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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 afte

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.

sourcecodeplz 4y ago
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.
- criddell 4y ago
  I would think the MIT Tech Review readers wouldn’t be total tech noobs…
  - gumballindie 4y ago
    In this case MIT TR product managers are.
- CM30 4y ago
  What's the conversion rate though? How many of those people continue to read the emails sent out by said site? Feels like you'd get a lot of dead subscribers and opt outs (and spam reports), not an active community or follower base.
  - jabroni_salad 4y ago
    If it is higher than zero somebody somewhere can justify it.
    - zeroego 4y ago
      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.
      - Cthulhu_ 4y ago
        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).
        zeroego 4y ago
        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.
        olyjohn 4y ago
        All the streaming services have shitty interfaces. How many times do these fuckers need to poorly re-invent the music player?
      - jabroni_salad 4y ago
        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.
  - nscalf 4y ago
    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.
  - datavirtue 4y ago
    They don't read the emails. The scan the subject and maybe the body for value...really quick.
- user00012-ab 4y ago
  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.
  - Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    I've got addons (ublock) and a Javascript bookmarklet that removes all fixed elements, it's fairly effective.
    - metadat 4y ago
      This sounds great! Can you share the code?
      - jabroni_salad 4y ago
        NTHNer but here is the one I use. It's old but it still works a treat: https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ (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]); } } })();
        err4nt 4y ago
        I rewrote this to be a little more succinct: document.querySelectorAll('body *').forEach(tag => getComputedStyle(tag).position === 'fixed' && tag.remove() ); - you can use `forEach()` on the NodeList that `querySelectorAll()` returns - you can use `remove()` directly on the DOM node you want to remove
        Xeanort 4y ago
        Here for an improved version: https://github.com/t-mart/kill-sticky https://github.com/t-mart/kill-sticky
- cryptonym 4y ago
  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.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_promoter_score https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_promoter_score
  - idopmstuff 4y ago
    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.
  - tyfon 4y ago
    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.
    - Eisenstein 4y ago
      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.
- dazc 4y ago
  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.
- Groxx 4y ago
  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.
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  > 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.
- m463 4y ago
  I'm reminded of Feynman's book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" We went into the bar, and before I sat down, I said, "Listen, before I buy you a drink, I want to know one thing: Will you sleep with me tonight?" "Yes."
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  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?
brightball 4y ago
Fwiw, I have a substack and I don’t like the email pop up thing…but it does work.
- arbitrage 4y ago
  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? What does the data show?
  - brightball 4y ago
    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: https://blog.carolina.codes https://blog.carolina.codes So far, I've used it to... - Announce the conference reboot - Poll the community for best dates and structure - Announce the official date and venue - 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. https://blog.carolina.codes/p/code-header-challenge https://blog.carolina.codes/p/code-header-challenge 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.
solarkraft 4y ago
> 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.
quaintdev 4y ago
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.
- solarkraft 4y ago
  Rich Harris has put it nicely: The web doesn't suck because of frameworks, it sucks because of capitalism. https://youtu.be/uXCipjbcQfM?t=1m29s https://youtu.be/uXCipjbcQfM?t=1m29s The advantage of Gemini and consorts is that simply nobody has tried to commercialize it because they have almost no users (like the early internet).
  - yurishimo 4y ago
    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.
- hiatus 4y ago
  What sorts of resistance does Gemini have? How does it prevent ads and commercial use?
  - pluijzer 4y ago
    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.
    - quaintdev 4y ago
      This. Early days of Internet were exactly like this.
sBqQu3U0wH 4y ago
>it's hard to believe people still do it in the most annoying way possible. Considering that the internet is almost unusable without an adblock, this does not surprise me at all.
jrochkind1 4y ago
> 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?
- auggierose 4y ago
  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.
  - ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
    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
    - auggierose 4y ago
      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.
      - Timwi 4y ago
Grimm665 4y ago
> 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.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  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.
  - birdyrooster 4y ago
    I don’t want to use unsolicited synchronous interfaces ever. For any reason.
    - paulryanrogers 4y ago
      Nor do I, though I can see the argument from those paying for the hosting and content.
- rchaud 4y ago
  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!
  - 4y ago
tootie 4y ago
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.
- ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
  a better analogy might be a dude on a soapbox on a street corner demanding you give him your phone number because you heard his yelling: if your yelling is worth a subscribe, people will find a way focus on making the content that way, rather than feeling entitled to the personal info of everyone who heard your yelling
  - tootie 4y ago
    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.
    - ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
      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
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > Content sites are just trying to reacclimate people to recognizing that they just provided value. By chasing them away?
  - tootie 4y ago
    By chasing away lookie-loos and building a platform for engaged users.
idopmstuff 4y ago
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.
- calvinmorrison 4y ago
  People understand the value prop with e-commerce when they put in their email
- dexterdog 4y ago
  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.
  - idopmstuff 4y ago
    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.
tmaly 4y ago
It makes not sense to use popups. I think an inline form with a call to action is a better method. Does anyone test their websites anymore? Especially on mobile.
lawkwok 4y ago
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.
aimor 4y ago
You don't think Google did this on purpose, do you?: https://ibb.co/JvY26s2 https://ibb.co/JvY26s2 Am I seeing double?: https://ibb.co/0y2xLWX https://ibb.co/0y2xLWX 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! https://ibb.co/yFb9QBd https://ibb.co/yFb9QBd
Suppafly 4y ago
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.

sourcecodeplz 4y ago

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.

