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Comment by jszymborski | Hacker News Reader

Please do not ever pull that "Subscribe" pop-up stuff.

Pleeasse don't do it... especially on a website whose target audience is the HackerNews folk, because they will not put up with it.

Those pop-ups are jarring. I think it's great you've got an affiliate link, and I get you want to get as many recurring eyeballs on this as possible, but those pop-ups are everyone's pet peeve... it's the MIDI autoplay, MARQUEE and BLINK tag of websites today.

Edit: Removed capitals for emphasis and adjusted tone to better communicate my intention and comply with HN Guidelines.

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When commenting here, please be civil, even though you don't like popups. Your comment is uncivil, because it rants and yells at another user who is sharing their work. That's especially bad in a Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html.

The comment also breaks the HN guidelines by using uppercase for emphasis. Please don't do that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Apologies, will edit accordingly. Will add that I did it with the intention of being helpful, but understand that it was rant-ey.

Thanks! It's always a pleasant surprise when people react like this, and I have the impression that it has been happening more often lately. Dare we hope?

I agree that it's annoying, but I would like to see some data about conversions before I would say "Do not ever pull that 'Subscribe' pop-up crap." I have heard anecdotes to the effect that it's actually great for the publisher and it would be especially great to hear the results of site targetted to the HN crowd.

Keeping a mailing list is great and super convenient, but there has to be a better way... For example, the inline Subscribe form is tucked all the way down as the last thing on the page.

I'm sure you'd get better conversion with it as the first thing at the top of the list, maybe with a pastel yellow background for the form.

It's sort of the same thing with pop-under ads or those video ads, sure you're likely going to get more clicks on those, but you've made your website look (1) sketchy (2) difficult to use and (3) undesirable to return to.

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