Some article websites (I’m looking at msn.com right now, as an example) show the first page or so of article content and then have a “Continue Reading” button, which you must click to see the rest of the article. This seems so ridiculous, from a UX perspective–I know how to scroll down to continue reading, so why hide the text and make me click a button, then have me scroll? Why has this become a fairly common practice?

  • anothermember@lemmy.zip
    0·
    8 months ago

    Page load: The biggest and I mean biggest reason someone leaves a page is page load speed. If you’re deep in researching some information, regardless of your internet speed or if the fault is on the user side and your page load is over 3 seconds, you will leave the site. Loading only 1/4 of the page helps with this along with other tricks like caching at the CDN and lazy loading.

    The thing that always bothers me about this is that I’ve been using the internet since 90s dial-up, and even 90s dial-up never had a “page load speed” problem when loading text-based articles. An extremely conservative estimate is that modern broadband speeds are 1000x what they were then so “page load speed” is entirely about the design of the website, and it seems that mostly the excuse is “we want to spy on people”. Am I wrong? Otherwise why not write an HTML page that would be just as compatible with Geocities as it would now?