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Comment by edanm | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

>This company produces great, great content.

What they made is a spammy, irritating popup.

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.

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.

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