The crazy thing about this whole newsletter and popup thing in general is that, why in the hell would I give out my email address or anything else 1 second after entering a website? How and where exactly is the connection there that makes sense?
I actually sent a strongly worded email to MIT Tech Review yesterday (there was an article on the front page) because they have 3 separate popups on first-entry to the site. Like, wtf? Have you not heard of timed popups (such as those that trigger past a certain element), or popups that don't make you want to immediately close the site?
It's so pathetic and such a 2005 trend, it's hard to believe people still do it in the most annoying way possible.
> Have you not heard of timed popups (such as those that trigger past a certain element), or popups that don't make you want to immediately close the site?
How about NO POP-UPs? Remember when browsers came with built-in pop-up blockers so users didn't have to deal with them at all? Newsletter sign-ups are the same bullshit as 90s style pop-ups, and everyone agreed we should block those then, why are these different?
I don't want timed pop-ups, or pop-ups that are more convenient, I want NO POP-UPs, and as soon as I see one I am closing the tab and writing off the website as not worth my time.
I don't mean to call you out specifically, I don't think you're arguing in favor of pop-ups, but I'm just confused why your initial response was to ask for lesser evil pop-ups, rather than no pop-ups at all.
The popups you're thinking of were much more harmful than these. Those were separate browser windows that opened third-party sites and downloaded and ran insecure code.
This is a popup in the visual sense. Although to be fair lots of sites use third-party scripts to handle these email asks, so maybe it's not that different!
You're certainly not wrong about the malware / insecure code...
But a popup that opens an in-page modal vs a popup that opens a new tab or window are pretty much equivalent from a user experience point of view in my opinion. I don't want either, and neither is less or more evil to me.
At least the pop-up windows had a consistent way to close them and you could use keyboard shortcut. Now I have to think about the right way to close each custom popup.
I'd go even further: I don't want ANY pop-ups of any kind in my computing experience, period. When I set out to do some task, I don't want my attention to be yanked away by anything. Computers should essentially be REPLs. Read my command, execute the command, print the result, and then read my next command. And the equivalent function when using a GUI: I click on something, the computer does that thing, displays the results, and then it waits for me to click on something else. They shouldn't be doing a bunch of stuff on their own in the background. They shouldn't be trying to decide what they want me to be doing. I decide what the computer should be doing!
We have drifted so far away from the light--when the user was 100% in charge of everything the computer was doing.
I am convinced that twitch video games are the largest influence on UX/UI today.
And it stands to reason. What does a nerd do in his misspent teenage/college years but get a gaming rig and get on Steam for some AAA action. He builds reflexes and the ability to track and demolish targets.
Therefore when he graduates college and becomes a slinger of code, he writes a UI that capitalizes on video game reflexes that everyone must share. The ability to react within 50ms to a dramatic change on screen. The steely nerves to track a moving target with our finger and tap "Undo" before the interstitial vanishes forever and our action is set in stone. Navigating endless chains of hover-menus by threading the needle, because if you go 3mm off track, you'll need to start all over again.
GUIs today actively punish the user for attempting to anticipate and go ahead with actions before the computer is good and ready, but when that computer starts throwing up dialogs, you'd better be able to keep up.
I had 6502 and 286 based machines that had UIs that were able to react instantly and stably to every input I could give. How can response time and latency worsen in the intervening 30 years?
> I'd go even further: I don't want ANY pop-ups of any kind in my computing experience, period.
And I don't ever want my focus dragged away from the window that I'm currently on.
Whatever it is that the app developer thinks IS SO ABSOLUTELY FUCKING IMPORTANT THAT THEY NEED TO STEAL MY ATTENTION AWAY RIGHT THIS GODDAMN SECOND, just isn't actually that important to me.
My relationship with a lot of applications is like a clingy sidepiece that I'm about ready to dump if they get any more annoying.
The reality is that in a lot of cases, losing you is acceptable collateral damage. Some percentage of people will close the site if they see a popup (I do some of the time, depending on how much I care about seeing the site's content and how easy it is to close the popup).
> everyone agreed we should block those then
They didn't, though. It's very plausible that everyone in your social circle agreed on that, but there were a lot of people filling those popups out then, and there are a lot of people doing it now.
That is not to say that you're not right - they are annoying, and I'd generally rather be rid of them. The reality is, though, people who immediately close websites upon seeing popups are a small minority, and for many websites the value lost by those people closing the website it meaningfully less than the value gained by some percent of people giving their email.
Arguably these in-page pop-ups can over some value if used judiciously, and unlike traditional pop ups cannot flood the whole screen or otherwise break out of the tab.
They do it because it works. Many people on the internet are not tech savvy and they just assume that in order to view the content they must input their email. It doesn't help that the close button is sometimes barely visible.
I've gotten to the point where if a site displays a popup, I just close the page. If I had the ability to remove that source from all future searches I would.
Things break? I use a similar bookmarklet, but I only ever use it for reading articles which have zero need for any dynamic features. Give me the text, images, and get out of my way.
(function () {
var i, elements = document.querySelectorAll('body *');
for (i = 0; i < elements.length; i++) {
if (getComputedStyle(elements[i]).position === 'fixed') {
elements[i].parentNode.removeChild(elements[i]);
}
}
})();
They do it because they have been sold a story that it works. It's easy to show short-term gains, and hard to show long-term damage... and nobody gets paid today for showing damage months later. Short-term marketing incentives are horrifyingly destructive.
Does it work? In some areas, yeah, I believe it does. But most are cargo-culting a dark pattern that loses them what might otherwise be excellent customers, sold by people trying to justify their marketing position, and companies whose business incentives are perfectly aligned with selling snake oil.
It focuses far too much on numbers; in the case of newsletter signups, it's conversion rates. If interactions with newsletters is > 0, it's worth having a newsletter; if conversion for these popups is > 0, then it's worth having a newsletter pop-up.
It's like an often quoted thing; Linus Tech Tips was criticized for having "reaction faces" in their thumbnails, and they said that while they don't like it, they had the numbers to back up that it was effective... to boost numbers and therefore revenue, I guess.
In the case of my current employer, they focus on NPS, Net Promoter Score, a wooly abbreviation [0] indicating how good they are doing based on the question "how likely are you to recommend X to a friend". Number goes down in case of outages, number goes up in case of good service. That's the main thing they focus on, not individual stories, users, whatever, but NPS.
I stopped watching and blocked the linus channel (and may others) due to the faces.
But I guess I am only one and the many likes these faces for some reason.
It is also probably a failure of optimization where one started doing it and made a tiny bit more money than the other. Then the others had to do it to keep up, now all have the sucky faces and they all make the same amount as before while doing something they don't really like.
What they don't take into account is the secondary and tertiary effects of doing things like this. I stopped visiting channels that did the faces, LTT among them, and I also (usually) insta-close any video where the presenter is making a completely fake 'why don't you tell me about it in the comments' calls to action.
The things is that your numbers might go up and your audience might grow, but these tactics work because you are appealing to the trend at the time. People see stupid face and click and the trending metric goes up and you get more hits -- same thing with user interactions on comments.
However, two months later when someone is trying to find a video about how to hook up their AMD CPU De-hot-an-izer to a radiator and they see Linus making a Macauly Culkin Home Alone face they pass, and you lose a potential actual long-term subscriber.
Also, people with standards tend to be really happy when those standards are at least partially met, and tell other people about it. On the flip side, people looking for their youtube 'stupid faces video fix' tend to forget what they saw 10 minutes later.
At work, I deal with enterprise software, and I agree that the focus on numbers (and NPS) can drive things the wrong way.
