I would have certainly taken this guy more seriously if I hadn't got a "won't you subscribe to my newsletter" popup in the middle of the article...
I think he would get good results by putting an obvious signup form on his sidebar, underneath his contact details. Make it easy to notice, but don't make it an interruption.
That said: totally agree, I hate modals like this.
This idea that the primary way to get people to come read what you have to say is to push it to them, and that this is such an important goal that it justifies nagging them for permission to be allowed to blast communiqués in their general direction, and that you can excuse yourself for annoying behavior like this by claiming that it's for the benefit of people who want the email but wouldn't be able to find a sign-up field in a sidebar - presumably a small minority of a small minority of total visitors - strikes me as being so very entitled. But then, I suppose that the basic idea of the attention economy is that you're supposed to be clawing at every scrap of Whuffie you can get.
Granted, it's the author's website, and they get to do what they want with it. And we have apparently collectively decided that it's OK for any webpage, even one that contains only static content, to require JavaScript in order to function properly. A corollary to that would be that simply using the web is tacit consent to be pestered, since it's not really possible to have JavaScript enabled while also avoiding modern-day incarnations of the blink tag. So there's that.
But still. . . I'd love to see RSS make a comeback, just to at least take away the "but RSS is dying" excuse.
There is no javascript in the feed. :)
Your reply on the Quora post basically says "if you browse the web like I do, you won't see the popup".
If you reflect on that for a little bit, you'll realize you're doing something to your readers that you, yourself, won't tolerate.
I'd encourage you not to. It detracts from your message.
The ultra mega hyperbolized text and the needless association with open source (what, people not working on open source don't deserve privacy?) don't help either.
Of course he is, that's the whole point of writing.
Writing is a tool for whatever purpose the writer wants to use it for. To some that's advertising, for others it's writing online content and hoping to grow a newsletter list.