What's the reason for hiding stories behind additional pages?

[trigf]

First there was the "consolidation" of stories on the front page, with the introduction of the "Show Full Article" button, but that wasn't a big deal. The stories simply expand and you can keep reading.

Now it appears that stories that are not on the front page are being hidden behind a completely separate "Read Full Article" link that opens another webpage. Are you just trying to increase page views and ad revenue?

 

[WildCowboy]

It's been like that for quite a long time. We use a snippet-and-thumbnail format (not sure why the thumbnail is broken on your example..will look into that) on archives beyond the first page to lighten the page load and make things more glanceable with less scrolling so people can easily spot stories they're interested in reading.

The vast majority of our readers are reading from the front page or individual articles (usually coming in via Twitter, Google, RSS, or similar). Only a very small fraction of our visitors get to these archives beyond the front page and our priority is on making it easy to scroll through them. (If we were primarily driven by a desire for page views/ad revenue, we'd use that format on the front page too...it would be monumentally more successful that way. )

Long story short: Front page is optimized for letting readers quickly and easily see the biggest, latest news right there. Subsequent archive pages are optimized for making it easy to quickly scan through the articles with a quick view of what each story is about.