In my personal time, I own an ecommerce company, and there it absolutely makes sense to be purely numbers-focused. The thing that matters is getting someone to buy, and getting an email address is almost universally the second most important thing, because it's the best road to getting someone to buy.
> It doesn't help that the close button is sometimes barely visible.
This particular dark pattern is nasty and unfortunately common across more than just newsletter popups. It doesn’t trip me up but I could see how others could fall victim to it.
If opting out is so strongly preferred by users that you have to try to hide the opt-out button for users to do anything else, maybe you shouldn’t be trying to do the thing they’re so adamantly opting out of.
In my experience, conversation rates were ~6% from a pop up timed to land when you were nearly done with the article (though on short articles, it was similar to what is described—I don’t have data on those two broken out). Subscribers stuck pretty well, something like 40% kept opening emails. For my relatively small newsletter, churn was extremely low. They’re basically warm leads if they make it to the end of an article, and email is extremely sticky.
Email pop ups are a very effective short term newsletter growth tool.
As someone who used to work in marketing, this. Anecdotal, but in my experience working in marketing it was often funny to me how little we had to validate the numbers we presented. My boss didn't care how many people actually clicked on the link in our newsletter, as long as we had a lot of subscribers we were good.
> it was often funny to me how little we had to validate the numbers we presented
Yeah, your clients expected you to be the expert, and honestly apply that expertise for their interests. In other words, they expect you to validate those numbers; if they wanted somebody they need to second-guess, they would just take opinions for free from a random web forum.
We didn't have any clients, it was a marketing department for a CPG company. I was just a peon; I didn't have any say in how things got done. Say all that to say, you would think that at some point VPs of other departments would want to know how all the money that got allocated to marketing was actually benefiting the company. I'm talking a concrete dollars to dollars comparison. I personally didn't get to scratch that itch until I moved into e-commerce.
Well, ok, I misunderstood that part. But the expectation of goal alignment is even stronger for an in-house department.
The people high up expected somebody on your department to validate your numbers and invest on the things that most benefited the company. For an in-house team, it's not rare that this expectation is so strong that nobody ever challenges it. So it's also not very rare that one team or another coast on it and don't deliver much value.
Obviously, none of that is ideal. But that doesn't stop it from being common. Anyway, if your department never checked anything, somebody up from you was doing a bad job, because it's literally their job, not really the random VP (but it is the VP's job to discover if the dept was doing their job) and really not of any other department head.
to be fair to your boss, you can't actually make me click on your link or read your newsletter. Delivering it is the only thing that you actually have control over, and you're probably delivering to one of those gmail purgatory folders anyways.
I definitely couldn't "make" anyone click on anything. But delivering it wasn't the only thing we had control over. The format and content of the email we had complete control over. This was years ago, but at the time I suggested trying to record and study which emails lead subscribers to actually click the link so that we could learn to produce content/offers that more people wanted to see. The idea was mostly shrugged off but I did it anyways. When the numbers of people actually following the links went up my boss never wanted to show anybody. My somewhat cynical guess is that he didn't want to introduce real accountability (proof that we were having an effect) into some of the data he was presenting to other departments.
This is why there's so many subscription services (e.g. streaming, apps, etc) as well; they don't care about viewers or happiness, they (and the stock holders) care about subscribers, because subscribers = fixed and predictable monthly revenue, as well as loyalty (if they don't unsubscribe) and inertia (forgetting to cancel).
I've often wondered about that. Spotify has never failed to have the music I wanted to listen to. Though their app interface has always been a little painful for me to use.
Marketing thinks "OMG, people subscribing the newsletter are returning to the website way more often than regular ones". Then by showing this newsletter pop-up down everyone throat, they successfully get X% more subscribers. Much engagement, much success, poor UX, annoying for everyone.
Maybe people subscribing to that newsletter are the most interested and you shouldn't bother everyone with it for the sake of few subscriptions.
Adding people to your email list surreptitiously, via frustration or because of some incentive (like 10% off) is a great way of building a high number of subscribers but I doubt this does anything to your bottom line. In the case of discounts for sign-up it's almost certainly negative.
If they are relying on fooling people into thinking you have to enter your email address to read the article... why don't they actually try to require you to enter your email address to read the article (perhaps after reading the first few screens), instead of just implying it to those who can be fooled? They could do this, right?
I own an ecommerce company, and while I can't tell you the why, I can tell you that ~6% of people fill mine out. Is it annoying? Yup. Would it absolutely, unequivocally, be a bad business decision to take it down? Yup.
You know what else I've got on the site? One of those annoying little notifications that comes up in the bottom right to say "Someone bought this four hours ago!" I hate those things! I swore I'd never put them on my site!
The problem is, when I swore that, I was making the same mistake that you are here - assuming that I was the target and that everyone is like me. The reality is they are not, and these things work well. They're ubiquitous on ecommerce sites for a reason.
So 6% of people fill yours out meaning 94% of the people either ignore it, block it or get angry and leave the site. How many of the 6% fill it out because they think they have to? How many just give you a garbage email address?
If somebody wants to be part of your email list, most of them will find a place to sign up for it and nobody will see your site as a slimy sales gimmick.
See the problem here is you're projecting your feelings about popups (which I totally get, to be clear) onto my business. From a business perspective that's a bad thing to do.
What I've done (and what countless other website owners have done) is operate based on data. I've done a lot of A/B testing of my email capture popup - I've tested content, timing, and whether or not it's there at all. "How many of the 6% fill it out because they think they have to? How many just give you a garbage email address?" Sub 3%. That one's easy to validate, and I've done so.
You're calling it a "slimy sales gimmick" (which I think is somewhat harsher language than necessary), but the reality is most new users who hit my site come in from Facebook ads. I would wager that you and folks of your same mindset about the popup probably see advertising on social media as slimy as well. The people who come to my site clearly don't.
What a lot of HN fails to realize is that the overwhelming majority of the world is not like HN and does not share the beliefs of the typical HN user vis a vis digital advertising, sales tactics, websites, etc.
> You're calling it a "slimy sales gimmick" (which I think is somewhat harsher language than necessary)
I actually don't think that's overly harsh.
> the reality is most new users who hit my site come in from Facebook ads.
And, once again, we see the corrosive effects of Facebook actively making things crappier for the non-FB-using world.
> What a lot of HN fails to realize is that the overwhelming majority of the world is not like HN
I suspect that the vast majority of HN is fully aware of this. That doesn't make our complaints any less valid, though. What's alternative? "Shut up and take it"?
> That doesn't make our complaints any less valid, though. What's alternative? "Shut up and take it"?
I have been very clear in my comments here that these complaints are perfectly valid and reasonably. The alternative is obviously not to "shut up and take it" - it's to do what you're doing and leave sites that do things you don't like. Vote with your digital feet.
My point remains that popups asking people to sign up for an email newsletter exist, and will continue to exist, because a significant enough portion of the population does find them useful (as evidenced by the fact that they give their emails and then later make purchases based on emails they receive), even if folks on HN think that they are slimy or evil or what have you.
"See the problem here is you're projecting your emotions and empathy onto my business. From a business perspective that's a bad thing to do.
What I've done is operate on data. My customers are faceless numbers, not people, and so long as they give me money I don't care about them.
What a lot of HN fails to realize is that the overwhelming majority of the world are suckers who will do whatever advertising convinces them to."
I'm admittedly taking some liberties here, but it grieves me that business is now pretty much "fuck you I've got mine, or I'll do whatever it takes to get it." There must be a better way.
If you think a popup asking someone to give their email address in exchange for a discount is the same as an advertisement convincing people to smoke, then I don't think we're going to have a productive exchange here.
