1) I become disinterested, in which case no amount of website engineering is going to change things.
2) I see a large break, such as a large advertisement, and wrongly assume the article has ended. Here, scrolling is not the problem, the problem is that the design isn't telling me there's something more to see. The minimization of scroll bars in current browser design (I can't even remember if this was a toggle I manually switched anymore) adds to this. The websites that have a counter of percent read on the side are good design to address this.
Personally barriers to scrolling are either:
1) I become disinterested, in which case no amount of website engineering is going to change things.
2) I see a large break, such as a large advertisement, and wrongly assume the article has ended. Here, scrolling is not the problem, the problem is that the design isn't telling me there's something more to see. The minimization of scroll bars in current browser design (I can't even remember if this was a toggle I manually switched anymore) adds to this. The websites that have a counter of percent read on the side are good design to address this.
Good advice here.