It’s not effective, I tell you
I have to give a word to the guys who did the UX of both GMA News Online, Inquirer.net, Mashable and anyone who is using this feature: Stop making us press that “Read More” button. For any reason. Why so? (I will be speaking from my experience, of course.)
It ticks off those who are interested in reading the whole thing
If you think that the “Read More” button makes people more curious to read the full print, not me. I like to skim, and by having this wall over what I wanted to see in full, it hampers me from understanding the whole thing altogether. Sure, we can justify its use on heat mapping but then again it’s a hindrance, so it beats the purpose. It’s counter-productive.
I gave a heads-up to the federated Mastodon.cloud community (through my handle) and Alex gave this reply:
Alex mentioned the thing about ads, and it kinda justifies the thought; but I think that’s not the point because unless your ad is persistent on mobile, it will not be seen thoroughly — heck, it will be even swiped downwards if it’s not really interesting.
What about the JavaScript?
A bigger concern with this also involve the latency (speed) of mobile internet and how the scripts are run in order. For example, the website’s JavaScript (especially the jQuery) is not set to load asynchronously, so I have to wait a few more minutes to make sure that the darn button does work.
Web Scrapers?
When I mentioned this to Solidad (then the tech head for Deremoe), he dropped the idea of web scrapers. “Can you check also, if you view source the page before clicking the read more, was the whole article there? If not, then its also some measure to stop scrappers from stealing posts. [sic]”
Web scrapers aggregate content into their own site so these scrapers can get their unethical share of web revenue, in which I thought, “What are they doing with RSS? It’s efficient that they implement something like that there, so what has happened with it?” Oh yes, most people won’t know RSS nowadays especially if the only program that they use to browse is Google Chrome.
Also, the article is there in full.
Overall, if your website is not like The Japan Times, The Information or even The NYT, just make it easy for us to read the article in full and stop implementing that “Read More” button. Please.
In any case, I’m glad to hear from you about the implementation of this feature in news sites; here’s my email: [email protected]. Better yet, respond to this post below. While there’s free speech, I do have the right to refuse replying to emails which reads more hostile than the commentary I stated above.