I can believe that. I operate in a little bubble where all ads and annoyances are blocked. I aggressively unsubscribe from every newsletter and set filters for anything that gets through. I patiently went through the settings of every website to max out the privacy settings.
Your average consumer, however, clicks whatever button is blue, enters their email wherever there's an email field, and powers through the ads which are personalised for them. I would not be surprised if the numbers that you described are true, and not just a fluke.
But I chose to build the sort of internet I like. A quiet, straightforward internet that respects consent and privacy. It worked fine for me, so I feel no need to change my ways.
The HN readership truly is unique; nowhere else will you see a community so virulently opposed to advertising/marketing, in an industry (tech) whose largest players have no other way of making money.
What percentage of people immediately bounce off your site as soon an aggravating interruption like this appears? I know I do. Have you measured if customers stay longer if you don't display the interruption?
Of that 6% how many actually read the newsletter as opposed to sending it to spam? Is that percentage more valuable to you than keeping people on the site?
> Have you measured if customers stay longer if you don't display the interruption?
That's not the right metric. I care about whether people buy things, and since I can measure that directly, it's better to do so than to measure intermediate metrics like time on page. Revenue is meaningfully better with the popup than without.
> Of that 6% how many actually read the newsletter as opposed to sending it to spam? Is that percentage more valuable to you than keeping people on the site?
Open rates vary from 20-40% depending on the type of email. Yes, it is more valuable.
I'll reiterate something I said in another comment, which is that there are a lot of people who don't think of this kind of thing as an aggravating interruption. Most of my new users come in because they click on Facebook ads, which are anathema to a lot of folks on HN but a normal, reasonable thing to look at and maybe click on to a much broader swathe of the world. I'm optimizing for those people, not HN folks.
Nobody here is “assuming that [they are] the target”. Everyone here knows everything that you said. Your behavior is still scummy.
Just listen to yourself:
> Is it annoying? Yup. Would it absolutely, unequivocally, be a bad business decision to take it down? Yup.
Translation: given the choice between making the website even remotely pleasant and making more money for yourself, you choose the money every time. Everyone else can suck it.
We are not criticizing your decision because we don't understand your circumstance or context. We are criticizing the decision precisely because we understand it. It's selfish, scummy, and it's the reason the entire web sucks ass now.
I've tried sliding it down from the top and up from the bottom, as well as a persistent email collection bar anchored to the top. All inferior in terms of form completion as well as revenue generated within three months for the cohort of people exposed to the form.
Haven't tried a block in the middle of the text, but that's because most folks are landing on my product page, and that's had a lot of testing to ensure it's optimized for sales, which are naturally more important than email collection.
> Have you not heard of timed popups (such as those that trigger past a certain element)
In the sites I interact with, that is probably the majority of these popups. You find them preferable?
I find them just as annoying and counter-productive as OP is describing.
For one thing, when your heuristics say I'm getting interested, that's when you decide to interrupt my attention? It's like they've intentionally decided to algorithmically make this as annoying as possible, when is the time we can interrupt the reader as annoyingly as we can?
And as you say, even if I've read 35% of an article or something, it may still be the first time I'm interacting with a site, and why do I want to give them my email address?
Your argument is valid in the context of people who just don't have any idea about User Experience. A popup can be made very user-friendly and non-obstructive if you plan it that way. A small slide-out from bottom-right corner with soft colors (in my opinion) is a great way to let people know you have a newsletter.
Absolutely not. A pop-up is, by definition, something that “pops up”, which it does specifically to hijack attention, i.e., to be distracting and obnoxious.
The best way to let me know that you have a newsletter is NO POP-UP. A pop-up immediately screams “this website is trying to hijack your attention, get out as fast as possible.” The idea that I should want to stay on such a dystopian website, much less reward it with a newsletter subscription, is just so ludicrous it boggles the mind.
Sure, that's fine. I don't see those, I see popups that cover up the article I was trying to read, and I'm pretty sure this is quite intentional, someone designing it believes that will maximize "conversions". (I have no idea if they are correct about that or not, they may well be).
Or you could just put it somewhere static on your page that doesn't pop up. Maybe quit hiding every single thing under a hamburger menu and some magical swipe, and people might be able to find it.
You could make the argument that if you read the content for free, but cannot even be bothered to be asked for your email (you don't have to provide it!), then there is probably not much lost either for the site or for you if you never visit the site again.
that hypothetic argument depends on the ridiculous assumption that if a user won't convert within a minute or so, in the middle of the first piece of your content they've ever read, they never will
Well, I would put the pop-up more towards the end of the content.
Also, you misrepresent the assumption. The assumption is that if the user is so annoyed even by just the attempt of conversion that they leave the site, that then you will have a hard time to ever convert them.
That assumption doesn't sound ridiculous at all to me. Also, it doesn't need to be true 100% of the time. Even 50% is probably enough to justify it, because if you don't attempt to convert, you will not convert for sure.
Your fixation on users as something that needs “converting”, and your insistence that anyone who doesn't “convert” doesn't matter and is not worthy of any consideration... well, let's just say, it explains why so many websites are unusable.
I want to visit websites that are made for human beings, not commodities.
Me too! But human beings must eat. So, get rid of capitalism, or convert.
Keep in mind that conversion here means to provide the author of the content, hopefully a human being, with an email, so that they can inform you of interesting new content. I cannot see anything inhumane in this.
it indeed sounds ridiculous to expect them to provide their personal information to you the first time they ever see any of your content, even if it's almost 1 whole piece of content
1 webpage view is rarely worth a piece of personal information as intimate as an email address, so you could either focus on demanding something less demanding, or making that 1 webpage view into multiple
Or just make good content, and let people filter themselves out, if they are not interested. If my content is not worth your email, you don't have to give it. If you furthermore don't deem my content worth the small annoyance of being asked for your email, fine! Bye bye.
The alternative is that I have to track you somehow, and determine how often you visited my content. I wouldn't like that. It is more complicated, it is creepier, and I very much doubt that it would convert better.
or just focus on demanding something less demanding, or making that 1 webpage view into multiple by making good content
either way, you're in the minority in feeling that someone viewing <1 piece of your internet content entitles you to personal information about them as intimate as an email address, because it is a ridiculous expectation
So, your point here, is that people complaining about algorithmically timed email-harvesting popups over articles are annoying you, and you want them to know you plan to continue this practice despite their complaints? OK. I think those people plan to keep complaining about how it annoys them, anyway, too. We all good now?
it would be good if you could consider the third option: produce content that drives people to return to or remain on your site and eventually subscribe without the pop-up,
since most people would agree it's unreasonable to interrupt someone for such intimate personal information as you're asking, when they've not even seen a single whole piece of content
indeed, this seems like a case where it's actually up to you
> Have you not heard of timed popups (such as those that trigger past a certain element), or popups that don't make you want to immediately close the site?
They're arguably worse because it's a slap in the face while focusing on something.
I’ve seen a few websites recently with a pleasant newsletter experience.
The signup field is a few paragraphs down the article and as you scroll to it, the article dims (but is still readable) and highlights the newsletter section. As you keep scrolling the the dimming fades out and you can read the article again.
This is much less jarring than a pop up and is placed after the reader gets to read at their pace.
OK, I'll bite. What are you doing with those emails, then? Are you blasting out spam to them? Do they engage? Are the analytics better for those who have subscribed to e-mail compared to those who haven't?
So I just took over responsibility to reboot a polyglot conference in Greenville, SC that will happen this August.
