Expand Everything: Userscript to click "show more" links to expand all the text | Hacker News Reader

Expand Everything: Userscript to click "show more" links to expand all the text

github.com

91 pointssni30 comments

Unfortunately I think this can't solve the more annoying instance of "More" that we can found:

Movie sinopses for streaming service TV apps.

What is the point of sites doing this in the first place? Is it to show more ads below the content?

After 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.

For some sites, it may be a performance optimization, to not load content users aren't going to see.

I 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.

Yeah, 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.

To 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.

i 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

I think it's often used in metrics to count as a reading.

It depends. Check for event listeners on the button if you want to know the answer for a specific site.

I 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.

It 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

I truly hate whoever came up with this stupid 'feature'. If I clicked on article is because I want to read it, for god's sake.

Did they imagine it would slow down scrapers/bots?

I would imagine it's for measuring engagement. They can then use the data to tailor their ad sale strategy and I imagine their content strategy.

They could turn that off for users with adblock at least. No reason to torture those who aren’t your prey – a hunters common sense.

I recently learned that ublock origin has an annoyances filter list that's not enabled by default https://a.imagem.app/on42hV.png. not sure if it covers this use case though.

I'm especially annoyed on sites like reddit when the "show more comments" link is sometimes a button that will expand inline, and sometimes a link that will take you to another page with some parent comments and some of the child comments. I have to look for "javascript: void 0;" in the URL preview before clicking, which I often forget.

Reading too much slows down scrolling and ad views, you must keep scrolling. Also, trying to have meaningful conversations with others might lead to independent ideas or actions that are out of the control of the platform, all ideas or actions must benefit only the platform and its adverisers.

Yeah, I get your point. However I also think [see more]

[14 more replies]

I find it quite annoying that [top of full article on new page instead of the same position of this link]

are you sure you want to expand this comment?

[leave it collapsed] [configure exceptions]

Would you like to know more?

[cue Starship Troopers theme]

I think this is apt commentary on the state of the commercial Internet as it exists today and I'm happy to vouch for yo--[See More]

My sarcastic comment was flagged but the point I was (poorly) trying to make is that this is an awesome extension but it goes against platforms' goals. If it gets popular the platforms will fight against it.

Is there a difference between a script that clicks on something and the user clicking on it, from their pov? I guess they could use tracking and notice it's abnormally fast, but it seems pretty hard to monitor, right?

The platform doesn't get as strong of a signal from the user about which posts they find interesting.

user.script doesn't do popular, it does everything else tho

Your comment was hilarious and I tried to vouch for it.

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