[anais9]

A progress meter may not be necessary, but as the article points out if you have comments or an otherwise large footer not associated with the content of the post, the scrollbar can be deceiving.

I'm personally a huge fan of the progress meter (having once thought it was redundant as well) - one other easy addition I didn't see mentioned is an "estimated reading time." Having a ballpark range for how long I should expect to spend with a piece of content greatly increases my chance of engaging with it, and the progress meter creates a tangible representation of that time (and how much of it I have left to finish consuming the content).

[self_awareness]

I'm not sure how "estimated reading time" works for non-english speakers.

As for "progress meter" being an optimization of websites with large footers or long lists of comments, I'd argue that a better optimization technique would be to remove the footer, or remove/hide by default list of comments (i.e. make it available with a mouse click somewhere).

[fabianholzer]

> I'm not sure how "estimated reading time" works for non-english speakers. >

Do you mean for non-native speakers reading English material or for material in other languages when read by native speakers with an average reading competence in their native language?

Anyhow, as a non-native English speaker, it implemented it on my site by showing both the word count, as well as an estimated time, which is simply calculated by dividing the word count by a constant number of assumed words per minute.

That number was guesstimated by doing some reading speed tests on myself and researching average reading speeds and rounding up to 10 wpm. I have to admit that my assumption of 240 words per minute does not hold up to any scientific scrutiny, but otoh it is an estimation.

It works ok for prose. As soon as other notation is mixed in (code, math, graphs, diagrams etc.pp) that begins to naturally to vary wildly in accuracy.

[hifromwork]

>I'm not sure how "estimated reading time" works for non-english speakers.

Do you mean people whose native language is not English? I assume it works the same way as for everyone else, i.e. it's always an approximation anyway. I'm not from an English-speaking country, but I'm pretty sure I read faster than the average English native.

The other interpretation is that you mean people who can't read English at all, but in this case I understand even less. They won't be able to read the article, if they don't speak the language. After automated translation, the reading time should be roughly correct again.

[swasheck]

something to hide comments altogether would be remarkable

[self_awareness]

That's why I like blogs with Disqus -- I've cut all traffic to Disqus servers through uMatrix, so the comments won't even show up.

[swasheck]

in the early days of blogs, i found comments to be interesting and engaging dialogs. the last decade, or so, i’ve found comments to be unhelpful nitpicking/personal disagreements, spam, or support requests, so i’ve completely stopped concerning myself with comments on blogs.

so i’ll agree that progress indicators are helpful for this use case.

[breck]

> if you have comments or an otherwise large footer not associated with the content of the post

I think the better solution in this case is to use the (relatively) new html tags: <details><summary>Comments</summary></details>

Demo:

https://try.scroll.pub/#scroll%0A%20%0A%20expander%20Comment...