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Cassandrich

Most hated web design antipattern:

[Big header]
[First 100 words of the actual article, product info, whatever, graying out in the last couple lines/words]
READ MORE! (clickable but tiny and hard to click on touch)
[Hundreds of chumboxes, alternate product ads, reviews, AI summarizes of reviews, other footer garbage]

The actual page content is literally the only thing collapsed/hidden and hard to access.

Who is teaching this???? 🤦 🤬

BTW Google created this.

They had the option, before this shit started, to make text not initially visible not get indexed.

They had the option to weigh relevance down by what % of the page content was actually the relevant text vs other junk.

They didn't and now we have this.

A new search engine hardly even has the option because everything is already shit and just not finding what the user is looking for at all because it adapted to make Google happy is not useful.. 🤬

I have one non-malicious theory for where the practice is coming from:

Designers see their pretty layout as the product, rather than as a tool for delivering the product (actual informational page content) effectively.

The main article, product info, whatever, is a very freeform, unknown size, "untrusted input" to their beautiful design, and they don't want it messing that up.

So they design a fixed size space for it where their layout looks exactly the way they want. 🤦

@dalias probably those that want to maximise "engagement" with site (amount of clicks, time spent) and amount of displayed ads...

@dalias no, it's to game the ad revenue. I'm not sure if it's because it brings the ads into view so they can charge for them instead of ads you never scrolled down far enough to see, or if it's so they can say the user interacted with the page. But it's something like those -- they can charge more for the ads if they do that.

@stark This might make sense for some sites - forcing the ads into view since they're visible as soon as the "read more" link is - but just putting them inline with the body or on the sides or something would do the same without ruining the actual content.

But on something like Amazon, who does very close to the same thing? It's not 3p ads and they don't have an incentive to defraud themselves like this...

Likewise on AliExpress where it's not 3p ads.

@dalias I've always assumed this is specifically for metrics collection, because the click to reveal is universally attached to a google analytics/etc beacon. It can also be used to force users through the "click to activate" heuristics in browsers that will subsequently allow their video ads to play

@Aranjedeath Where I usually see it, there doesn't appear to be anything they're trying to exploit the click to activate. But maybe that's because I have UBO. 🤷 😂

@dalias all of these malignant patterns are traceable to Google. Once they controlled how people surf and explore the web, they were able to shape it however they wanted (profit-making.)