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Comment by lostlogin | Hacker News Reader

I know it’s common and frowned on to comment on the site rather than the content, but wow.

The content on that site takes up a bit less than one third the screen on an iPhone 8. The rest is the cookies policy and the subscription advert. It’s totally obnoxious.

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Since we’re already off-topic here, what is the point of all of these “read the rest” squishings of content? If you click “read all”, they always seem to display the content immediately meaning it isn’t doing an additional load to get the text meaning they aren’t “saving bandwidth” by not loading content people won’t read. It’s obviously just hidden via css. I don’t get the purpose...especially since as op mentioned there already is so much cruft.

You could track if users actually try to read the rest of the article.

Ah ok yeah, that makes some sense. Thanks!

Is it not possible for the page to track how far down it has been scrolled? (I've seen plenty of pages that react to scrolling)

What does the action of clicking on a button add?

Yes, it is possible, but bear in mind that this site has an infinite scrolling behaviour, so you could actually scroll down and be reading another article. Then you would have to keep track of the height of each article and account for font sizes and many other things.

It is doable, but not usually worth the hassle imo. Plus it is a somewhat common thing on many other sites.

Agreed, you hate to see a dumpster fire like this with MIT's name on it.

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