criddell 4y ago
I would think the MIT Tech Review readers wouldn’t be total tech noobs…
- gumballindie 4y ago
  In this case MIT TR product managers are.
CM30 4y ago
What's the conversion rate though? How many of those people continue to read the emails sent out by said site? Feels like you'd get a lot of dead subscribers and opt outs (and spam reports), not an active community or follower base.
- jabroni_salad 4y ago
  If it is higher than zero somebody somewhere can justify it.
  - zeroego 4y ago
    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.
    - Cthulhu_ 4y ago
      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).
      - zeroego 4y ago
        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.
        olyjohn 4y ago
        All the streaming services have shitty interfaces. How many times do these fuckers need to poorly re-invent the music player?
    - jabroni_salad 4y ago
      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.
- nscalf 4y ago
  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.
- datavirtue 4y ago
  They don't read the emails. The scan the subject and maybe the body for value...really quick.
user00012-ab 4y ago
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.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  I've got addons (ublock) and a Javascript bookmarklet that removes all fixed elements, it's fairly effective.
  - metadat 4y ago
    This sounds great! Can you share the code?
    - jabroni_salad 4y ago
      NTHNer but here is the one I use. It's old but it still works a treat: https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ https://alisdair.mcdiarmid.org/kill-sticky-headers/ (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]); } } })();
      - err4nt 4y ago
        I rewrote this to be a little more succinct: document.querySelectorAll('body *').forEach(tag => getComputedStyle(tag).position === 'fixed' && tag.remove() ); - you can use `forEach()` on the NodeList that `querySelectorAll()` returns - you can use `remove()` directly on the DOM node you want to remove
        Xeanort 4y ago
        Here for an improved version: https://github.com/t-mart/kill-sticky https://github.com/t-mart/kill-sticky
cryptonym 4y ago
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.
Cthulhu_ 4y ago
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. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_promoter_score https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_promoter_score
- idopmstuff 4y ago
  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.
- tyfon 4y ago
  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.
  - Eisenstein 4y ago
    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.
dazc 4y ago
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.
Groxx 4y ago
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.
kitsunesoba 4y ago
> 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.
m463 4y ago
I'm reminded of Feynman's book "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" We went into the bar, and before I sat down, I said, "Listen, before I buy you a drink, I want to know one thing: Will you sleep with me tonight?" "Yes."
jrochkind1 4y ago
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?

brightball 4y ago

Fwiw, I have a substack and I don’t like the email pop up thing…but it does work.

arbitrage 4y ago
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? What does the data show?
- brightball 4y ago
  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: https://blog.carolina.codes https://blog.carolina.codes So far, I've used it to... - Announce the conference reboot - Poll the community for best dates and structure - Announce the official date and venue - 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. https://blog.carolina.codes/p/code-header-challenge https://blog.carolina.codes/p/code-header-challenge 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.

solarkraft 4y ago

> 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.

quaintdev 4y ago

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.

solarkraft 4y ago
Rich Harris has put it nicely: The web doesn't suck because of frameworks, it sucks because of capitalism. https://youtu.be/uXCipjbcQfM?t=1m29s https://youtu.be/uXCipjbcQfM?t=1m29s The advantage of Gemini and consorts is that simply nobody has tried to commercialize it because they have almost no users (like the early internet).
- yurishimo 4y ago
  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.
hiatus 4y ago
What sorts of resistance does Gemini have? How does it prevent ads and commercial use?
- pluijzer 4y ago
  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.
  - quaintdev 4y ago
    This. Early days of Internet were exactly like this.

sBqQu3U0wH 4y ago

>it's hard to believe people still do it in the most annoying way possible. Considering that the internet is almost unusable without an adblock, this does not surprise me at all.

jrochkind1 4y ago

> 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?

auggierose 4y ago
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.
- ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
  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
  - auggierose 4y ago
    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.
    - Timwi 4y ago

Grimm665 4y ago

> 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.

paulryanrogers 4y ago
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.
- birdyrooster 4y ago
  I don’t want to use unsolicited synchronous interfaces ever. For any reason.
  - paulryanrogers 4y ago
    Nor do I, though I can see the argument from those paying for the hosting and content.
rchaud 4y ago
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!
- 4y ago

tootie 4y ago

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.

ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
a better analogy might be a dude on a soapbox on a street corner demanding you give him your phone number because you heard his yelling: if your yelling is worth a subscribe, people will find a way focus on making the content that way, rather than feeling entitled to the personal info of everyone who heard your yelling
- tootie 4y ago
  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.
  - ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
    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
JohnFen 4y ago
> Content sites are just trying to reacclimate people to recognizing that they just provided value. By chasing them away?
- tootie 4y ago
  By chasing away lookie-loos and building a platform for engaged users.

idopmstuff 4y ago

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.

calvinmorrison 4y ago
People understand the value prop with e-commerce when they put in their email
dexterdog 4y ago
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.
- idopmstuff 4y ago
  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.

tmaly 4y ago

It makes not sense to use popups. I think an inline form with a call to action is a better method. Does anyone test their websites anymore? Especially on mobile.

lawkwok 4y ago

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.

aimor 4y ago

You don't think Google did this on purpose, do you?: https://ibb.co/JvY26s2 https://ibb.co/JvY26s2 Am I seeing double?: https://ibb.co/0y2xLWX https://ibb.co/0y2xLWX 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! https://ibb.co/yFb9QBd https://ibb.co/yFb9QBd

Suppafly 4y ago

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.