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Comment by bbarn | Hacker News Reader

I started to read this with some interest, as someone who's spent many hours thinking about and trying different metabolic strategies, diets, etc..

Then about 30 seconds in my reading got disrupted by a fucking light-box asking me to sign up or log in or god knows what.. my instinct to close tab won out over my curiosity. Please stop this pattern. If you really think your content is worth having to (whatever)wall from the public, do so, but don't make me get into it and then shove something mid word into my face. This is the digital equivalent of giving me a magazine to read, waiting until you're sure I've got my eyes on it, then shoving a business card in my field of vision and telling me what you do for a living. It's a low rent tactic, annoys rather than grips your users, and it reeks of desperation to monetize.

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This company produces great, great content. You agree that it's interesting, from what you've read.

And yet apparently the most popular comment on their effort is that you don't want to spare the all-of-2 seconds it takes to click your mouse to close a pop-up? On a site that isn't plastered with ads, btw, and is generally very accessible?

I don't mean to take out my frustration on you, and I get where you're coming from, but maybe we as consumers should stop feeling so entitled, maybe that's the pattern that has to end here.

Ve specifically said ve didn't mind a pay wall. Ve found the the mid-read interruption rude, which I think is totally fair.

I had to google this "ve". At first I thought that you were mimicking a German accent, which did not make sense here.

I'm guessing the result was:

Ve, a proposed gender-neutral pronoun [0]

I hadn't heard of it either.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VE

I'm just personally tired of our lack of appropriate gender-neutral pronouns. I guess it got me some downvotes due to misunderstanding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

Doesn't do it for me. It leads to confusion in a couple different contexts. I think we should be open to intelligently refactoring our language, instead of being slaves to organic change.

But "ve" doesn't create confusion?

Only momentary confusion. You will probably never again be confused by "ve", for the rest of your life, based on just this tiny passing exposure to it (assuming, of course, you ever see it again.. which is obviously not certain).

The idea of overloading the plural "they" to mean a gender-neutral singular nominative has some inherent problems you can't just learn away, because context is often not sufficient to pinpoint a meaning from the possibilities.

I'm working on a chrome extension to kill exit intents, I'll share it

Killing everything with position:absolute would work pretty good. Would take away annoying top/bottom bars too, and actually let me use my screen real estate for content instead of quick links to social sharing.

The Chrome extension "Fix Fixed" adds a button which removes all fixed-position content. It doesn't solve the lightbox problem (because you still have to click a button) but it's a big help with real estate.

>This company produces great, great content.

What they made is a spammy, irritating popup.

Similar to GP, if one of these sites throws something in my face I'd rather just leave the site.

Not only is it often (though not always) indicative of other nearby antipatterns, but it's my small way of protesting the lightboxes. Same thing goes for interstitial.

I intentionally do not use any ad blockers and when this how you treat me, i'd really rather not.

It really destroys the flow of reading though. These light-boxes should be more passive. I agree with the first commenter. It's super annoying and something nice becomes ugly.

Check out how DigitalOcean does this, on their tutorials. As you scroll down, a small box appears in the left margin asking you to sign up for the newsletter. It doesn't block any of the content and you can ignore it while you continue reading. That's nearly perfect, and an example of how to do it right.

I still find the animation of it appearing distracting and I think it interrupts the 'flow' of reading the article, but it was easy enough to block the element with my ad blocking extension.

As an aside, Firefox + Noscript are a thing of beauty. Using them I just don't see most of these annoyances. Yes, it 'breaks' many websites but this usually means a much faster page render without all the annoying stuff.

The problem is these boxes are designed to manipulate behaviour, not to avoid annoyance.

Unfortunately slamming a SIGN UP NOW!!!!! box in the middle of the page gets more people to sign up than a "Please sign up over here" box at the side.

The problem may be a lack of systems thinking.

If your metrics are sign-ups, then the aggressive pattern wins.

If your metrics are committed sign-ups by users who are genuinely interested and aren't simply going to ignore your emails for the rest of eternity, the picture may be more complicated.

Too many UX people don't seem to think this one through.

Well, the other side is that it seems quite pointless. I'm glad it's a simple popover, and not a full page video ad, and it responds nicely to escape. But all that means is I've closed it half a second after it appeared, without reading, with nothing but a grunt of frustration over "yet another popover crap". Is that really the impression this site wants to make? Something unobtrusive in the sidebar that would let me keep reading, and then look at, I would be more inclined to even read...

Arrgh!!! and yet somehow your complaint about something, which is at best mildly irritating, has generated enough off-topic commentary that I had to scroll for miles to find the useful part of this discussion which is about the article's subject matter. Right now I know what I find more annoying, and it isn't a click-to-dismiss lightbox.

Seriously though, bumping our gums about this sort of thing doesn't get us anywhere, unless it's a particularly egregious UX crime. Have a moan directly at the site owners, not the rest of us, many of whom find these posts tiresome. Or install something like u-blocker or privacy badger.

Why hasn't HN implemented a collapsible thread function yet like Reddit? I love HN comments, but this is my biggest gripe.

There's an extension for Chrome, but it really should be built-in: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-collap...

Agreed. This one is also quite good:

http://gabrielecirulli.github.io/hn-special/

I'm a big fan of: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hckr-news/mnlaodle...

