this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024

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230

Why do some websites have a "Continue Reading" button? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

77 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

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[–] [email protected] 154 points 10 months ago (16 children)

Web Manager here. Some good answers here. Let me add a few more.

Engagement. If you land on a page and don't engage on the page and leave, Google doesn't even count you as a User. The more things you do on the page, Google will rank you higher.

Data analysts: we are testing if the article is valuable or not. If nobody is clicking continue, we know that we might need to rework the article.

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.

There are tons more reasons, but we found that with the "Continue" button, it wasn't detrimental to the site performance.

[–] [email protected] 64 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (3 children)

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

As both a developer and an end user, this drives me batshit.

Seemingly no one has figured out that if users are bouncing due to page load times, maybe the problem is actually because your page that was supposed to be, say, a recipe for a bologna sandwich doesn't need to first load an embedded autoplaying video, an external jQuery library, a cookie notice, three time delayed popovers, an embedded tweet, and a sidebar that dynamically loads 20 irrelevant articles, and a 2600x4800 100vw headline image that will scroll up at half speed before the user can even get any of the content into the viewport. Just a thought. I don't care what your dog-eared copy of Engagement For Dummies says. It is actually wrong.

I have made the business I work for quite successful online by taking all of the alleged "best practices" things that clearly annoy the shit out of everyone, and then just not doing those things.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago

I miss when browsers used to be fast. Almost every site has perceptible lag now.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I hate with a passion how when looking up recipes, you gotta go through like 5 pages of why they like it, a fluffed up but useless how it's made, all sorts of other shit, and only then do you get the actual fucking ingredient list and cooking temperatures and the actual cooking instructions.

I HATE IT SO MUCH!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Don't forget the long winded tales of how their distant relative they never met gave them the recipe from the "old country" or some shit.

Dude, I just needed to see what temperature to set the oven to.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

It depends on the site. A recipes site is trying to get as many impressions as possible so they can either turn a profit or keep the lights on.

If your company doesn't rely on ads to stay afloat, the site experience is better.

If you dislike the page, exit the page within 10ish seconds without clicking anything and you will hurt the page's SEO ranking.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 10 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 10 months ago

You can still write plain html websites, and they would be super fast! But that's not how we do things damnit! I need to implement feature x. Do I spend all day rolling my own lean version? Fuck no. I download a 5-ton JavaScript library that already has that feature, and I fuck off the rest of the day.

You are correct on one thing. The math does not add up at all.

The root cause is the current meta of software development. It's bloat. Software is so ungodly bloated today because we've been taught since as long as I can remember that hardware is so fast nowadays that we don't need to care about performance. Because of this mindset, many of the best practices that we were taught work directly against performance (OOP was a mistake. Fight me).

There might be overhead on the ad tracking bullshit... Sure. But, if developers cared about performance, that ad tracking can be fast, too ;]

How long should it really take to render a webpage? That should be near instant. If modern games can render a full 3D landscape over 100 times a second, surely a wall of text and some images can be done in under 1 second, right?

This is a problem in all software. For a simple example, I remember Microsoft word from 20 years ago being quite snappy on the desktops of the time. And by comparison, we are running supercomputers today. A cheap android phone would blow that desktop out of the water. Yet, somehow, word is a dog now...

[–] [email protected] 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

The biggest reason I leave a page is paywalls and ads.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Some of my clients do not have the budget to give you free content without ads. Even a (usable)shared hosting server costs around 25 bucks a month. Add in dev time and design, small mom and pop sites can't afford to be ad free.

Only the big dogs do paywalls.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (6 children)

That's funny, I always thought 'continue reading' was a paywall button going to a subscription page and just back right out

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago

Also, a lot of websites are built on CMS that has [Read More]... baked in. eg wordpress is designed around the concept of an excerpt of each page/post as it was built 30 years ago. Although as others have pointed out, the time/data savings are minimal - that mattered when wordpress was invented and is a vestigial part of the system.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Why do ads (videos with loud sound) always load before any meaningful parts of the page?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago

Because many are served by a 3rd party CDN that's more robust than the original article.

Also might be part of the coding.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

As I mentioned, small mom and pop shops can't afford to give you free content without ads. So they prioritize the ad so they can get paid for the impression.