In the interest of time, I needed to communicate a lot with a lot of people to keep people informed, raise awareness, etc before I have time to properly build a new site so I setup a substack blog to do it. You can see it here:
- Feed all of the social media accounts created for it (with dlvr.it)
- Announce call for Speakers (open til May 25th)
- Announce call for Sponsors
- Additional community information (we're trying to help get local meetups moving again as a side effect)
Early on there's been a ton of information to distribute and feedback to gather, so it's worked well. The substack email list is the primary communication channel and we've got about a 50% open rate with very high engagement from about half the list. I use the scheduling features to make sure I never sent more than one thing per day, on weekdays only.
I'm learning the marketing side of this as I go, so I'm trying to be very wary of things that bother me. On the flip side, the defaults for a tool like dlvr.it will post multiple times a day to social channels which seems very spammy but it also seems to work. I've never been very social media active because I don't like doing that type of thing.
Spreading the word on this stuff is hard though, so I've got to balance my own desire to not bother people with the real need to get the word out around this conference. We did have one fun social media challenge for programmers where people could create variations of a code payload about the conference in their favorite language. I'm looking for fun things like that to engage people when I can.
The bigger the list gets, the less I feel the need to keep spreading the word because I feel better about being able to reach people with the important things when I need to. Now I'm far enough along that people are starting to spread the word for me and connect me with potential sponsors, so that's helpful.
Sometimes I feel its time to build separate Internet with a new protocol like Gemini but better. A protocol tht is resistant to all the BS of modern web.
Small sidebar, but I really enjoyed this talk. So much so that I'm going to go try out Svelte having been a big fan of Vue for a long time. Don't get me wrong, I probably won't switch, but I think it's worth exploring the ideas of such an intelligent person across multiple facets of their professional outputs. I even learned a few things hanging out in React land a few years ago!
Really excited to see where Rich goes over the next decade.
The key thing to cut out is the ability of web site owners to make clients initiate connections or exfiltrate information without the user's say-so. That plus the profit motive have made most of the Web spyware—and you're not gonna get rid of the profit motive, so it'd be more effective to make the Web practically impossible to use to distribute spyware.
The Web needs far more capable built-in UI elements, and to remove most ability to script it. Including a great deal of CSS, which is under-rated as a source of bloat and slowness on the Web I think, in addition to having become a privacy threat.
Like a previous comment mentioned, the only resistance is that it as a small user base and it makes no commercial sense to pit any ads there. This also makes is resistant to insincere content. There is no need for low effort click-bait content because if you would like to attract lots of users you wouldn't be publishing on Gemini.
The problem isn't the permissibility of a web browser. It's that we live in a capitalistic world; someone somewhere will always be trying to figure out how to post a bill on a wall that reads "POST NO BILLS".
Reminds me of browsing car and other shopping sites. They always pop up these chat windows and have stupid discount spinners that popup as soon as you access the site. I'm not going to spin for a deal on a shopping site I've never used before I even get a chance to actually look for something to buy.
Think about it from the websites perspective. If you visit their website and leave without "converting" in any sense then why are they serving you? It's like do you get annoyed when servers leave a bill on your way out of the restaurant? Content sites are just trying to reacclimate people to recognizing that they just provided value. Ads are worth less than ever so they need to a relationship to milk. Emails are cheap.
That's not a better analogy because the soapbox guy is essentially pushing spam. These popups are catching you leaving someplace you visited voluntarily. Like the retail people who stand by the door asking if you found everything you were looking for.
now imagine those same retail people asking you for your personal information because you looked at almost 1 thing in the store, it'd obviously be annoying and unreasonable
Web layouts have *evolved* in a bizarre way, especially when businesses are paying for results and the user experience comes second. Popups (or whatever the cute new euphemism is) are an easy way to add new garbage to a site while separating the garbage from the content. Cookie banners, logins, paywalls, and more!
Despite this topic being brought up regularly, these pop-up forms do work. That's why everyone uses them.
Disclaimer: I use them and so do many of my competitors.
"Does a poor job of increasing conversions" is the opinion of someone that has never looked at the data. You can be sure that the people interested in conversions run analytics and A/B testing on everything. If these pop-ups did a poor job and there was a better alternative, you can be sure that everyone would have already migrated to that alternative.
The "rule of seven" can also be used to counter her argument. That is precisely why businesses try to get the email of visitors: to have more interactions. Otherwise, for the vast majority of visitors, the first visit would be the only interaction they will ever have.
"Works against user goals" might be true for short term goals like jumping through the most amount of content. However, users have different goals and short-term ones are often not the best goals. A pop-up might address other long-term goals the visitor cares more about than going to yet another web page.
But more than anything, these pop-ups serve business goals because most of these websites exist only thanks to their revenue. Without them my business would probably not be viable. I assume that many accept the small annoyance of a pop-up as the cost of keeping the websites they like running. And if the pop-up appears when the user is about to close the window, it does not even stop a visitor in his tracks. He can still close the window without any extra click.
Do you know the ratio of your annoyed vs. subscribed-via-that-popup users?
I get terribly annoyed by them and always wonder why they don't just add a section to the page where one can easily subscribe, if one seems it to be a worthy thing to do?
Edit: Also, I want to add, that sometimes I leave the page immediately because such a popup pops up. The cookie banners are annoying enough.
Measuring a conversion increase means that there was a net positive.
I know it’s not a popular opinion on HN, but losing some annoyed users is an acceptable trade off if the net result is an increase in conversions.
The truth is that visitors who are so easily annoyed that a simple pop-up will cause them to leave the site weren’t very interested to begin with. If you gain 10 subscribers for every 1 annoyed visitor, it’s still a big net win.
Most visitors aren’t as sensitive to annoyances as a lot of the people in these comments.
Actively disqualifying people that are not a good fit is a vital part of any business. The people that get easily annoyed are going to be a huge pain at every step, while the real customers buy silently.
Also, when people have a true need, the pop-up is not an annoyance. I do agree that "subscribe to our newsletter" is not a great pitch, but it's a problem of content, not of method. If you get a pop-up on a website offering you a solution of a pressing problem you have, that pop-up is not an annoyance, but an opportunity.
And finally, even if one would be interested in measuring how many of these annoyed visitors there are, that's not really something you can measure. Conversions, instead, are a concrete metric.
> If you get a pop-up on a website offering you a solution of a pressing problem you have, that pop-up is not an annoyance, but an opportunity.
I'm curious if you have an example of what this looks like done well. I have never personally seen a pop-up that I viewed as anything other than an annoyance, but I freely admit that I'm not a typical user (to the extent such a person exists). What kinds of great opportunities do typical users find in their pop-ups?
If I'm on Substack and am reading a genuinely interesting article, and half-way or something through I get a popup asking if I want to sign up for that person's newsletter, I might do it.
That I could see, but I almost always have to close the Substack pop-up before I'm even allowed to read the first paragraph, so that's more of a hypothetical example than a real one.
Also, there are better ways to handle that from the user perspective: inject the subscription form as a static element in between two paragraphs so you don't interrupt me mid-sentence. That way I get my opportunity but I also get to finish your article.
What if half way through the article you see a sign-up field which separates the top and bottom half of the article, instead of a popup? Baked into the page, like an ad? No small "x" to click, because most of these don't care about keyboard input, no interruption?
Let say you are losing hair and you are researching the topic online. You will probably read everything you can find. If you then get a pop-up offering a free guide on natural remedies against hair loss, you will definitely want that.
Granted, the guide needs to deliver some value and not just be a bait and switch. If it doesn't deliver any value, it's pretty much guaranteed you will lose that subscriber.
To give you a real example: I offer a guide about design patterns and most of my subscribers come from that pop-up. And they are developers, showing that while pop-ups are not popular on places like HN, they are definitely not despised by all developers.
I myself sing up when I find something I am interested in. For example, I got a nice free guide about photoshop blend modes which was very useful when I got it.
Correlation is not causation, and yet, a correlation exists and I'd rather lose these visitors than getting headaches later.