I think bearing in mind Hacker News origins and community, comments like this are appropriate to the audience.

I think the priceonomics guys are regular HN participants. They'll probably see the comment and its votes/discussions.

> Right now I know what I find more annoying, and it isn't a click-to-dismiss lightbox.

And now you understand. Maybe if they hadn't used the shitty lightbox, you wouldn't have had to scroll to "on-topic" content?

This is the digital equivalent of giving me a magazine to read, waiting until you're sure I've got my eyes on it, then shoving a business card in my field of vision

This is an ironic analogy to choose, seeing as how magazines do in fact do exactly that.

I know it's been a while since anybody read one, but if you cast your mind back, you'll recall that every dozen pages or so they will have stuck in a subscription card that you'll have to shake out or even tear apart just to continue reading.

It funny in a way to see that digital media has so exactly copied that.

I don't remember any magazine with that crap, but maybe it's a regional thing, I'm not from the US. Which ones are you thinking of?

I think what makes it even more mildly amusing is how to deal with it. I remember shaking magazines out and pulling the cards out before reading. If you didn't, then the pages would get flipped by the siffer subscription card's paper stock and you'd be unable to read some article. (Literally, the page would just start flipping over - it was so goddam infuriating sometimes when the card couldn't easily be removed because it was perforated and left a little tab behind that prevented the magazine from ever laying flat on the table!)

Funny, I was thinking the exact opposite after I had been on the site for 10 minutes or so.

It's sad that you get sites making 'slideshows' getting 20 page views per visit for stupid slideshows like 'Celebrities who have had DUIs'. Meanwhile, something educational and informational makes 5% as much as those other guys? Just because I have only loaded the page once?

You can't pay wall it, because then you don't get the 50,000 visits from HN. It sounds like a really tough position to be in.

High-quality educational content has never been popular. So it seems a bit silly to try to monetize high-quality educational content through a popularity measuring platform, doesn't it?

It would be nice if HN as a community could agree to take bike-shed issues like this "as read", and not quite so often re-argue them in the top comment spot.

Sure, annoying things are annoying, but maybe the site has their reasons, but maybe those reasons are misguided, but then again maybe not, etc. That's all a great discussion to have, but let's have it in the comments on an article that's actually about such issues.

Maybe that's a hint that links from such sites aren't mostly welcome here?

I think there's something in this. Constant complaint discussions are a way of applying social pressure.

If every discussion on an article with an egregious anti-pattern gets hijacked, people might tend to submit such articles less, or find alternate sources that don't have those anti-patterns. This costs page views for the sites that do them, and rewards the sites that don't.

Firstly, the way to show what sites you approve of is with votes, not by hijacking comment. Degrading HN comment pages doesn't apply social pressure to anyone.

Secondly, I doubt there's a site on the internet that doesn't have some technical or design issue that someone finds egregious. If everyone did what you're suggesting then every comment thread on HN would get hijacked.

My best friend is printfriendly.com

(Chrome even support url query generation from the url bar http://www.printfriendly.com/print/?source=homepage&url=http...)

Beautiful, thank you. I've added it to my bookmarks bar next to my Google it! bookmarklet.

  javascript:(function(){location.replace('http://www.printfriendly.com/print/?source=homepage&url='+document.URL)})()

I believe most people adds the readability extensions. Which is a more sophisticated and produce more elegant results, but printfriendly is very fast, non invasive, and very effective at getting content without clutter. 0.01% errors, and the team reacts rapidly when it happens.

I can't install extensions here, so that's unfortunately a no-go for me. This looks like the next best, least intrusive option

Completely agree with this. I think there is an analytics blindspot underpinning it. We don't measure the amount of people inclined to just close the tab when they see this, or the negative sentiment it incurs. We might see a nominal rise in email addresses from bots and other braindead folks who fill in these forms, but the negative effect isn't measured.

I wonder if the time delay on these pop-ups is set to avoid being measured by the "bounce rate" or "0-10 second session duration" analytics tools.

This would be especially interesting to measure. While the 0-10 second bounce rate on any site will be somewhat high due to people just looking for something other than the page you give them (I see 50% bounces on a small business site with zero ads), and it's difficult to distinguish these from people who didn't like the ads or format, you could get a precise measurement of exactly how many people close the page within 3 seconds of the pop-up appearing.

> fucking light-box

I completely agree.

I turn off javascript for sites that have light-boxes or large top-bars. It's worked well for sites like priceonomics, which appear on HN intermittently. In case it's helpful, the one I use is "quick javascript switcher":

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/quick-javascript-s...

Before Reading any article, just hit the "reading mode" Button of safari/firefox.

This eliminates every Source of frustration very effectively and removes distractions alltogether.

It's a pain to do, not always available, and doesn't always work properly when it is available (it's all heuristic based).

Far better if sites were readable to begin with.

Firefox article reader mode kills pretty much all of that s*. It also makes articles much nicer to read, IMO.

I read an interesting article [1] on the topic of these annoying boxes recently. Very thought-provoking ;)

[1] http://www.moneylab.co/email/

NoScript fixes this and does not break the site in any appreciable manner.

A secret underground cabal of rogue developers is optimizing their sites for NoScript users...

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