Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?

145 pointsciwchris124 comments

I don't remember the timeline. I believe browsing Pinterest anonymously was always limited, therefore I pretty much always avoided this site. At some point LinkedIn changed to require a login to view profiles, well most of the time. Maybe this change occurred around the time Microsoft bought them. I avoid LinkedIn too. At some point both Instagram and Twitter also started aggressively limiting content for anonymous users. Medium and Substack have been increasingly nagging and/or limiting content too. Spotify seems to be trying to increasingly cross sell podcasts and audio books. Just within the last week they've also made multiple attempts to get me to enable push notifications for various communication. And then just this morning I browsed Indeed to keep an eye on what's going on in the local area and found they are limiting search results to one page without logging in. The only one of these I pay for is Spotify, so I guess fair enough, except for Spotify. This certainly isn't a comprehensive list. I feel I'm having to be increasingly defensive. I'm finding I'm spending more and more time blocking, dismissing or having to give up on sites and services.

Is this trend increasing? If so what are some reasons why this is occurring? Is it the changing economy? Because companies dominate the product and so they feel they can get away with it? Because companies grow and lose their first principles? Because of the pressure to always be growing?

I'm interested in hearing the thoughts of others on this topic? Is this behavior increasing? What is contributing to it? Is this something we will need to learn to accept or is this something to contest? Is there a positive aspect to this, such as this behavior will create opportunities for other players?

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User and business priorities are aligned during the growth phase, when user acquisition is the most important thing for the business. Once there is a self-sustaining level of user activity and new signups, revenue per engagement becomes an increasingly important metric. At that point the user's priorities and those of the business are no longer aligned, and the company starts asking more of its users.

A third phase occurs when phase two is successful enough that competitors lose traction. If you can achieve a monopolistic position in your market, then you can stop asking for attention and money, and start demanding it. Pay up or else you don't get to stream music. Sit through more and longer ads with increasingly insipid UX and privacy issues, or else you don't get to stream videos.

My view is that the Internet is in a consolidation phase where a smaller number of companies are getting a larger share of traffic, resulting in monopolistic dynamics.

I felt like this was a really solid explanation of some dynamics at play I've been seeing a lot of. Thanks for putting such succinct thoughts to it.

Absolutely accurate, but I think to your point this is the same relationship between companies and employees.

As your product becomes more monopolistic, demand more from users, and you also become the company really smart people want to work at. Thus furthers your innovation which leads to more monopolistic products.

Interesting take. It feels like this can explain quite a bit about growing vs large company culture as well.

It does feel like every website is turning into a bad 90's infomercial - instead of "buy now and get 2 for $39.95!" its "like and subscribe!" multiple times per video, even more fluff in the video to lengthen them or ad reads by podcasters that don't care what they are advertising because just 1% is all they need to click/follow the link.

Everything on the internet is a metric (likes, subscribers, mins viewed, followers, etc.) and pushing those metrics higher gets more money from advertisers. I'm finding less and less quality content across the board. That and the pushy-ness could result in less of those metrics they all want to increase.

Reminds me of people who mark every one of their emails on Microsoft Outlook with the "Urgent" flag. Or people who immediately want to speak to the manager.

There's something psychotic about it all.

Underlying a lot of psychotic behavior is a lack of empathy often caused by varying forms of a narcissitic personality disorder. Itself the root of many other disorders.

The culprit has got to be all of the tech and more specifically, social media. It causes more damage than most realize. It's basically a narcissism breeding machine and the advent of social media lines up perfectly with so many serious problems in society.

IMO its because the demand for ever growing growth (not only must we grow on last year (growth up 5%), but our growth must be faster (growth trajectory up 5%)) is running headlong into a shrinking economy. Anonymous users have always represented the best potential growth since they already use the service, so convincing them to convert should be easier than convincing someone who has never heard of the product.

Ergo, companies are getting ever more pushy, trying to convert the "78% of viewers who are not subscribed" (as YouTubers put it), so that they can continue hitting their exponential metrics and stave off the effect of their existing user base spending less.

But every business is always looking to maximize, but why is there a sort of contraction, and why now?

