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Comment by culot | Hacker News Reader

Maybe some webmaster education to teach people that popping up a dialog begging for Facebook follows or email addresses is generally considered a hardcore dick move? Seriously, who decides to employ those dialogs? A newsletter signup is best embedded in the page itself, as is any social follow ads. To shove them in my face is always rude, and usually means not only am I not going to sign up for your newsletter, but I'm to close out of your page altogether. You lose, go home [and fix your jerky web design].

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> Maybe some webmaster education to teach people that popping up a dialog begging for Facebook follows or email addresses is generally considered a hardcore dick move?

That doesn't work. Before Bayesian filtering and Gmail, 90% of my mail was spam. The people who did it knew that it was wrong, they just didn't care. $$$ > almost anything.

Imho the difference is that spam emails are a captive audience; keep sending them, eventually you get a hit. And you can send new ones to the same person repeatedly.

But irritating popups will ensure many will never come back - you've forever lost your opportunity to even attempt to sell me something. Seems so illogical

You're assuming that regular people care that much about them. When you have users with an Internet Explorer not that far from this one: https://i.stack.imgur.com/82hWm.jpg, do you really think that several popups phase the regular users? :)

Internet explorer with a million toolbars seems to have been replaced with the much cleaner tablet-as-a-Facebook-machine and a million freemium apps.

"Steve needs your help in farmville!"

True, but mostly I end up those sites because google sends me there.

When browsers and search engines fights back against crappy web content I suspect we'll see change.

I bet it gets enough leads and or sales so that even though it annoys a bunch of users that it is worth it. If it had no conversions they would have stopped doing it by now.

Arguing that etiquette should be observed when you have a lead / sales generation flow doesn't work.

> Arguing that etiquette should be observed when you have a lead / sales generation flow doesn't work.

Depends on which customers you want.

Browsers need a button so the user can categorize a page/site as dickish. In the future, visits to the site will cause the browser to stop with a reminder, similar to the "this page is insecure" dialog, giving the user the option to click through or go back.

"Seriously, who decides to employ those dialogs?"

Usually some out of touch marketing, SEO, advertising, etc. person. Most web developers aren't the decision makers in situations like this.

> a dialog begging for Facebook follows

Or that monstrous dialog Facebook has on its pages asking its visitors to join Facebook. Annoying on desktop, supremely annoying on mobile. Just another reason I usually don't bother clicking on Facebook links.

Do you think those popups are created just to piss you off, or because they are profitable?

Or maybe because someone thinks they're profitable.

It's not like most people had education specifically for this. The truth of the matter is most of us are winging it big time. Hence the wild west improvisation.

I've tried to explain this the my client but they don't care. IF they see conversion from it, they'll keep using it.

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