And sure, you can always rationalize anything, but I still see a difference between a pop-up that offers something the reader might like against a dark pattern that forces or tricks someone to sing up.
> Most visitors aren’t as sensitive to annoyances as a lot of the people in these comments.
Why on earth should I want to subscribe to a newsletter from a site I've never visited before, which I'm visiting for the first time in my life because an article from it trended on HN?
I know nothing about the quality of the site, neither about the type of regular content of the site. I don't even know if I'm going to find it useful what I'm about to read.
Imagine entering a store and the first thing they do is ask you if you want to give them your phone number so the can keep you informed.
How can you call this sensitive if you view if from this perspective?
> The truth is that visitors who are so easily annoyed that a simple pop-up will cause them to leave the site weren’t very interested to begin with.
I don't agree here, maybe your service or newsletter is absolutely great for me as potential customer, but I close pages with newsletter popups instantly. Not because I'm annoyed, but to make a point. I guess a lot of services might have me lost because of this. You block yourself of getting even data from a user who's just a little privacy concerned.
> The truth is that visitors who are so easily annoyed that a simple pop-up will cause them to leave the site weren’t very interested to begin with.
how do you know this? They chase me away even if I was very interested in whatever the page was talking about.
Yes, a simple pop-up only a minor annoyance -- until most sites do it, then it becomes a really huge deal, like a tiny pebble in your shoe on a long walk.
> You can be sure that the people interested in conversions run analytics and A/B testing on everything. If these pop-ups did a poor job and there was a better alternative, you can be sure that everyone would have already migrated to that alternative.
And this is the problem with modern corporate logos. They think if the A/B numbers are trending up, it must always be a good thing. Nobody does real UX testing like Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, etc used to do. You know where they actually track down a non-technical person, sit them down in front of a computer, open up the website/app, see what the user does, then ask about how the experience was. This is UX testing and will lead to meaningful impacts. A/B tests are inane methodologies that are formatted to confirm whatever preconceived notions upper management wanted to hear anyways.
A more concrete piece of anecdata; my upper management told me they wanted us to boost the priority for sales eligible customers. I asked if this means we would prioritize people not paying for our service (since they're eligible for sales) and de-prioritize our already paying customers (who are not eligible). Upper management basically said, "yup that will happen. But it will increase our conversion rates which is what we care about". News flash, ruining your company's reputation for some shitty KPIs will damage your company in the long term.
Prioritizing shitty A/B tests will eventually ruin your company. It may not be immediate, but the slow and inevitable degradation of a useful product will lead to utter contempt and disdain from your users and they will switch to an alternative that actually prioritizes UX. See: Medium -> Substack, Microsoft -> Apple, and more I can't think of off the top of my head. We forget that the reason the iPhone was so wildly successful was because Steve Jobs was obsessed with creating a meticulously crafted UX. We forget that Nintentdo shenanigans are tolerated only because the games are lovingly crafted and built by people that care about their target audience. We forget that Amazon took off because of Customer Obsession, among other admirable qualities (that unfortunately aren't followed as well anymore). Keep treating your users as dumb cattle and they'll wise up and leave. The users aren't stupid, they're just waiting for a viable alternative so they can finally dump the shitty product built by companies prioritizing all the wrong metrics.
>Despite this topic being brought up regularly, these pop-up forms do work. That's why everyone uses them.
Unfortunately a good part of HN is quite blind when it comes to facts about things that aren't of the liking of the community.
Some people seem to not be able to understand why K8s is widely used and not <whatever>, why the majority uses WhatsApp and not Signal or why the majority uses Twitter and not the <open source alternative of the year>. A not irrelevant amount of HN users will think, and many times literally say, that all these people are stupid and cannot understand how things really work.
In reality, everything happens for reasons. Sure, some people will just blindly follow trends but when you see most of the big websites that have plenty of money to do studies to find out if it works continue to do it, perhaps it means it's working for them? I hate those popups like most end-users but at the end of the day I'd never think most of the website owners who do this are dumb and do it to harm themselves but rather I tend to think they have hard data that shows this actually works pretty well.
I wish the community would realize how arrogant those "I don't have data on this / I don't understand why this is done therefore people who do this are just stupid" positions are.
Are you really wondering why multi-channel, billion-dollar companies like Apple and Stripe don't have to use the same lead generation method as a rinky-dink online blog?
> Despite this topic being brought up regularly, these pop-up forms do work. That's why everyone uses them.
I think most people here know that. I was surprised by the author's claim that they “do a poor job of increasing conversions”.
The real criticism is not that they don't work. The real criticism is that “conversions” shouldn't be the metric, and a web designer who prioritizes that metric over any semblance of a welcoming or pleasant experience, is scummy and is treating their users as disposable garbage.
It's similar to how we all hate sleazy politicians. We want them to serve us, the people. Instead, they serve their own interests (at best, getting reelected; at worst, helping the massive corporations they invest in). Why do they do it? Because it “works”.
Everybody knows that it “works” according to a metric that is not aligned with the common good. The criticism is that you should prioritize the common good.
> "Does a poor job of increasing conversions" is the opinion of someone that has never looked at the data.
The data is biased. The visitors signing up for newsletters are probably way more interested on average.
Also, of there is an A\B test the ones that does not sign up are harder to track.
The sign up could probably just aswell be replaced by a big "click this happy emoji if you like my site"-button and marketers would argue the button increases conversion rates.
> if the pop-up appears when the user is about to close the window, it does not even stop a visitor in his tracks. He can still close the window without any extra click.
That's a much better way of doing it. If sites did that, I probably wouldn't put them on my "never go back to that site" list.
The problem is people take this perfectly legitimate bit of reasoning and apply it to the point the site ends up like your average British local news website; there's a good reason nobody bothers with local news in the internet era and not because it's unimportant it's partially because most of the sites are literally unusable. Not even in a 'I find the tendency of capitalism to turn everything into a glorified billboard depressing' sense that's a common opinion online, I mean that in a 'I've closed three nag boxes and I still can't see the content I came to read' sense.
On Twitter/Instagram/whatever, you're exposed to the arbitrary censorship choices of the platform AND the risk of being deplatformed for any reason. Once that happens, you don't just lose deliverability, you lose every single relationship you had.
With an email list, at least you retain the list should your deliverability tank. It might take a lot of work to migrate to a new non-deny-listed setup, but at least you have a (hopefully double-)opted-in relationship with each prior reader still.
A lot of fairly low quality (but at least semi-legit) newsletters that I probably didn't explicitly sign up for end up in my Gmail SPAM folder--probably because enough people have flagged them as SPAM. But I actually find it pretty uncommon for a newsletter I directly signed up for to end up there.
It's really hard for me to take UX people seriously that believe that such text style is okay. My eyesight is good but my eyes still get tired reading such thin font, even the "bold" text is too thin. I shouldn't have to turn on Reader Mode to be able to read your website.
Don't touch my browser font, font size (no arbitrary px, use rem/em with main text at least 1rem) and font weight. How hard is this?
In Firefox, you can go to Settings >> Fonts >> Advanced >> Untick "Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above", then you'll never have this problem again (though you sometimes will end up with others, such as icon-fonts not rendering as icons, and missing out on meta-discussions around poor font choices).
Some designers miss on the readability front when it comes to weight (ie: textual color) for body text. Most sibling replies talk about background/foreground contrast but something doesn't need to be stark in that regard to be more easily read (which also affects whether people will continue reading something in the first place).
I brought this up years ago but there's a mid-century type design book that mentions a trend in the late 1800s of typefaces in print that were too thin, leading to complaints about readability. However it was in vogue so it lasted for a time.
