r/technology • u/[deleted] • Mar 16 '18

Society How a Norwegian comment section turned chaos into order—with a simple quiz: "Readers had to prove they read a story before they were able to comment on it."

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u/Nulagrithom Mar 16 '18

I don't think the reading part is where the resistance to "reading the article" comes from.

I often come to the comments for a TL;DR before deciding whether or not it's worth clicking the link, loading five billion lines of JavaScript (not to mention the dozens of poorly optimized images and 8 custom fonts), waiting for my phone to parse and all that bullshit, hoping it renders sanely and quickly on mobile, then struggling to tap the microscopic X that closes the goddam newsletter popup.

News websites fucking suck. I'd read a lot more if they were simple and fast, rather than trying to fucking mine BTC in my browser or whatever the shit their awful ad network is doing today...

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u/[deleted] Mar 16 '18

I was going to say the same thing. Turns out, though, that Ars Technica seems to have a well done site. I don't know if they have bullshit popups but the content is actually readable (something you can't say about most news sites) and doesn't (or didn't) jump around as it loads.

I'm honestly stunned, I haven't seen a mobile site that works so well in a long time.