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Comment by angry-hacker | Hacker News Reader

Sorry for off topic but why does every news site mobile layout wants me to click read more/continue reading? Now techcrunch too. I tried to Google the question but didn't get an answer.. Who and why invented this trend?

Is it to measure engagement? Surely there are better ways.. Most of the sites don't lazy load the hidden content, so there's no bandwidth benefit either...

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This is just a hypothesis, but maybe for viewability for ads? There's a big controversy among advertisers/publishers over the difference between "was my ad shown" and "was my ad seen." Clicking Read More at least says you're going to look a little down the page. Some evidence for it is that right below the "Read More" button, there's usually an annoying little ad square.

Because it breaks most mobilizers/"reading mode" browser plugins which means they can show you more ads.

On a lot of pages it actually doesn't.

Maybe you could just get bored within the article and they want to show you more content before you leave the page. if you actually want to finish the article a simple button press isn't trememndous. just keep your interest and show you alternatives early.

Also interested to know. Surely just seeing every so often where the content is scrolled too is much better than this?!

Probably related to ad revenue across the various sites.

Could be a performance/turnover-rate thing. If they only have to send a small bite of the article in the beginning, it means a smaller response body, which means the page will load faster. You are less likely to close the page in frustration as it continues to load.

I don't think this is the reason. The amount of text that is contained in the article is usually smaller than the shit ton of superfluous JS and images they're sending. If they're looking to optimize page load, there are lower-hanging fruits.

Hmm... I have uMatrix installed and it just loads the whole page.

CNN has it too, it's annoying.

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