I personally find the opposite and love low contrast colour schemes. High contrast (e.g. pure black on white) is much harder to read for me. Apparently this is common in dyslexic people. I guess everyone is different.
After reading this comment I double-checked the website and, sure enough, there was five paragraphs of text I completely missed. My lizard brain saw the picture and format, interpreted it as a Tweet (I thought the title + picture was the content), and I completely dismissed the small grey text as something unimportant.
It's definitely a personal preference though. I find super high contrast very harsh part 2 certain point.that being said,for linked website and with very low contrast colour they used, I sure wish they opted for a heavier font.
I just checked the source and it's not that. It's not a bad decision with regards to text justification as far as I can see, either. Might just be some broken kerning in the font it's serving up, this page is a dense thicket of machine-generated markup and I really do not want to investigate any further:
<span>When a user moves their mouse from the middle of the page toward the navigation bar — presumably to abandon the page — there are technologies which can track this behavior and trigger a “mouse-out” alert. While this UX element (from companies such as Crazy Egg and Rooster) has great potential, I’ve found it far too common that websites use this to overlay huge pop-ups across the entire screen as a last-ditch effort to convert users.</span>
</span>
</p>
what is this garbage, why does a paragraph need its text inside a span inside another span, what generated this trash?
You'll see that type of output from most WYSYWIG editors. Some are better than others and they've improved over time, but a lot are still garbage. Both Redactor and TinyMCE would have produced something like this at points in the past (been a while since I used them, so that may not be the case now). Pasting from MS Word will also produce some gnarly HTML in most editors.
this is why I have downloadable or website fonts disabled and in browser, use a singular monospace bitmap font, unifont, and across the entire system. you can do this with your preferred font. also eliminates any risk of security due to font parsing issues.
Low contraxt text tires me. I tend to toggle Reader Mode in my browser or simply click on this bookmarklet (a bookmarked link with the below in the URL field) that changes all fonts to "Open Sans" or "Lucinda Grande". I can't remember where I found it but it's been one of the first things I add in a new desktop browser.
There is exactly zero percent chance that I will subscribe to any newsletter when I haven't read even the first article on your site fully.
Maybe if I see myself coming back to the site for insightful stuff, then I might consider a newsletter - but even that I'll subscribe to using my RSS reader (NewsBlur).
There's a zero percent chance I will subscribe to a newsletter willingly even if I love your articles. I try very hard to keep the signal-to-noise ratio of my inbox tuned because otherwise important things get lost in the deluge. I don't want your articles pushed to me on your timeframe, I want to consume them in my own time and for that an RSS reader is perfectly adequate.
There's a sizeable portion of the population for whom RSS would be perfect, but they don't know it exists, and if you tried to get them into it, would be baffled by the complete lack of interface (remember when Firefox would show an RSS icon near the URL when a site had an RSS link in the header?)
A newsletter is useless to you, but a lot of people like them. I agree that popups aren't the way to push it, though. A simple newsletter link in the header of the site is more than good enough. I don't care how good the "conversion" rate is, I don't like harassing people who are just visiting my site for the first time.
> There's a zero percent chance I will subscribe to a newsletter willingly even if I love your articles.
Same. Mostly because of tracking. According to what's been getting published in various internet marketing sites, one of the primary reasons why newsletters have become so popular for sites to do isn't about the newsletter -- it's about getting the email address (that's also a reason why more and more sites are requiring an account even when it doesn't make technical sense). That's a decent identifier that allows you to be tracked across sites.
Then there are the rare cases where you do subscribe, but every link in the email is a tracking link. Because they need to know when and from where you clicked on that link. SMH.
My switch between RSS and E-Mail is if I (mostly) want to read everything. RSS means I’ll see every single article. But for some (mainly backblaze, actually), I don’t. I want to read some, so I’m subscribed to their newsletter that gives me a summary of all recent posts every once in a while.
If the pop up listed two options - email subscribe or rss subscribe - I don’t think I would be nearly as irritated and would probably use the rss option a lot.
Can't upvote this submission, and the spirit of the post, enough. These drive me absolutely crazy. The decentralized news/opinion revolution is probably a net positive. But this, specific, behavior related to it, drives me nuts.
Having your mouth washed out with soap is a "traditional" punishment, usually inflicted on those that have committed a mouth-related offence like swearing (if you can believe it) or smoking. It's now mostly a figure a speech. The brown soap is a less desirable bar of soap to have forcibly inserted into your mouth.
Many years ago I made TabClosedDidntRead.com - a collection of invasive overlays - to highlight this trend when it first started (and wrote it up [0] though much of that probably doesn't stand up so well now). I had to stop collecting them after a few months as it became most sites rather than some sites, and things have only gotten much worse since. It looks like TC;DR is no longer up, presumably I just lost hope at some point.
it shouldn't. It is your opportunity to actively decline the tracking of the website.
And if you actually do click the settings tab on some of them, you will see just how many trackers clickbait sites integrate and that will give you at least a choice to opt out.
The GDPR laws im europe are part of the healing process of the internet, therefore not at all compareable with the "please subscribe to my newsletter" popups.
Cookie banners with [Accept] [View settings] buttons are dark. But these are just HTML forms; even if there's a [Reject] button, I've no reason to suppose it has any different effect to [Accept]. And no - I'm not going to check the HTML source and parse all the Javascript, or crank up the network monitor to find out.
I agree, though will add that the GDPR does not require active rejection of tracking. Rather, outside of some narrowly defined use cases, tracking is only permitted when there is explicit consent from the user. If you ignore the GDPR banner, or block it with a filter, the website does not have your explicit permission and is not legally allowed to track you under the GDPR.
see here is the loophole, if you block the banner altogether they will still track you under the disguise of "legitimate interest" vs when you actually deactivated the stuff or use the "reject all" button that the better providers provide, you will, at least for the bigger publishing houses, opt out.
That’s what they currently do, yes, but it’s not really a loophole, so much as willful misunderstanding. Legitimate interest covers things like IP logs for the purpose of network security, and certainly doesn’t cover user tracking for the purpose of targeted advertising.
It only takes some people to accept the newsletter/messages to make it worth it, unfortunately. Probably the reason the practice could ever stop would be the marginal cost of the messages or newsletter to rise above engagement. That’s probably much higher for a newsletter than the push notifications.
"If “the rule of seven” — that a customer needs to interact seven times before buying — is marketing 101, why does the site demand a newsletter conversion before a new user has even finished reading one article?"
This seems to really misunderstand things - if the customer has hit your website because they came to one of your SEO-optimized blog articles, there is a very solid chance they're not going to stumble upon your site again. The point of the newsletter conversion is to give you a chance to get those seven interactions.
All of these complaints boil down to people wanting something for free, without any inconvenience at all, even something as minor as clicking an extra button.
Unfortunately, most websites require an actual business model to consistently produce content. Business models usually need a form of lead gathering, or audience building. (Which is, frankly, core to most businesses.)
If you don't want to engage with businesses, then there are still endless hobby websites out there that do little other than produce content for free, without any popups, ads, upsells, etc.
If businesses want money for their content, then they should ask for money BEFORE they send it to whoever asks. Pestering someone after they send the article feels so scummy.
There's a group of guys near where I live who stand around and hand CDs to tourists, and after a minute of chatting, start asking for "donations". It's the same vibe. Giving something of value to someone then using that to set the expectation that they should give something of value back. If you give something away, in my opinion, the transaction is complete. Trying to use that to get something in return is manipulative.
I'm a fan of LWN.net's[0] business model. (Enough that it's the only news source I actually subscribe to).
Links to external news articles are free for anyone to read, and for all account owners (paid or not) to comment on.