Unfortunately the content is not free to create and maintain.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (4 children)

As a person who knows nothing about web development, can you not load the pages in smaller chunks, so that the first screen or two worth of stuff loads fast and the rest could load while you are looking at it. That way, to the user, it appears to load quickly enough to keep them from leaving?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago

It’s a bullshit excuse - a couple pages of text loads in a second or two in even poor connections. Their optimizing for ads and tracking

Let me correct my other comment here: I miss when a 9600 baud modem was fast but holy crap has the internet gone downhill. Now get off my lawn

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You can, but you would have to do it through scripting which would rely on whatever methodology you're using not breaking with browser updates and standards changes, whether or not the user has scripting enabled to begin with, whether not their adblockers or other plugins mess it up, etc. And then you can wind up just deferring the issue. Let's say the user intends to quickly skim through your page to see if it actually appears to contain what they're looking for or whether it's just SEO bullshit, so they scroll down right after the first chunk loads and hit the point where the next chunk should load, and unexpectedly find that it didn't do so instantly (because it probably won't) and it appears your content cut off mid-page. They'll assume your site is just broken and you've never seen another user hit that back button so fast.

So the answer is "yes, but," and may not be worth the trouble.

Clicking a "continue reading" button is not an ideal solution either, but at least the user will (should) realize that they've performed an action that will load more content, as opposed to having it happen behind their backs in a manner that they weren't initially aware.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Yeah this shit annoys the hell out of me with certain websites where I'm trying to ctrl-f information. It hasn't loaded the whole page until I scroll down, so my search ends up being worthless.

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[–] [email protected] 128 points 10 months ago (1 children)

It's two fold:

it's good proof of "user interaction with site" to sell to advertisers
they can use that to load more ads or refresh current ones after it loads more text, and you're already bought in on the story so you're likely going to keep going.

I suspect a third reason is to try adding other news stories at the end in case the current one didn't grab your attention, but that doesn't seem to be as consistent amongst sites that I've seen do this. I run ad blockers though, so I don't really see the sites the way they expect me to.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 10 months ago

Because fuck you, that's why.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 10 months ago

Enshittification

[–] [email protected] 44 points 10 months ago (1 children)

My guess is that this gives them data they can analyze on how many people actually read the page that far.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 10 months ago (5 children)

It also generated clicks so they can charge advertisers more for views.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 10 months ago

Then you click it, and it's like 2 sentences and the rest is ads. Might be one of the reasons.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Just a guess: to prevent bots from scraping the full content?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

Doubt it. My web analytics indicate that bots click on every single element on the page, whether it makes sense or not.

For this reason it's a good idea not to allow your site to generate any kind of circular self-referential loop that can be achieved via navigation or clicking on things, because poorly coded bots will not realize that they're driving themselves around in circles and proceed to bombard your server with zillions of requests per second for the same thing over and over again.

Likewise, if you have any user initiated action that can generate an arbitrary result set like for example adding an item or set of items to a quote or cart, it is imperative that you set an upperbound limit on the length of result or request size (server side!), and ideally configure your server to temp-ban a client who attempts too many requests that are too large in too short of a time span. Because if you don't, bad bots absolutely will eventually attempt to e.g. create a shopping cart with 99999999999999999 items in it. Or a search query with 4.7 gigabytes worth of keywords. Or whatever. Either because they're coded by morons or worse, because they're coded by someone who wants to see if they can break your site by doing stuff like that.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Apparently it can boosts engagement?

At the Times, which got 60 percent of its June visitors from mobile, the “show full article button” has resulted in “moderate increase” in the time readers spend, according to Paul Werdel, senior product manager on mobile.

Quartz, which also introduced its own “read full story” button alongside its design refresh in June, has used the button to boost the performance of its mobile Engage ads, which appear directly below the button. The Huffington Post uses a similar approach, presenting readers with a 300 x 250 banner ad below its own “read more” button. Huffington Post VP of Engineering Sam Napolitano said that preliminary data on the feature has been “very positive” since its addition.

https://digiday.com/media/publishers-mobile-truncated-page/

[–] [email protected] 10 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Some people prefer pages to scrolling (it’s amazing the strength of opinion about this for either point of view)
Advertisements are charged per impression. So each page counts as a new impression
Be grateful websites no longer auto scroll web pages
Some things lend themselves to page by page. For example very long articles (this is why books replaced scrolls)
Be grateful that websites stopped animating page turns etc
Sometimes web developers don’t care and just use a bought in package

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago

Because they want you to obnoxiously see as many ads as possible because they don’t care if you read the article, only view ads. This is the new shitty web. MSN, Newsweek and Yahoo are the scummy kings.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

Maybe to make the article seem shorter, so you’re more inclined to keep reading. Once you’re halfway through, you’re more likely to want to read the rest. Both halves are probably filled with ads, so the longer you stick around, the better.

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