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Comment by jatsign | Hacker News Reader

Why do so many sites have UX like this one, where after you start reading, the text gets grayed out and you have to click a button "Read Full Story"? It's annoying to the user - if I want to read more, just let me scroll.

It can't save that much bandwidth to send just part of the story. Is it to measure user engagement?

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There are some reasons on StackOverflow. There's an answer by someone from QZ specifically, who says it's only shown when you visit from an outside referrer and it's so you can skip all the content if you're not interested and jump to other interesting articles.

https://ux.stackexchange.com/a/82966

Something that works well for me is disabling javascript and making use of Firefox's read mode. Tends to let me get straight to the content in a legible way without much of the cruft getting in the way.

Only reason I could see it being done is to improve loading time. Most users these days will bounce back if the page takes more than few seconds to load.

I always figured it was something about ad views. Seems you could charge more for an ad view right after that break than if the break didnt exist. You've now confirmed that user is actively reading and will actually see the ad.

But maybe ads are click based anyways?

I thought it was about being able to see the footer if you wanted to.

You could say it is good, since most web site visitors tend to stay in a site less than 30 seconds, imagine how much bandwidth is being saved.

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