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Comment by hmate9 | Hacker News Reader

True, but that reading 4 bullet points takes ~5 seconds and you might have a new feature which really helps you and you might miss it otherwise.

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You're appealing to "Fear of Missing Something Important (FOMSI)" from an article that was posted to HN a few days ago[1].

Yes, there's a very small chance that I might miss a feature that I care about. However, there's a 100% chance that if I read your popup, I'm not spending that time doing something else that I know I want to do because I consciously chose to do it.

And let's not pretend that it's just 5 seconds this one time. Website and app behaviors like this eat up 5 seconds load time on a slow phone, 5 seconds to read, 30 seconds to remember what you were doing before your attention was hijacked, 3 minutes and $10 to add data to your phone plan because you used up all your data, over and over and over again. Because lots of sites do this, and that time and loss of attention adds up.

So frankly, I don't care about your ad for your new feature (and let's be clear, it is an ad). I'd rather have the 5 seconds and other things you're taking from me with that What's New section, and if you do this kind of thing consistently, I'll go elsewhere.

[1] https://medium.com/@tristanharris/how-technology-hijacks-peo...

I agree with you, I am like you as well. I automatically close popups.

But as this article demonstrated, the general population does not.

No, you won't go elsewhere. If you or your team is using the tool and managing projects + clients on it, then you're deriving value out of it. In most cases you'll appreciate the new features and if you see something new every other week then you'll be impressed at the speed at which they're adding features.

Your increased efficiency is worth far more than the 5 seconds and $10. You can argue that you're not the target customer of the tool. In that case your comment is meaningless.

Also, don't mind me saying this, but your comment reeks of classic HN bullshit where anything deemed 'marketing/advertising' is made to seem like it's bad.

> No, you won't go elsewhere. If you or your team is using the tool and managing projects + clients on it, then you're deriving value out of it.

It's pretty bold to claim you can predict my behavior better than I can. Just because I'm deriving value from your product doesn't mean I can't derive more value from a tool that respects my time and attention.

> In most cases you'll appreciate the new features and if you see something new every other week then you'll be impressed at the speed at which they're adding features.

If it doesn't already have enough features for me to derive value from it, I wouldn't be there, as you said. So generally, new features added after I have been using the product for a while are nice-to-haves, not need-to-haves.

I don't use products because I'm impressed by the speed with which they add features I mostly don't need, I use products because they solve a problem for me. In fact, many times modifications to good tools break things that were working for me before. I'd rather see slow, careful modifications driven by my needs rather than rapid development that's shoved in my face constantly.

> Your increased efficiency is worth far more than the 5 seconds and $10.

This would be relevant if interrupting my workflow for features I mostly don't want or need increased my efficiency, but it doesn't.

> Also, don't mind me saying this, but your comment reeks of classic HN bullshit where anything deemed 'marketing/advertising' is made to seem like it's bad.

I don't mind you saying that. I myself will openly say that marketing/advertising are harmful to me, other users, and society.

Are you a paying user of Basecamp or any of its direct competitors? Jira wouldn't be a competitor.

So because it's the best choice for the target customer, it is okay if they are slightly annoyed by the popups, as long as the annoyance is not big enough for them to bail? Because that is what your comment sounds like.

(If I really care about a product, you can subscribe me to the update newsletter or the blog feed. Which I can read when I'm reading other things, at a time I like. Consider a "don't show this again, but sign me up for the newsletter" button, I can't think of an app right now where I wouldn't prefer that.)

They won't be annoyed if the updates are valuable enough. They're more likely to appreciate and be happy about them.

And they wouldn't be happy if you told them about the updates in a different channel? I of course can only talk about my perspective, but nearly every time I encounter such a screen, I couldn't tell you if its contents were valuable or not, because I'm angrily smashing the screen to make it go away. If the prominent button on that screen took me to the app store, I'd be even more annoyed. Given that their ratings haven't tanked because of that it seems that this is a minority feeling, but a user should still be able to turn it off.

If you use an app infrequently enough that it updates between each use, you'll see an alert every time you open the app! 5 seconds isn't that much, but many 5-second inconveniences add up. Plus, if you have to read a bunch of text to understand the features of your app, most people are going to miss the features anyway.

I dont think that it was a bunch of text - each feature was one short bullet point. How would you communicate new features more efficiently?

If you use an app infrequently enough that it updates between each use, then it isn't going to be adding up to much.

It may well be the major thing you remember about the app, though.

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