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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Yes, but not as exclusively as you might think. There’s an increasing number of manually vetted “premium” sites (for better or worse, as it reduces SEO spam while also making it harder for good but niche content to break through) which provide actually good content, as irritated people looking for a sentence in a multipage article aren’t going to look kindly on ads, whereas engaged people reading good content will