There used to be a period of “Patrick McKenzie way of doing business” during 2005-2020 (https://www.kalzumeus.com/):

- Be nice with customers,

- Reimburse when they haven’t used the software,

- Provide value, even with 3 fields on a webform,

- And you’ll get positive feedback loop into higher revenue, even with a crappy layout,

It was the time of Basecamp and Joel on Software. It was the time of Atlassian. It was the time of entrepreneurs being cool kids.

What happened is the Schumpeter cycle (40-70 years, as opposed to Kondratiev cycles, 5-7 years due to stock movements). Internet entered a more stable phase, instead of the startup phase. The cake is now limited, everyone has reached peak time spent on phones, the eyeballs you get are eyeballs someone else doesn’t. The goal is to stay big. Now, to be heard, you need a designer, not only for your services, not even for your software, but even to publish your CVE (Heartbleed). If it’s not sexy it’s not worthy.

Unless, of course, unless all of these Twitters and AirBnbs were fluff that can go away without any part of the economy depending on it, in which case we’ll just see another short cycle until we invent the final technologies/services which will stay.

Well the fact that these companies were given enough capital not to worry about turning a profit indefinitely did contribute to it

Revenue alone just isn't enough. You have to turn a profit

I think this is it. None of this stuff mattered when all of these companies were cool with losing unlimited money.

Now they are facing existential risk and they don't really have a choice, if pissing users off is the way they can punt on revenue then they are going to do it.

Ultimately I think it signals that a lot of these companies (not ones that have been bought by FAANG) are functionally insolvent and are in a slow death spiral.

I bet many of them will start looking to illegally broker user data as that reality gets closer.

Worked at the popular [video game news website name redacted]. The Sales Dept head was a genius in their abilities: take last quarter's numbers, and ADD 10%! No forecasting or guidance, just more. That's it.

Second derivative capitalism will be the end of us all.

NPV of future monopolies is going to take a permanent hit by 2030, hopefully will be regulated.

I agree that this seems to have increased.

Pushiness is advantageous to companies unless it disgusts so many people into leaving that it makes up for the added conversions (in the broadest sense: a conversion can be a sign-up, sign-in, consent for targeted ads, etc.)

People seem to be too willing to put up with them. Long term brand damage is likely not much of a concern nowadays, given that it has been normalized.

Everyone is now trying to become a unicorn and exit by selling the company for $$$$, and public-facing tech companies are mostly valued based on the number of users.

When people start publicly complaining about it, ending contracts and providing the popups as a reason etc., this will change. Until then, it will just become worse.

Edit: Rule-by-metric likely also contributes. "Signups go up" is easy to measure, "users hate it" and "the popup has put the user off so they will never trust us or sign up, ever" isn't.

Also, there's an increasing push in internet marketing circles to get people to sign up for things, even free things. The reason is that it bypasses a lot of antispying tech and law.

At the same time, not having a mailing list is suicidal when big tech is ramping up erroneous removal of accounts, pushing users elsewhere (Twitter potentially. And Facebook has reputation of being for old people now), or killing organic reach (Facebook since a few years back: pay up).

I mean it’s the Walmart model; be cheap early, get less cheap over time.

My 5,000 foot philosophical take is because they were never making money in a day to day business way and relying on low interest rates to inflate values through money shuffling schemes to game attention.

Over time models made it apparent they would never make long term business sense as software improved and automation took over, so it’s a medium term pump and dump jobs program fueled by low interest rates to attract information workers into providing them code shapes to train AI that writes code and let big tech own all the copyrights.

So we’ll have MPAA/RIAA owning all art, and FAANG or whatever owning all technology. A modern patronage system kind of sort of.

Not saying it’s good or bad. Just an attempt at a meta viewpoint of society.

Is that the "Walmart model"? Out of curiosity, I just checked their financial statements. For FY 2022, they had a gross profit margin of 25.1%. In comparison, for FY 1986 (the oldest year I have easy access to), they had a gross profit margin of 25.9%. That hardly seems to fit the pattern.

WalMart wasn’t doing it globally, they were doing it regionally or even city by city.

