The offending code that reloads the page every 3 minutes [0]. Terrible. The author told me on twitter [1] it's because of traffic, but... no. it's the js code. Ironically, the forced reload is making the traffic problem worse.
You can add a "function contentRefresh(){}" in your devtools js console to get rid of this. It was the only way I could finish the article.
var timer = setTimeout("contentRefresh()", 1000 * 60 * 5);function contentRefresh(){self.location.reload(true)}
But yes, this is astonishingly aggravating. Why would you do this on a site, or at least a page, that is attempting long-form journalism? Don't they want people to, you know, read it?
Only a guess but I'd place money on "because that's the best way they can think of to increase advert impressions". I've known publishers do that for this reason, at least. Depressingly.
And yet I have adblock on, so the only thing they're accomplishing is making me not read the whole article. There's enough irony in that to cure every case of anemia worldwide.
I'm just using AdBlock Plus on this particular browser (Conkeror; Firefox-like). Haven't bothered to try with Firefox (which doesn't have Ghostery, but has a more stringent ad-blocking policy and some other privacy-ish addons that I can't recall at the moment).
It happened to me without any adblockers or other add-ons (Chrome, in its default form.) The refreshes were partly obnoxious due to not always scrolling back to the same place on the page.
Well yeah, it's definitely the site; one of the replies to my original comment managed to identify the piece of JS that's doing it. Using a JS-blocker (or inserting a bit of JS into your developer tools to blank-out the offending function) would do the trick.
