huh? it's just substack... the whole point is this half blog/half newsletter thing. It does have a close button, called "Let me read it first"
Why do websites have these "cute" labels these days? We have to beg the site to let us read what's written on it now?
Are they trying to plant ideas and emotions in our minds or something? "Let me read it first" implies I'm gonna decide later. I've already decided not to subscribe, reading the article won't change a thing. Where's the "don't bother me ever again" button?
Most people will bounce from pages. This encourages more people to stay and read.
If this cute label wasn't there most of us wouldn't want to read it, of those who do visit it we would scan the page, maybe scroll once, then bounce.
This annoyance is twofold. It makes the user invest something (the time, brain power needed to find the correct link) and the user will want to at least get something back from that investment. Secondly the "let me read it first" is a kind of suggestive NLPish language. It says to the user "I will read it before deciding", the "first" bit is important. We promise to hold off of some activity (deciding if its worth it) by reading more than we would normally. it's a trap.
The words "let me read it first" could be written as "I won't subscribe" or "Just let me read it" but these other two won't get as many views and time on the page.
It's not at all cute, it's manipulative and it actually appear to work.
I sincerely doubt that is the intention. A simpler explanation would be that they want just you to subscribe, so they nag you.
However, no user is going to subscribe (and go through the time costly action of giving their email to get a newsletter) to a blog where they haven't read it before, it's never going to happen. About 99% of users to that page will be first time visitors to the page.
edits: They could probably re-word the annoyance to state this and it would have the same effect.
Something like:
"we want to give a pause right here to ask you to read the page, as asking for this helps more people stay and read but first please think about whether you want to subscribe to our newsletter sometime in the future. By thinking about this, we've found that this helps more people to read this wonderful article. Thanks for your time!"
It sure as hell didn't encourage me. I closed the tab the second I saw it. If anything it encouraged me to come here talk about the manipulative nag screen because it's probably a more interesting topic than whatever the article is talking about. If they're putting a stupid screen dimming modal in front of the words, surely whatever they wrote can't be that important anyway.