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Comment by frankfrank13 | Hacker News Reader

Isn't that just the Substack default? so much better than Medium's or others, at least it closes. Besides, Substack is one of the more writer-friendly platforms re: take-home-pay and no ads, so maybe reconsider?

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At risk of being condescending, 50% of the platform's job is also being reader-friendly. If it can't achieve that, then it's not very well-designed. Some people have said it has a nicer nag than Medium, though surely we can do much better and have no nagging when you're in the middle of reading an in-depth technical article?

The other 50% is actually getting paid, which is what the popup is for.

I'd reckon that user/reader comfort is less than 50% of the site's purpose nowadays. Considering author content is future training data for an AI, meaning it's more likely more monetizable than users (especially a hackernews user). IE: make money from readers, be comfortable for writers, collect data to be future monetizable for AI training.

Writer-friendliness doesn't need to be at odds with reader-friendliness.

Sometimes it seems like they do need to be opposed. For the writer to get paid, the reader needs to be asked to pay, or exploited quietly. I don’t know a way out :(

It's not about what, it's about when though — like the GP, I got a pop-up fairly immediately before I'd engaged in the article so I just closed the tab.

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.

"I would rather not read this article than have to click a button" is an interesting level of entitlement. Hope you never had your fingers stained by the ink when reading the newspaper, you probably would have sued the New York Times.

Dude we had a whole web browser revolution in the early 2000s centered largely around the ability to prevent browser pop-up windows. The fact that people are doing it in the canvas now doesn't suddenly make it not incredibly obnoxious. Pop-up windows were bad design 20 years ago and they're bad design now.

Pop-up windows that take focus over other running applications are a whole another ball game, dude. In-app popups are a pattern that may or may not be annoying, like most things used well or badly. This case seems pretty innocuous to me.

No, they are always annoying. I'm here to read an article, the only thing this pop-up window does is get in my way.

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