrome.com/blog/autoplay#new_behaviors