Comment by hardwaresofton
5 years ago
This was a good read but I was struck with something else… has anyone noticed on long form content the scrollbar being “stuck” at around 85% and never moving after a while? Is this a hack to keep people reading? Am I imagining it?
"Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting. Exception: when the author is present. Then friendly feedback might be helpful."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Apologies! Will not do that in the future
Appreciated!
The fad of scroll jacking with JS is one of the worst. There has been little benefit of this that I have seen. Maybe there's some successful examples, but I have only seen a couple. It could be when they work well, nobody notices and only the bad examples are visible???
Yeah this wasn't a particularly bad example, I just noticed it that's all (it's not the first time either). The article was engaging, but it was jarring to look over and see the scrollbar not move.
I just don't like the idea that someone somewhere had decided that to increase "engagement" they need to lie to me about how far into the article I am. I get that they're probably fighting the recent trend of declining attention spans but I don't know if I like the solution being subtle manipulation.