While hiding long posts behind “show more” is pretty useful it would be nice to let users modify the hide threshold to their liking.
Right now it is hardcoded in app/assets/javascripts/app/views/content_view.js with height value of 200 and this is by no means universal. On my monitors and with my typical content 800 makes much more sense but for someone else (say, netbook users with low resolution screen) it differs.
It would really be great to have this as user option so they could modify it to their liking without turning to addon scripts or hacking the pod files.
I am usually against adding settings for such things, as they don’t do much besides cluttering up the settings interface with hundreds of things most people never touch anyway. Maybe there is a smarter way to do it, like, for example, using the viewport height as a base.
I think the cut-off height was set low to reduce scrolling; a user can potentially have a lot of long posts in their stream, and setting the cut-off to screen height would entail a lot more scrolling to get past content in which they’re not interested.
It’s usually apparent in the first 200px height of a post whether or not I’m likely to be interested in it, so setting the cut-off low seems a good idea to me. I doubt there’s a high enough demand for a change to this to merit adding a user setting; but let’s see.
No doubt about it but I think it greatly depends on the typical content in the given user feed. 200px is all right for lots of shorter posts (Twitter-like experience) but not longer ones. Also it doesn’t play well with externally hosted pictures. Especially if a couple lines of text were added. At some point I followed some photographers and ended up clicking on every second post just to see what it was (not to mention the feed looking super ugly). Just scrolling would be faster than unscreening narrow image strip (and then probably still scrolling past).
Maybe there is a smarter way to do it, like, for example, using the viewport height as a base.