They can't afford to quit their job over popovers when most of the ad money in their industry goes to Facebook and Google rather than content creators bc of the tech companies' reach and the massive amounts of data they have about everybody?

I'm already happy not half the page is ads on this one, but yes you get ripped right out of reading and it instantly comes off as a cheap site.

Not an answer to why it happens, but for any longform text like this, I find that reader mode almost always provides a better reading experience.

Popover=need to scale. Can websites rlly ‘be cultural hubs’ when their ultimate goal is 2 scale at all costs?Do we rlly ‘trust’ websites that primarily exist 2 scale? Do we like businesses that only rlly want to scale and don’t actually care abt their customers?

Why do we ‘celebrate’ scalable ideas? Do ideas that are ‘scalable’ represent the optimal solutions 4 human existence? Or are they the businesses that have the most successful scalable ideas eventually oppress us by marginalizing necessary human actions into metrics & monetizable opportunities?

I highly doubt the author gets any say in the matter.

I only got the one popover (which browser are you using?) and there are plenty of sites with worse dark patterns.

It’s not the writers, it’s the private equity. See: the recent demise of deadspin.

If you are using Firefox, press F9 on the article.

What popover? Are you not using uBlock Origin/uMatrix for some reason?