So, a store would open in a new city with very cheap prices. That individual store might be running at break even, or even at a loss. Once the various other local competitors have been driven out of business, they start to raise the prices, and become more profitable.

When competitors start coming back to town, they lower their prices and repeat.

Different individual stores would be in different stages of this at any time, so you wouldn’t really see the strategy by comparing various profit margins from different years, unless they were changing the rate at which they were in the expand phase.

It used to cost X to run corp A, now it costs Y, where Y is Z times higher than X.

Millions to billions in this case.

Don’t forget to add in the cost of social programs their employees rely on given the abysmal pay in order to keep your numbers down.

Things I've noticed:

1. Obtrusive messaging / sign up modals / exit intent modals work. I hate them. But they convert.

2. There is a large group of people who don't blink at the 'account required' messages. They just sign up.

3. If you don't have an account, you're not a useful customer. There is no reason for the company to cater to you.

What honestly bothers me more is how "Yes/No" dialogs are increasingly being replaced by "Yes/Later", even in paid products/services. Seems like companies are done with even pretending to take "No" for an answer when they want to push something on you.

Even more evil, I've started to see things (mostly apps) use "Miss Out" instead of No, explicitly and literally feeding FOMO.

Things like that are a clear and obvious indicator that whoever is producing it are scumbags and shouldn't be trusted even a little. I never feel FOMO from them.

Even traditionally legitimate sites are doing it more often now, unfortunately. Still, I view it as neediness or manipulation though and it makes me think less of the site.

It's interesting to see tech behave in ways that would get people banned from pubs. I'd worry if I dated someone with a product manager's understanding of consent.

Even game mods now come with intrusive "subscribe to my patron" popups there's no rock unturned for monetization

"npm i" even had someone begging for a job in standard out.

The obtrusive modals are a brutal trend in modern web design, especially the whole-page cookies thing. Now I sometimes see 2-3 modals stacked ... does anyone actually stay on such a site?

I get that a newsletter modal might be worth it, but there's just no way they're not losing users by making them close 3 bullshit windows (cookies, privacy, black friday!, newsletter) before they get to useful content. A user needs to see the site before they choose to subscribe/spend money on it!

I'm happy to tell a company that doesn't want my eyeballs to pound sand. I'm not buying 200 subscriptions to yet another BS service.

Spotify in particular can go straight to hell (and the Amazon app+video stuff). If I'm paying money, don't hit me with billboards and ads.

My website has none. I thought it was normal because I've had the "annoyances" uBlock filters turned on for so long.

Then I bought a device that doesn't support uBlock and got a taste of the modern web. Not pissing off your visitors has to be a competitive advantage by now.

The last point always confuses me. Twitter can show ads to me without me having an account. Instead, they block me from reading on Twitter after a few tweets, thus loosing my eyeballs. Maybe that's compensated by signups, but it certainly didn't work for me.

Good news, one of Elon’s top priorities is to remove this nagging stuff and make Twitter fully usable via browser again.

Believe it when you see it, not when you hear it.

I was just able to doom scroll Elon's feed back into October, so maybe it's only enabled on some accounts?

Try it and see, I suppose. My experience of it is that you can read an individual conversation but if you just look at some random person's timeline it will only show you a few tweets before asking you to log in.

That specific behavior seems to have gone away when musk culled a whole bunch of microservices a couple weeks back. I know well what you're talking about and it annoyed the hell out of me, but now its gone! For now, on desktop browsers, anyway.

That's what I did (I think, I don't know how to use twitter) - went to https://twitter.com/elonmusk and kept spinning my mouse wheel down.

Maybe it's only on desktop or because I have never logged in?

Could be desktop. Mobile browsing still seems to trigger demands for the app to be installed followed by login requests, though I just picked a few tweets at random rather than checking systematically.

That seems to not be true. I just made the mistake of not noticing a Hacker News post was to Twitter a few minutes ago, clicked on it, and couldn't even read the Tweet because it was covered by a modal telling me to turn on notifications, which I'd never seen before. What can Twitter even notify me of if I don't have an account? Everything that is ever Tweeted globally? That would probably be billions of notifications a day.

