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 ...
> 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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
It's just that the amount of "mildly annoying" annoyances starts to pile up. Yes, it can be closed, but what's the rationale behind offering a modal subscription popup if I haven't even read the article and don't even know who wrote it and what else he wrote?
If you have no knowledge you can still make use of element picker in the context menu. In this case though the problematic element will have a generated class name like `frontend-components-SubscribePrompt-<random>`, so I resorted to the CSS syntax (`<hostname>##<css selector>`). There are a lot, a freaking lot of them [1] but the CSS syntax alone can achieve a lot.
As disrespectful and annoying as it is, don't sites do this because it's a net gain in conversions for them? I think we're a minority here. At scale, do not the masses submit to these popups and end up converting into sales?
You’re partly right. If anyone signs up at all, then it’s a net gain in ‘conversions’. But it’s not a majority at scale, and it doesn’t have to be anywhere close in order to work. Typically only a small minority of visitors convert to being email subscribers, and then only a small minority of those email subscribers convert into paying customers. It’s not uncommon for the paying customers at the bottom of the funnel to be in the single-digit percent of visitors, or less, and the people annoyed by popups who leave to be the overwhelming majority.
To echo another person in the thread, surely the best time to engage someone is at the end, when they've finished reading a (hopefully) substantive article, and want to stay engaged with the writer. Not after a few paragraphs.
Aren’t you assuming most people finish the full article? I find that quite unlikely, especially for longer articles.
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 :)
You'd be shocked at how varied people can be and what effects your actions will have on them. The cumulative effect of those actions can be especially counter-intuitive when there are multiple orders of magnitude at play (like the 100:1 or 1000:1 odds substack must have on anyone interacting positively with the popup).
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.
Well people don’t pay and websites have bills to pay. Sure many of them want to put out good content but they need to pay the bills to keep doing that. It really is a perfect usecase for crypto currency if they could manage the throughput. They should be an option to pay a penny/fraction of a penny to view a page without ads that people could just one button click and move on. Any amount larger than a $1 and it should bring up a verification screen so people don’t get swindled.
