I have 1080 vertical pixels and I probably know the page title from the link I clicked to get here. Why do you insist on hiding my content at least 1081 pixels down?
I used to build Web 1.0 websites with elaborate headers and jampacked sidebars and they still let you see the meat of the page on the first screen.
P.S. Welcome to some of my open tabs
For some reason, news sites are inexcusably bad at this. Maybe they're just stretching out after a couple centuries of counting everything in column-inches.
scrolling is physically easier to do on mobile devices than it is on desktop. it turns out that ad revenue on mobile isn't nearly as tied to being above the fold (this is public knowledge these days but, alas, we don't have public sources for it that we can point you to - sorry about that). so everyone stopped worrying about it.
in the absence of a strong incentive to keep teaching web developers to keep things above the fold, everyone stopped doing that and nobody really has the skill set anymore. it was more work, after all.
like a lot of things where someone might be tempted to suggest a conspiracy, it's really more that there was a systemic incentive in play that isn't obvious unless you know about it. of course, it would still be correct to point out that that incentive is user-hostile, since it is focused on revenue, not on people's enjoyment of the site. it just coincidentally happens to be the case that revenue and enjoyment used to be aligned in a way that they no longer are, so everything got worse, and nobody on the production end noticed because that was never their priority in the first place.
we don't even remember what we did to the CSS to make this block so huge, but it was intentionally hostile