Twitter makes more money showing TARGETED ads, ads that dont have a demo targeting are not nearly as valuable

Old school webmasters (perhaps this is redundant phrasing) know that's okay. Back in the day, you'd say "I'll put your animated gif on my site for $500 per month" and if you had a networking forum Cisco or whoever would happily pay that secure in the knowledge that your viewers were in the market for their product.

Lesson: target the content, not the viewer. You know the general demographics of who is engaging positively with the tweet, and you show ads relevant to that group. A small fraction of the viewers need to be logged in for that to work.

Print magazines worked on the same principle; the ones that are left still do. I subscribe to one magazine. In it, all of the editorial content is up front and the back third is nothing but ads. I still read them -- sometimes I start there! -- because I genuinely want to know what's going on and what products are available in the niche this magazine covers.

This seems like so obvious an observation that I don’t get why advertisers haven’t made it. If I’m in work-mode, and you show me an ad related to a hobby of mine, I have a 0% chance of clicking it. If you show me an ad related to my work, it is probably more like .01%. Which is still an infinite-times improvement.

It's because there's an arms race to maximally exploit the massive amount of data they're collecting about individuals. The more specificity you can claim, the more the ad-buyers will pay. I'm not convinced it's doing any good, but I think a draw-down would be a hard sell for all parties involved in that market.

Re-targeting ads seem like a joke. Many times I've already bought their product or competitor's and am no longer interested. Hopefully they are paying for click throughs and not impressions.

Conversely, making accounts with a VPN has become essentially impossible, which is extremely limiting even if the rationale makes sense

We now also have sign-in modal appearing after clicking on a button labelled "Generate 4 images". There are clear contextual clues that images will appear on the side after clicking on the button.

Where do designers learn to be so pushy when they are not acceptable in real life? Is there a reference guide for designers that teach these patterns?

Maybe look at Calm Technology? NN group?

Re: 1.

Any data on the quality of the converions?

Like, if you convert more, but they're marginal customers who won't spend much, or quickly bail, and it negatively impacts conversion of high end "good" customers, it could easily be a net loss (not even counting things like reputational damage).

> Obtrusive messaging / sign up modals / exit intent modals work. I hate them.

In case anyone hasn't seen it, here's a godsend to get rid of that crap: https://github.com/t-mart/kill-sticky Works on mobile, too.

It's a downward spiral. Short-term-focused metrics and promotion cycles have no way to see beyond local optimization. With each cycle of changes, the product is increasingly user hostile and the corporate culture gets further away from knowing how to build product features that are usable and enjoyable. It gets harder and harder to get the numbers to go up legitimately, so PMs and complicit engineers resort to even more user-hostile behavior.

It's a cancer that has infected the industry under the guise of being data driven. We've thrown out basic reasoning in favor of juicing vanity numbers. And then the people responsible for driving the product into a ditch fail upward to another company, get a bigger title and salary, and start grabbing at the wheel of a new car to repeat the cycle.

On Instagram, when you create an account, you now need to submit a selfie picture while holding a code given to you while registering. For suspicious account, it can even be a video selfie. I know bots are an issue but they should ask for this only when posting/commenting, not for browsing. No way I'll send a picture or video to facebook linked to my email/phone number.

I was thinking of signing up to Instagram to create a golf and fitness diary and connect with a few people I really care about. There goes that - fuck that noise!

Sounds like an interesting stable diffusion prompt.

Text is still a big challenge, I don't think I've seen any that have properly rendered the text you want. I wonder if handwritten text would be easier or harder since there's more variation.

I thought this was typically done on purpose to prevent exactly the types of situations described, I didn't think it was actually a technical limitation of the model.

https://opguides.info/posts/aiartpanic/ was on the front page a few days ago, and you can see from the results that the text is pretty mangled. If it were intentional, I’d expect it to be clean text, even if it didn’t make sense. It seems to genuinely have trouble with characters and combines glyphs a lot of the time.

