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Comment by rajesh301 | Hacker News Reader

Point noted. None of the items you mentioned ( newsletter sign up, eBooks ) are required to access the content on the blog. In fact, none of the eBooks require you to enter an email address.

I am sad to see that you focused on these things rather than 1500 other articles on the blog.

C'est la vie :)

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Trying to stay positive, I think you should use the newsletter popup on something like the 3rd or 4th visit. By that time, users have read some of your material and could form an opinion about subscribing to a newsletter.

From my personal perspective, if you punch me in the nose with a sign-up form the first time I visit, not only am I going to dismiss it without any consideration at all, I am going to be suspicious of the subsequent material you present. Changing the timing of this popup could help you a bunch, I think.

Exactly my thoughts. This post will generate a decent amount of visitors from HN. The vast majority of these visitors including myself will be first-timers to your site and unable to tell whether they are interested in subscribing to your newsletter in the first place.

If I have not seen your site, I will not subscribe to your newsletter. If I have read through n items on your website, chances are good I might be interested in your newsletter offer, though.

Point noted and thank you.

Thanks for the great feedback here. Noted it and will act on it. Unfortunately I can't do that until Monday as the person who can fix it won't be available until then :(

I did find many articles with original content on your site. But the density is less, you are perhaps focusing on the article count? Maybe bringing the count to say 100 but with the same content will save peoples time trying to wade thru the site. And this can only increase traffic to the site.

As per your own theory smart people cannot solve their own problems, so instead of taking the "C'est la vie" stance, try "I see, let me see what I can do about it" attitude.

Thanks for the comments. The "C'est la vie" comment was specifically about another comment which focussed on things totally outside the article - like newsletter sign up etc.

I will definitely think about your comment and discuss it with my mentors. There are people who I take advise when it comes to these aspects ( blogging, writing ).

Thanks for the advice in any case.

The popup/overlay that tells me I'm a new user to this blog was keeping me from reading the content, so I just closed the tab.

The popup was not a gatekeeper and you can easily switch that off without signing up to the newsletter.

Having said that, I have made a note of the feedback on the popup and will take action to fix that.

Thanks.

The popup was not a gatekeeper and you can easily switch that off without signing up to the newsletter.

It may not have been a physical gatekeeper, but things that overlay the main content while I'm reading them (even if it was meant to show quickly, before I started reading and was delayed because of download or javascript execution times) communicates that the author/maintainer of the website considers their content to be less important than whatever the overlay's content is. I don't have time for this, the internet is quite vast. There are a bunch of other hacker news entries to review.

The only advantage you have now is that I don't even remember the name of the site that I so quickly closed due to annoyance, and my browser is now flagged as having visited it previously, so if I happen across it again, I presumably won't get a popup/overlay telling me I'm a new visitor.

I'm not sure why a new visitor needs to be told that they are a new visitor.

Your argument is so right that it would be foolish to argue against it. You make a very good point and I will discuss this with my team to get this fixed. THANKS.

The popup saying "you're new" is in practice equivalent to saying "go away".

Thanks for all the feedback about the popup. Will get that fixed right away. I am not tech-savvy enough to fix it myself so it has to be on Monday :(

Cheers.

Come on guys, give me a break. It was a welcome note which said, what can be found on the website.

I agree if you would have said, it is not required for the people who are visiting it for the first time as you don't know the quality of content provided. But definitely it dint say or meant "go away".

Of course it didn't. But it has the same effect.

The content of the article was ok. One opinion in an ocean full of them. The pop-up even before I've even read a single line is just so glaringly ill-timed that it kinda ruins the whole experience before the actual experience. IMHO.

Thanks for the note. Will get the popup fixed soon.

My biggest problem is that I have a small screen and the tweet button blocks the left side of the content the whole way down. Really annoying.

What browser are you using? I checked it with Safari, Firefox and Chrome on a Mac and the tweetboard plugin was working fine. Please let me know.

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