Featured articles by LWN's paid contributors are available for paid subscribers to read and comment on immediately, and for everyone else to read and for unpaid account owners to comment on between 7-14 days after first publication.[1] If you want to check out their past article quality, or just read interesting previous articles, you don't even need an account.
No pop-ups. No generic nag screens. If you're not a paid subscriber and you go to view an article you can't view yet, it tells you it's currently for subscribers only and how to get a subscription if you want one, but also tells you the date that the article will become free to read without a subscription.
Yes, I lurked for a few years before I became a paid member. Because I was able to read everything for free, the site built its reputation for me to the point where I was happy to subscribe to get those featured articles just a bit sooner. (And be able to participate in the comments in a timely fashion.)
[1] It's a bit complicated. Featured articles from throughout the week are collected every Thursday into the "Weekly Edition", and the Thursday after that that Weekly edition and all its articles are available for free.
I think the author of the article and many commenters here are saying they are more than happy to take their eyeballs to web sites that express a different worldview, or at least a different attitude toward users.
Google could very easily populate search results with mainly non-commercial websites. However, they are very strongly incentivized to support commercial websites; I believe this explains why they don't generally penalize popups and similar things.
> Unfortunately, most websites require an actual business model to consistently produce content. Business models usually need a form of lead gathering, or audience building. (Which is, frankly, core to most businesses.)
So why should I pay to support their unsustainable project?
This happens in brick-and-mortar too. It has become difficult to buy something in person without being asked to sign up for a frequent shopper program -- sometimes very forcefully.
Apparently retailers despise the fact that some customers prefer to buy things anonymously without being spammed or having their privacy invaded. I predict B&M stores will soon begin to block you at the front door until you give them your email address.
I literally couldn’t buy something the other day without giving an email because “oh we’re paperless!” Was the response I got when I asked for a paper receipt instead.
Of course, 10 seconds later I got a “welcome to the family!” email.
A few brick and mortar store retailers around South Africa have started asking "May/can I have your cellphone number?" when I'm making a purchase to which I respond with either "You don't need that." or simply "Nope.".
When asked why, conversation typically goes like:
Me: "I don't want my phone being sent SMSes or phone calls from your company or anyone they would share my number with."
Them: "Oh, don't worry, that won't happen from us."
Me: "Well it absolutely won't happen if you don't have my number.".
It kind of re-frames their request as if they were offering to do me a favour, which I then politely indicated I don't even need. I've found that it either cuts off most of the counter-arguments that the person asking was about to retort with, or it just throws them off-balance for long enough that the interaction moves on, enough that I don't get a lot of push back after using it.
While I'm entitled to take that stance, I opt to be less confrontational since the person I'm talking to is just doing their job in the manner mandated by their corporate head office. I've never had to explain more than that and in the unlikely event they insisted, I'd politely ask to talk to the store manager about it.
What I don’t understand is why you can’t just put a nice big (or small) square or element or CTA on the page prominently that asks people to sign up for the newsletter.
Like, it’s fine, go ahead, ask me. Make it obtrusive. Hell you can make it blink. But why can’t I look at it and just scroll by it. Just like put it on the fucking page it’s not hard.
Preferably at the end of the article because if you’ve made it that far…
Unfortunately I’d never see it because I almost always clicked off the site if reader mode doesn’t work unless it’s something I’m really interested in. Can almost watch the battery drain with all the auto-play videos and animated ads they pack into websites these days.
I think the whole theme of this article and thread is don't waste your time trying to sell to developers. they block your ads, don't buy your stuff, won't even sign up for your free newsletter to see if you add any value there. generally don't even believe in advertising and marketing. Most of them would rather build instead of buy, which is useful as a developer, but not great to form a business around.
The exception is Free Tiers so they can convince they're bosses to use your enterprise tier.
I often wonder how many human hours/days/weeks/years are lost on these cookie & newsletter modals. Too many. There should be some sort of standardised comms with the browser to say what the browser would accept, probably via HTTP headers in case JS is disabled - and then the site can deal with this if they take exception to the browser's defaults.
While I agree with you I must admit that it sometimes even save my time. When cookie/newsletter pop-up shows it breaks my procrastination habit. I ask my self in that moment if I really need to see that content. In most cases answer is no. So instead of closing the modal I just close whole tab.
Just a few days ago I was reading an article from some tech site complaining about ads in Windows and the first thing upon opening the side is a popup ad for a newsletter. Do they not see the irony there or is the whole industry on autopilot?
> If “the rule of seven” — that a customer needs to interact seven times before buying — is marketing 101, why does the site demand a newsletter conversion before a new user has even finished reading one article?
This has happened because Google, Facebook, Youtube and other walled gardens have locked up the online audience. If you clicked on a site, chances are you discovering it via one of the above. And chances are, you'll never see that site again if you close the tab. So that's the 'rule of 7' out the window right there.
If the popup converts even one person, that's better than it not being there at all.
"Yeah, but it's so annoying, I'll never subscribe via these tactics!" Congratulations, you are part of the rare few that know how the sausage is made. You probably also know that these modals aren't there for UX designers to praise or Substack to quake in their boots. They're there to convert.
I wonder if the people who implement this stuff consciously balance "it works" with "this is shitty" and feel a twinge of guilt when they do it. Or are they just scumbags who don't know the difference between effective and good?
I doubt it. These tools have paying customers. At least, I doubt if they care any more than the people that work on pre-roll ads on Youtube, or Sponsored posts on Instagram.
If you use Substack and don't like this behavior you can turn it off, go to settings and look for "Subscribe prompts on post pages" and uncheck it.
I love Substack but think this feature is ill-considered. I am sure it converts by the numbers, but I want 100% of my readers to have a pristine experience reading, foremost.
The web has become quite unusable over the years with all the popups.
Perhaps we need a browser that uses AI to block all the annoying page elements?
Or we use crowd intelligence to achieve the task. If enough users flag the page elements that popup, and this data is shared, many could profit from a better experience.
Some ad-blockers already provide optional block-rules for "annoyance" elements. Unfortunately, they are less well supported. I used them for a while with AdNauseam until it ate some important UI element or other.
I gave up on RSS a long time ago. It's ironic how people think it's great to send full articles through email, but only want to push short (some times even misleading) summaries through RSS.
Yes, RSS should be even better than email for the marketing people.
* obscure everything behind it
* distract the viewer
* require dismissal to proceed
I think modal popups for any reason is bad. It's always better to use a new page which can be deep linked and avoided if it contains content irrelevant to the viewer's interests.
There are some sites that I am actually signed up for their newsletter, I'll click a link in the newsletter to read the article on the site, and then I still get a popup on the site to signup for the newsletter. Most newsletter links have referral URL parameters. I don't know why they can't detect that I came from a newsletter click and just not show me the popup. I understand it could be "abused" or if the link was forwarded from someone you might want to try and capture new subscribers, but I feel like that's a small enough percentage that it would be better to make the experience less annoying for your regulars.
Is it a good idea to build an newsletter subscription service (like mailchimp) that works like apple email relay, where the customers don't have access to the actual emails? The difference would be on trust that the provider will not use the emails for it's own purposes other than what the newsletter owner agreed too in a contractually binding manner that survives acquisitions. Now the newsletter owns the relationship, and the readers are assured that they're not handing over their email and can easily unsubscribe.
As the viewer if I wanted to sign up to your email then I'd be using a unique email address (like icloud I guess) which I could simply block when you inevitably leak my personal data
Still is there value? whether you submit a unique email address, this model would still work for the millions of users who do not correct? Also, I assume icloud or similar services are not immune to leaks?