Most of the web and apps feel hostile these days

On Playstation starting the YouTube app now gets you a full screen unskippable ad before even reaching the app

Prime video show you ads even if you're a paying customer

Every now and then I listen to a podcast to fall asleep, 50% chance I'll be jump scared by a 0.1kbps ad in German that has the volume 4x louder than the podcast itself

Google removing video previews form YouTube links in search results so it's harder to visually ignore video tutorials when you look for a written one

The golden age of internet died a while ago but until recently it was still somewhat useable, it's degrading rapidly these days

I've purchased more DVDs in the past year than the previous ten years combined.

Similarly, we borrow a lot of DVDs and Blu-Rays from the local library nowadays.

I thought I was the only one!

The reason is simple: These companies are ad-supported. When you create an account and log in, the ads they show can be better tailored to your interests. This is especially true for companies like Pinterest, where users catalog their interests on the site.

I think this is surprising to people for two reasons:

1 - We've been told the "companies sell your data" narrative for so long that many people don't realize that Facebook and similar mega companies don't actually profit from selling your data. They target ads, and they keep their customer data close because it's their competitive advantage. Note that there are a lot of companies that do sell your data, but they're not the ones people generally think about (Facebook, etc.). It's a fundamental misunderstanding of these business models.

2 - The whole economy was unusually hot for many years, largely due to low interest rates. Funding was available everywhere in huge quantities, which drove tech companies into pure growth mode even if serving their websites came at a loss. That story doesn't work forever, though, and now we're seeing those companies turn the knobs to look for profits.

It's actually kind of amazing that we've been able to use gigantic Big Tech services, developed and operated by engineers making $$$ total compensation, for so long without actually paying for much at all. I wonder if we'll look back at this era as an unusually 'free' period of the internet, much like how we look back at the early days of VC-subsidized Uber as being very cheap relative to what it actually costs to buy these services today.

Facebook did more than just hoard user data; They performed research to actively change user behaviour.

It is said that if you don't pay, you aren't the customer, but the product. Perhaps YOU never were the product either, but your mind and actions are?

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/facebook-ma...

But the thing is, for the most part the 'big tech' companies haven't created a service/product that users are interested in paying for.

Tangentially, just last week I received an email from a product company that I'd purchased goods from before. It had probably been over a year since my last marketing email from them. I click on the link in the email to check their products, but don't buy anything primarily because I can't easily figure out the advantage of one particular product over the other. For the remainder of the week and this past weekend I have received one to two emails a day with additional offers and new products. Will I visit their website again? Probably not.

> many people don't realize that Facebook and similar mega companies don't actually profit from selling your data.

I think most people here know this. The difference doesn't actually matter as much as the companies think, though.

> mega companies don't actually profit from selling your data

Does anyone on HN actually believe big tech companies are selling data as opposed to using it to target ads? I thought we were over that long ago.

What do you mean by 'actually profit' and 'your data' ?

For sure companies are still selling data from their platforms. Does that include what the company would consider to be a user's data? I doubt they are selling private contact data associated with their users but any user activity on their platform is likely being sold off in bulk. Whether they 'actually profit' from those deals is an accounting game.

Agree. There's a bunch of websites I don't visit anymore: Pinterest (you need an account just to browse pictures? c'mon!), Reddit (some subreddits are only available via the app... I'll never install the Reddit app), Instagram, Medium, Twitter, lots of newspapers.

I thought I was going to miss them, but I haven't.

You can use `scribe.rip` instead of `medium.com`. The former is just an anonymous frontend for the latter. All the info you need at https://scribe.rip/

I miss Medium. I do find myself clicking on search results that lead to Medium posts, then immediately clicking 'back'.

It makes me feel a little sad every time I don't look at something there. There are a lot of Medium posts written by people that clearly thought (or think) that they're writing a blog that's available to all, when they're not.

> some subreddits are only available via the app

just fyi: old.reddit.com accesses ALL subreddits

Using a 3rd party client also fixes all the UI issues with new reddit as well.

I use Apollo on iPhone, but I've heard Sync for Reddit is good on Android.

i.reddit.com works and is mobile-friendly

Same here, I’ve simply written them off.

The sad thing is the next generation never sees what’s been taken from them, and our absence merely solidifies the new norm.

