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Comment by lerxst | Hacker News Reader

I imagine their bounce rate will be very high if they continue doing this. Other news sites have done similar things such as make you participate in a survey before reading the article. In order for me to open this article before September 22, I would have to copy that link, paste it into an email to myself, open Mail on my phone, and open the link from my own email.

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Quora permanently lost me several years ago when they suddenly forced me to select five categories of interest before I could continue to the question I was interested in.

Forcing me to do something I have no interest in and will never make use of is a good way to alienate me.

Quora requires registration to simply read it.

That's at least going to lose them viewers who don't want to bother.

Or multiple incognito/private windows :P

Yep, for awhile I didn't even register; I used some trick (I forget what it was) to get around that.

Eventually I did register. And then the above requirement came, and that was the final nail in the coffin.

Adding share=1 to the query string allows unregistered viewing.

Such a strange decision by quora. No wonder they're so irrelevant.

Iirc you can get around this by appending ?share=1

The "Quora Share" add-on for Firefox will automatically add the "?share=1" parameter for you:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/quora-share/

Pinterest is probably the worst offender for that. You get progressively blocked the more you try to read.

i stopped using them because of that, and i even have an account; i just can't be bothered logging in to it everywhere.

In my experience, blocking cookies and/or using incognito mode works to block off their solicitations. Now if only someone would find a solution for Scribd..

The "block element" feature of muBlock allows you to block the popup that asks you to register. Just right-click on the popup, use "Block element", highlight the popup, click "Create", and do the same for the opaque background.

Don't bother, on the 22nd, it will probably be one of the top titles on Hacker News: "Remember this article that used to be exclusive on Apple News? Now you can read it!".

probably. always remember, on internet, the product is you.

this is but another social experiment/AB test/growth hacking thing (and I'm giving them already valuable data just by posting here).

Well of note, listening to talk radio one thing I heard is true. The consumer will decide this in the end. However don't expect Madsion Avenue to take it laying down.

they will go the route radio went years ago, they will setup ads like news stories and blog articles and get to the point to where it will be hard to distinguish until you have absorbed a good part of the material.

I guess the real question will be if the reduced pageviews offset the increased ad impressions. As much as I also hate those popups (I often leave the page), I imagine they've done enough split testing to know that it at least helps their bottom line in the short term.

Well, I've seen a bigger website change their layout completely believing it would increase ad impressions, assuming that users scrolled down on their page. It went live, their profit was reduced to less than half, thousands of people lost their job. The new layout stayed.

Why not just use Handover?

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