• they/she

wondering poet, codeweaver. systems have souls; souls have systems.

<3 @effinvicta


hackermatic
@hackermatic

I have 1080 vertical pixels and I probably know the page title from the link I clicked to get here. Why do you insist on hiding my content at least 1081 pixels down?

I used to build Web 1.0 websites with elaborate headers and jampacked sidebars and they still let you see the meat of the page on the first screen.

P.S. Welcome to some of my open tabs


hackermatic
@hackermatic

For some reason, news sites are inexcusably bad at this. Maybe they're just stretching out after a couple centuries of counting everything in column-inches.


xkeeper
@xkeeper
Sorry! This post has been deleted by its original author.

ireneista
@ireneista

scrolling is physically easier to do on mobile devices than it is on desktop. it turns out that ad revenue on mobile isn't nearly as tied to being above the fold (this is public knowledge these days but, alas, we don't have public sources for it that we can point you to - sorry about that). so everyone stopped worrying about it.

in the absence of a strong incentive to keep teaching web developers to keep things above the fold, everyone stopped doing that and nobody really has the skill set anymore. it was more work, after all.

like a lot of things where someone might be tempted to suggest a conspiracy, it's really more that there was a systemic incentive in play that isn't obvious unless you know about it. of course, it would still be correct to point out that that incentive is user-hostile, since it is focused on revenue, not on people's enjoyment of the site. it just coincidentally happens to be the case that revenue and enjoyment used to be aligned in a way that they no longer are, so everything got worse, and nobody on the production end noticed because that was never their priority in the first place.


atax1a
@atax1a

we don't even remember what we did to the CSS to make this block so huge, but it was intentionally hostile


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in reply to @xkeeper's post:

i assume part of this is, honestly, from analytics/metrics. forcing you to actually scroll the page brings in new ads, extends the time you're on the page, and probably ticks some middle manager's yearly bonus

yep, I don't even think this is that much of a conspiracy theory

I think the big driver about the "continue reading" button might be more about the fact that browsers are now inexplicably in the habit of prefetching pages you haven't navigated to, so if you're serving heavy pages you might not want to serve them to people who aren't even actually looking at them yet

Sometimes it actually goes out to get the rest of the article, if the read more is bait to get you to subscribe. The article itself is still probably the easiest content on the page to serve though so it's probably not trying to avoid heavy work on prefetches?

in reply to @ireneista's post:

Modern web design revolves around creating itches for people to scratch. More than anything, getting that first extra nanosecond of your attention is the battle being fought, here. It's not an accident that those images are the things getting clipped by the fold. The impulse to just scratch that itch, so to speak, and see the rest of the photo is entirely the goal, there.

A lot of it is ad-driven, but it's worth noting that it's not entirely that. My own conspiracy theory is that the modern Reddit design wasn't just about giving more space to ads, it's about giving more space to each thread to be caught mid-way through the scroll. I think they'd rather you see 3.5 reddit threads than 4.