[flagged]
I open a HN discussion about an article, and the first comment talks about popups, colours, fonts, cookies, ... and it triggers a long discussion. Same story again and again ...
... now, that's annoying.
> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
> Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
If we're consistent enough about this, eventually the community will get the message.
> Click on its timestamp to go to its page, then click the 'flag' link at the top.
The extra click is probably why it isn't used much. I thought I simply didn't have enough karma.
The best time to engage me is after I've enjoyed the article and hopefully interested to hear more from the writer rather than immediately landing on the page.
It's the equivalent to sales staff jumping on customers in shops the minute they walk in the door — "can I help you with anything today?" — before you even have a chance to see what the shop is like.
Kill Sticky: https://github.com/t-mart/kill-sticky
NoScript: https://noscript.net/
Reader mode: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=browser+reader+mode
Or yeah just close it. Life's too short to put up with websites that hate you. I rarely bother visiting Medium or Substack articles because of how hostile they are to readers.
Maybe mildly annoying? You can easily close it and continue reading.
Offer a decently sized, floating, pinned-to-top, non-blocking subscription banner, perfectly fine.
substack.com##[class^="frontend-components-SubscribePrompt-"][1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax
I would definitely imagine a sweet spot between “they are now engaged” and “they haven’t given up or gotten distracted yet” is optimal, especially given people’s attention spans these days :)
It wouldn't surprise me at all if any of the following effects (or hundreds of others) are enough to make a difference.
- The people most likely to pay for in-depth tech articles are also high earners with large demands on their time, and they're likely to be interrupted before they finish the article or bounce before the conclusion because they've internalized the meat of the content already. Asking early is annoying, but if it's even 10% as effective then it might overcome the bounce rate. Optimizing total revenue might happen by targeting those people, even at the expense of ruining the sign-in conversion rate.
- Their A/B testing treats sign-ups and subscriptions as information-independent funnels. They're optimizing sign-ups, hoping to therefore optimize revenue, but the sort of person most likely to sign-up after being afronted with a pop-up is also the sort of person who doesn't care that the pop-up appeared before they finished.
- Sign-ups are dominated by people who are hooked on a single article after then first paragraph or three and who can't stand to put it down. After the psychological investment of making an account, they're more likely to stay.
- Sign-ups are roughly orthogonal to the current article. People sign up when they think doing so will have enough value over time, and they have enough signal from the article to figure that out well before they've extracted all the benefit they'll get from the article. The pop-ups only capture people who were about to convert anyway, and the pop-up just made the conversion easier.