https://www.livescience.com/animals/birds/mice-on-remote-island-that-eat-albatrosses-alive-sentenced-to-death-by-bombing-scientists-decree
Invasive mice are devouring albatrosses alive on a remote island in the Indian Ocean, so conservationists have come up with an explosive solution — "bombing" the mice.
Mice have been wreaking havoc on Marion Island, between South Africa and Antarctica, for decades. Humans accidentally introduced the mice in the 19th century, and the rodents have since developed a taste for wandering albatrosses (Diomedea exulans) and other threatened seabirds.
The Mouse-Free Marion Project, a collaboration between the South African government and BirdLife South Africa, is trying to raise $29 million to drop 660 tons (600 metric tons) of rodenticide-laced pellets onto the island in winter 2027, AFP news agency reported on Saturday (Aug. 24).
The project plans to send a squad of helicopters to drop the pellets. By striking in winter when the mice are most hungry, the conservationists hope to eradicate the entire mouse population of up to 1 million individuals.
You think they even opened it?
i think the probability of an evil ad banner layer hiding important parts of the article preventing it from beeing read completely by a subset of readers with some not so common browser(-settings) outdated adblockers, no adblockers or specific not fully successful adblockers, or only blocking in dns a.s.o. is very high as ad layers are always on the top no matter what and ads also use lots of scripting no matter how invasive.
usually ad layers are considered more important by website owners than their actual contents and thus these layers might not be removed/fixed even if they are known(!) to hide the real contents in bad ways.
i have seen pages that only show the first paragraph of their contents if you displayed them in reader mode, circumventing all ad layers and their cookie trap banners at once and bcs of that the pageowners choosed to only show you a fraction of their contents thus visitors only can read it incompletely.
because you don't personally have all browsers, -settings, and adblocker scenarios at hand, you cannot tell or even try how bad a page is made unreadable by ads for any given website or article.
so if pple don't read full articles, its likely just bcs of malicious ads or webpages.
prove me wrong
for me roundabout in the middle of that article an advertising for a newsletter is statically displayed while a very similar ad (maybe exact same) for the very same newsletter is displayed as a top layer preventing further scrolling down the article at some (random?) place while reading it. if that newsletter adlayer pops up with a bad timing one has read a significant part of the article maybe its appearence does not break a paragraph or such an due to that adlayer no further scrolling down is possible thus the reader thinks that was the whole article and just goes back to talk about it without knowing significant parts. maybe its the newsletter ad that prevented ppl from reading the article and you (!) are just an indirect victim of malicious ad placement here.
I appreciate the systemic analysis. That said, I don't really have a stance on why they didn't open it, simply that they didn't.
and i think they opened it, but were just hindered to read "all" of it, which matches your observings while it does not assume bad/unwanted behaviour of participants here as a cause but only a bad webpage which actually was observed. so it matches the observings and likely causes while not suggesting bad actors here other than the webpage which actually was observed to act in a disturbing way. i'ld say thats a way better fit ;-)