I hate the fucking news websites that make you press a "read more" button. Of course I want to read more, that's why I clicked on your fucking article!!

The reason is probably commercial: to generate more clicks. Really annoying, though...

@Lukas but it's not loading anything new, it's only hiding/covering up the article

Then it's plain stupid :)@TheInitializer

Finally, a rant!

It's to make sure you actually read the article and don't navigate away

@TheInitializer Could still be interesting for metrics and engagement stats.

And also those top 10 type articles that give you one item per page.

This is speculation but my theory is it's an anti-Adblock technology. Because Adblock loads at page load I think what it's doing is make the user manually trigger an event AFTER page load, which then renders the ad, thereby bypassing the Adblock. I can't really think of any other reason for this

Yeah that's very annoying, sometimes it feels there is no articles except headings.

@TheInitializer It's more so because say you want to read the third article in a site, you wouldn't want to scroll down the entire length of the previous two articles before going to three. In a multi article blog, it helps to make the reader just read what he wants

@nottoobright I mean on an actual article page, with one news article

I think It's loading resources on demand. So the page load time is reduced

@zeprod Yeah, I myself sometimes lazy load images so they load only when the user scrolls a certain length to improve page load times. Some people just add a button than scrolling

@TheInitializer adding a "read more" is a design concept. People are turned off by a very long piece but if u only present a shorter version so that only the interested ones will read on

@nottoobright I think that's applicable for mostly mobile devices

Oh man. I agree. This crap sucks. I am especially irritated on mashable.com and BBC.