Big companies hire "digital marketers" who try to push metrics up to justify their jobs and salaries and demonstrate some form of growth.

Why do you see intrusive cookie banners on every website? So they can force people to hit accept and get their GA metrics higher. Why do you see login required on many pages? So they can get their login / registration numbers higher. Companies might lose some anonymous viewer traffic when requiring a login, but the money is largely made off of targeted advertisements for logged in users so they want to push you in that direction and harvest that data.

You might be deterred into not using a service by that popup, but the data shows that enough people will just go ahead and sign in or register and so it's worth it to the company to add it. One of the first companies I work for had me add a big modal that asked you to sign up for their newsletter when you visited their homepage after you scrolled down for a second. I thought it was intrusive, but it absolutely got people to sign up so I couldn't really argue with it.

I definitely get the sense that it's getting worse. It's very hard to visit a site without getting a popup to subscribe, purchase, or donate. Apps are constantly pushing you to subscribe or create an account.

I wonder what the end game is for all of this. Is this just the way things are going to be from now on? Is the pushiness going to die down a little bit?

It certainly makes me want to visit sites less. If there's any friction now on a site, such as a pop up requiring sign in, I simply don't have the patience to try it out and more often than not just close the tab. It makes my experience of reading dead-tree books and magazines such a joy nowadays. I know I can flip the page without anything popping up.

Substack in particular seems to have pulled a bait-and-switch in terms of strategy. Their original line was "Each newsletter is a separate publisher and separate business and we're just a platform. You can take your list and leave at any time." But in the last months they've been rolling out feature after feature designed to bind publishers and readers tightly to Substack as a brand: A reader app, app-only chat, checkmark-badges for high-sellers, semi-mysterious (algorithmic?) promotion features for driving subscriptions, etc.

At this point it seems like actual email newsletters are kind of a nuisance to them, and they're trying to be more Medium than Medium.

Consequence of everyone thinking the purpose of anything at all is to make money (which is almost never the point of anything). Everything is always an advertisement, everyone is always selling. There’s no positive end game to it, it’s just drain circling. The EU and such will horribly mangle “solutions” because they don’t understand anything, and “governments” move too slowly even when they do understand things.

Lest you think that’s cynical, note that all the companies focused on what is likely to be our “next generation computing experience” are all advertising giants.

I work for a popular web app. We restricted anonymous access just a few weeks ago. The argument was that “no other major platform offers so much without login”.

My take on is that it’s a trend to follow the big guys, just like other faang-led movements like microservices etc

Interestingly, TikTok feels like the exact opposite of this; I used it without an account for a while and enjoyed the experience so much that I created an account and started making videos myself. It's quite rare that I have an experience with this kind of app /service these days where I'm invited to see the best of what it has to offer without being pestered in the same way that I am if I ever try to use Twitter, Instagram or Facebook while logged out.

- Scraping is a major issue.

- Browser privacy / VPNs lead to an arms race where account. age/reputation become critical signal.

- Apple/Google play store apps provide device integrity check which improves confidence in account reputation / Ad targeting.

- Everyone already has a Google/Apple account and are unlikely to convert if they wont just signup via SSO which takes couple of clicks.

> LinkedIn

yeah, I basically just stopped using the site. I used it for a while when job hunting, but now I maybe login once a week or something. otherwise, since the site blocks anonymous use, I simply don't use it.

> Instagram

I have an account, but I don't post or comment, so I am not going to log in just to view shit. So I basically don't use the site anymore. If someone links to a post I will check it out, but usually you get login prompt after viewing like 5 posts, so at that point I am just done with Instagram for the day.

> Twitter

Twitter gives you like 10 comments before login prompt, so I just leave the site for the day after that.

> Medium

Medium is horrible, so nothing lost.

For twitter, I highly recommend nitter.net (or other nitter instances) for anonymous reading. You can drop-in-replace the `twitter.com` with `nitter.net` for any twitter URL, and it will just work.

At least... this will work until Elon kills the API, which I fully expect to happen eventually...

Anecdotally, seems like there has been an increase to me. I just no longer visit those sites, if they don't want me for free then so be it. There is a lot more internet to be had out there.