I guess, there's still a use case for modal pop-ups, since they provide an ideal break point for considering, whether the piece in question is worthwhile your time or not. So, you may simply leave instead of bothering to operate the button…
In UX terms, there may be room for improvement with the wording, like, "Are you sure you want to read this till the end?" ;-)
The funniest thing happened once in my clinic. I was in a support group and our leader was pushing this concept of "Amor Fati". In service of that, she YouTubed us a video from a channel called "The Daily Stoic" and somewhere near the end, the host mentioned that they have a newsletter and you could subscribe for the aforementioned daily bits.
One of the other group members perked up and expressed great interest in finding out how she could subscribe to said newsletter. It was going to be a challenge, but I wonder if she managed to find out how and do so.
So there are people out there who, moths to a flame, will be magnetically drawn to your newsletter come-ons, and that's exactly why we have a million annoying popups, because it's a numbers game, and even 1% counts in large amounts.
As someone who runs a news letter take my opinion with a grain of salt. The reality is that the marketing tricks work. The stupid thumbnails, the pop up windows, and the call to actions. They have been demonstrated over and over again to increase growth.
It sucks that it's the case, but the internet is not the same internet of 15-20 years ago. We are in the attention economy now, and since most users expect things to be free, we have to worry about things like tops of funnels, SEO, evergreen content, and virality. The things that people have to say and do to stand above the crowd are ridiculous. And it's not just newsletters, look at the guy who made the AI Drake/Weeknd song, look at Andy Kelly's post^1 Why I'm donating $150/month (10% of my income) to the musl libc project, look at all the current advice for how to become a new published author. How you market plays a huge role in your success, and merit alone won't cut it unless your program or content is just that good.
I write my newsletter because I'm excited to contribute to a space that has provided so much for me, both financially and intellectually. I'm eternally grateful for the opportunities tech has given me and every post I make is sharing that gratitude. But I also want my posts to be heard by more than just myself, so I've got to market it, even if I'm getting no financial gain from the newsletter. The tools and techniques people will choose to employ to get seen and heard vary, and each content creator must decided where they draw the line. Maybe it's my ego that demands I have more than a dozen eyeballs viewing my posts every week, or a corruption in my soul from decades of internet consumption. But I genuinely believe in the content I post, and I want to find the largest community of people who will enjoy it too.
Reminds me of the days of going to radio shack and their insistence on having your name and zip code. One professor of mine recommended providing a particular zip code in Alaska with a name that was ridiculous or even vulgar. If your marketing teams want my info, they’ll need to pay for it.
About time I saw an article about this on HN. Honestly one of the worst design patterns since the original popups. I can't believe it works, but it obviously must do, otherwise it wouldn't be so prevalent.
Hey, as long as e-commerce stores keep giving me 10% off my first order, which I was going to place anyway, then I'll keep subscribing (and then unsubscribing) from their shitty newsletter.
I wonder how many of these popups result in newsletter subscriptions that quickly get marked as spam because nobody remembers subscribing to them and hitting the spam button is easier than finding the tiny unsubscribe link in the footer that may not actually do anything.
Also, calling for an extra-light font with pale grey type is super illegible, damn.
Not to mention the internet moves so fast you can become illiterate again.
I bet most internet users have never tried VR, crypto currencies or ChatGPT yet. Some new things will come. Some will even stick for the long run. And inertia means illiteracy will rise.
No to mentions as the old people die, new kids are born in countries were internet is not widespread yet.
After all, some parts of the world still don't have electricity.
> I bet most internet users have never tried VR, crypto currencies or ChatGPT yet.
I’ve tried none of those things and I’ve been on the internet since the last century.
Don’t feel like I’m missing out just like I don’t miss trying to figure out how to do anything useful with gopher over some crazy convoluted connection that required a 20 page pamphlet to set up.
What I try to remember though is I felt that way about everything, initially:) . My wife didn't miss or need a second monitor for our first five years together - and then she finally tried it and she cannot imagine living without one now. She fought me on Netflix as cable already had so many channels she didn't need anything more (same results once she tried it:) . I fought my best friend on vr for 2 years until he practically locked me in his basement and stuck oculus on my head and now I feel stupid for not trying sabre beat or boxing apps sooner :).
Not everything will work that way. But "I don't currently need" is not always a good / sufficient dismissal of something new.
To the original point - I do not have crypto tiktok discord tor snapchat etc... And may indeed be considered illiterate to some, even though I too have been on them intertubes for 3 decades and make my living in IT:). It was a point of pride for people I knew in 90s and 2000s to not have tried interwebs.
(I've tried chatgpt though and find it massively useful for learning!)
people who grew up with phones as the primary computing device are more tech illiterate than those who started with desktop machines. they're inherently locked down, meant for consuming not producing. they're harder to customize, harder to do things in nonstandard ways, harder to learn how they work.
e.g. hierarchical filesystems are gradually becoming esoteric knowledge for zoomers because of how much phones and always-online apps obscure it from the user.
You think young people are tech literate? They are iPhone literate but they would be hard pressed trying to do literally anything on a computer beside opening Chrome and launching YouTube.
Now that the elderly are leaving the internet, the chance of finding somebody who randomly follows instructions will make this malware trend vanish imho
/e:
apparently this is more true for Europe than it is for other locations. I mean come on, its two clicks more which you usually do once for a website. And we also had every news station explain to you why the GDPR is a good thing and a big deal.
Watch people under 30 use computers. They are just as likely to have a million newsletter subscriptions, and to click whatever makes the cookie banner disappear. HN is not a representative sample of the current generation.
I stopped expecting a demographic change as the boomers age when I looked at the demographics of gen Z and younger. The population “drop” doesn’t look so significant.
Meanwhile intelligence/knowledge will always be a rarer feature in the population. There’s just more to do in a day and no one picks the same hobbies.
I assume there are some conversion-optimization experts who think and consult data to choose the ideal timing and frequency to invite a visitor to sign up. I.e. the moment they are most likely to do so if invited.
... and the other 95% of folks who just grab an off-the-shelf email-list-invite popover widget and slap it on a web site.
This stuff has forced me to read every article in Firefox' reader mode. I am forced to tolerate missing figures and bongled formatting (from bad internal markup) because I cannot read an article if at any moment I might be hit with a newsletter-jumpscare.
It's been years I don't read emails that aren't job specific or have more than 10 lines of text. In fact, the email communication within my job is all reduced to notifications more than work, everything is handled on Slack.
One of the hardest problems in marketing is making the uninteresting interesting. So instead of solving the hard problem (being interesting), a lot of marketers focus on tactical stuff like increasing subscribes to the newsletter.
It would be great if there was a website like HN where I can go and it has all the news from the companies I am interested in and based on my subscription it would also recommend what else to be aware of.
It would be cool if there was a “syndication” format for sites to post summaries of all their new content, so then you could have a reader on the client side to collate the news feed of the day.
This syndication format would need to be really simple though. :)
Everyone does it because everyone else does it. And since everyone does it, it does not hurt metrics. And seems like noone had the guts to be the first to stop this nonsense. (also applies to layoffs?)
Or when you think you've unsubscribed, multiple times, only to see there's a "Preferences" link on their unsubscribe page, where you find out you've unsubscribed from 3 of the 48 categories of newsletters they send.
could you please give an example of "light design patterns" in such case? I've caught the thought: there are no magic bullets. And still.. what can at least softly help me to increase newsletter conversions?
I actually sent a strongly worded email to MIT Tech Review yesterday (there was an article on the front page) because they have 3 separate popups on first-entry to the site. Like, wtf? Have you not heard of timed popups (such as those that trigger past a certain element), or popups that don't make you want to immediately close the site?
It's so pathetic and such a 2005 trend, it's hard to believe people still do it in the most annoying way possible.