I figure there are two main reasons. First are aggressive bots and scrappers, here the login walls are only a side effect. Everyone wants to be "smart" and takes but no one gives. Second are marketing and managers demanding more tracking and profiling. This is the New Internet for now, I don't see any seeds of paradigm change at this stage. Users will adapt unfortunately, at most they'll be pissed off by losing track of how many accounts they are signed in to.

Twitter recently removed the login prompt[1], so at least one website is now slightly less pushy.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33724569

Does that work consistently for anyone else? I don't have a Twitter account but there are a couple of Twitter posters I occasionally check on - and I'm still seeing the "See more Tweets from ..." modal at times (I just verified it now).

I tried in Chrome Incognito mode and I have yet to encounter a popup, but I only sampled a few persons and only scrolled for a few minutes, so I am not sure if they only reduced the threshold or if it's not yet rolled out everywhere.

I wouldn't be surprised if it somehow sees in the cookie that you've logged in before and prompts to login.

I've not seen one for awhile now, but I have no logged in ever.

I am still getting the login window after scrolling a few tweets. Same in incognito, doesn't matter if I accept all cookies or not.

(to post again) Imagine if the people designing the Discord, Windows 10+, Telegram UI, and Amazon Prime cancellation UI to manipulate you into paying for services, were in charge of designing airliner cockpits and industrial plants. User interfaces can and should do better in preventing unintentional user error, and people should refuse to implement, use, or accept dark patterns.

In the thought experiment, do you mean me to transplant the designer’s adversarial intent or only their expertise?

>Is it the changing economy?

Reddit, Pinterest et all definitely were super pushy before the economy changed to the worse.

I'm starting to use the internet less and less for this type of thing. I can't abide using youtube, they bleep out curse words because of advertisers and other things like that.

How did the "wild west" of the internet become New England Puritan culture of 1620? Makes me sick.

This is cyclical - sites lock down access and push popups/nonsense etc, new sites are created "designed to make reading content easier", those sites gradually decay until they are locking down access, a new wave begins.

Substack and Medium are clear poster children for this.

The free money train is over, so companies are trying to actually make a profit. Part of that is that they can't provide a free, non-monetized service for a decade+ before making people pay for it.

The BBC has started doing it which I abhor. I saw it with Twitter too but don't scroll too far anymore. I generally don't sign up and stop going to those stupid websites instead.

It's the cycle of life in the pursuit of ever increasing profit. As companies age and need to squeeze more blood from a stone, they resort to increasingly drastic measures.

(Anonymous)Visitors is not a very useful or valuable metric. Blindly pumping content into the ether isn't going to convert to value, or cashflow.

I think we are seeing the advancing erosion of (generic)ad-supported free content and services. Which is not necessarily a Bad Thing.

If you can't be bothered to identify yourself with an account, then these services do not get much value from you, and many times see you as loss/overhead, so limiting access to their content is logical on their end.

Failure of imagination, or even just a memory fault. If I have a website that is focused on content relating to heirloom tomatoes during the week and artisanal firewood on weekends then I should be able to sell advertising space on my site during the week to grocers and on the weekends to woodstove manufacturers. It's not that complicated.

your understanding of ads industry is decades out of date. this is not how digital ad is bought or sold today for small content creators

This is merely my assumption, but I would guess that it's simply much easier to monetize users who have clearly identified who they are. (ie, they have provided an account name with email, name, phone number, etc.) If that's the case, then users without accounts are "free riders" who are getting the benefit of the service without "paying" since they're not as easy to track and sell their data.

The wisdom—which likely was already around before but became the common sort that everybody making and funding software projects knew by some time around 2010-2015—is that there's no real money in the open Web. To make serious cash you have to own a platform. That means exclusion and lock-in. You only really participate in the open Web for initial growth, if even then.

Isn't that just a result of public companies having to chase forever growth to keep their valuation?

A company starts with a product, sees growth and investors pour in with the expectation of accelerated growth (and hence profits), at some point their product can't really attract many more customers, it grows until the market it is in starts to saturate and growth slows down. They need to chase other verticals to validate to their shareholders they are still aa valuable and so it begins the slow downfall of the product, not necessarily of profits.

I really don't see another way given the incentives of the current crop of capitalism, a public company that stops chasing growth will see their valuation drop and with that the board might decide it's time for a new CEO. If the board sticks to their guns and stop chasing growth, a mutiny of shareholders will ensue to replace the board.

The incentives are wrong if what you expect is the best product ever, they're aligned to chase growth as the only metric and everything goes to Goodhart's Law from there.

I noticed this too. After a decade break or so, I've started getting back into music mixing as a hobby. I noticed a lot of sites to I used to frequent in order download free sound samples now require an account in order to download. There are a few no-signup needed sites but compared nothing compared to what it was in the late 2000s.

I think the global recession triggered enough companies to worsen their products (cost more, get less, more ads, etc) in order to increase / maintain profits that a tipping point was reached and other companies simply followed suit. A new norm is building; one that hopefully goes away when the money tide goes back in.

Unprofitable companies suddenly realizing at the last possible moment that they need to be profitable or they’re done.

I like it, I find it limits myself tremendously if I browse said sites not logged in or a browser that disables cookies. That login wall/prompt is easy to bypass but when I see it, I capture myself and quit the tab.

Medium.com

Quora.com

Luckily both of those websites have almost no value to me.

And what happened to BugMeNot [0] ?? Saved a lot of time.

And Mailinator [1] email addresses are now blocked from so many websites.

These types of demands have C-suite loud talkers written all over them.

[0] https://bugmenot.com/

[1] https://www.mailinator.com/

Yes, it's happening across the board. I shut down a lot of it with ad blocker rules, and in the last year I had to keep adding rules for new growth hacks.

Modern tech is a non-stop sales pitch, and it keeps getting worse.

I think that the modern business model is to grow at any cost, take over a market, and extract a toll. We're experiencing the toll being raised.

If so what are some reasons why this is occurring?

They want your info so they can track you more easily. This is mostly about selling ads.

Because companies dominate the product and so they feel they can get away with it? Because companies grow and lose their first principles? Because of the pressure to always be growing?

It's like passive income or free money.

The internet is slowly being monopolized or corporatized.

Why? Capitalism. Money to be made capturing a particular market. Quarterly goals at each company to increase X by Y%, so how do we do that...

These companies were funded with the idea of future profits. The high interest rate environment has made the demand for those future profits move forward in time. They need the profits now and will adjust strategy to get that.

Meta just got a 265 million euro fine because their stuff was too open and people/companies scraped the data of 533 million users.

Best way to stop people from scraping (and getting fines) is to require an account.

It seems reasonable to assume that this is a byproduct of laws/regulations requiring more specific consent for tracking users. We're not in the wild west any longer.

Yes. I called it as soon as these companies started reporting bad quarters. These services are all about to get more annoying.

I work for Indeed, and was surprised to hear your experience. So I brought up the site in a non-logged-in browser, did a search and verified that I can still see multiple pages of results.

There may be an a/b test or something, but as far as I know we're not limiting results to push logins. But I wouldn't know, I'm not on that team.

This is what people mean when they about "Late Stage Capitalism":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_capitalism

Yes, this trend is increasing. And it's essentially a long-term consequence of the laissez-faire capitalist model of attempting to govern almost entirely via the profit motive. It strongly incentivises businesses to prioritise profits at all costs (and those who don't will be outcompeted by those who do). And while most businesses will prioritise value-generating activities in their attempt to generate profit, eventually that isn't enough and so they turn to aggressive user/consumer hostile approaches.

Can we do something about this? Yes, we can regulate and heavily penalise companies who do this. We can also bias the economy towards smaller companies (through progressive taxation on businesses) who are much less likely to engage in such activities as they tend to be more connected to their customer bases and subject to much stronger competitive pressures.

Race to the bottom. These yachts ain’t gonna pay for themselves.

That's why one should use nitter, bibliogram, proxitok etc.

Nitter still works but Bibliogram is gone. For medium.com posts, there is scribe.rip.

Bibliogram still works if you are using a small instance.

It's cus They sell your informatioooOOOOOOoon

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