Comment by tantivy
1 day ago
I'm often so flustered to be interrupted by yet-another-marketing-modal that I will just close the tab and abandon whatever task, or purchase, I was undertaking. They are actively harmful to my holistic state-of-mind and make me into a more agitated and cynical user of the web.
Who are the people who decided this is how 90% of web pages should act, and how did they win? Do so many people really sign up for newsletters when prompted?
btw, if you use https://kagi.com/ , they have a workflow for this: if you are on a site, and they popup a modal asking for you to sign up for something, you click back to the kagi.com search results, click the shield icon, and then click block. Now you'll never see that site show up again in your search results.
I've found those sites that want you to sign up for stuff usually have poor content to begin with, so this is just helping you curate out all the bad content out there.
Many people forget — Google once used to penalise sites with some abusive behaviours, so webmasters had a vested interest in having decent web pages if they wanted good rankings.
Somewhere along the line (when Prabhakar Raghavan was running search maybe?) that seems to have changed. Part of it might be cookie popups (thanks EU*). Part of it might be giving networks using Google’s own ad networks a free pass. In any case, webmasters had no reason to stop abusive/dark UX any more.
*This is not an anti-EU jab. It’s a jab at an inadequate technical measure. Given how many sites people visit, cookie consent popups do not provide informed consent, and further legitimise popups.
Paywalls used to get you deranked, too. Serving different content to Googlebot than what a user would see was considered an attempt to game it, and the domain would be penalized.
sadly sometimes it's e-commerce websites where you actually want to buy their product and they interrupt you three times with "sign up to our newsletter and get 5% off with the code" modals, like they're actively trying to frustrate me into not giving them my money
It's infuriating when you click on the search box, start typing, and the modal pops up disrupting your attempt to give them money.
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They usually succeed with me. Or if I really plan on purchasing I sign up to get the discount only to immediately opt out, so what’s the point? We’ve been furnishing a new house and so getting usually ~15% off a high ticket purchase I’m already decided on buying just for giving them my email which I also already will be giving them when I purchase is a good enough deal that I’ll do it temporarily. So much so, I can only think about how is this a good ROI for them.
That said, the sites that employ the “spin the wheel” approach to winning a discount are too much, I bounce.
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DuckDuckGo has that feature, too.
They have it hidden behind a … menu though which is unfortunate because it’s a great feature to have.
That is a decent feature.
Edit: if it influences their search ranking it may be able to be gamed though.
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I assume you mean because you have to be logged in in order to use kagi?
They do have anonimised logins for this though: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass which is a pretty good mitigation IMO. As it's a paid service of course proving you paid is a must.
And as for control, I can't agree there. Kagi offers more control than any other search engine through its lenses and the ability to influence the ranking of search results from specific sites.
I don't use their service at the moment, I'm pretty ok with my self hosted SearXNG and I like being able to customise the look and feel there too. But Kagi is excellent as search engines go.
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How does one make a comment like this, I wonder, and not substantiate.
Say more, or say less.
why would you say that?
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Uh, what? Wanna explain why?
Being obnoxious works well. Obnoxious people get elected to power. Obnoxious companies (and CEOs) generate hype that increases stock prices. Obnoxious youtubers call themselves influencers and make a good living out of it.
Or more charitably it is difficult to be successful without annoying many people.
There was some company a while back, I forget what they were called, but their claim to fame was a much higher click through rate on modal popups due to them “guilting” people with dynamic messages like “No, I don’t want to save up to 50%” or “I would rather let children starve than sign up for this newsletter”.
One, I can’t believe this worked. Two, some website owners were convinced that being patronizing towards visitors was worth the extra clicks.
Someone made a funny video about this approach with a guy at Petsmart and you hear the lady say, "Ok, just follow the prompts." and gets worse/funnier from there:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDUvykJVmMU
What I've seen lead to success:
* Arrogance
* Overconfidence
* Schmoozing with the right people
* Doing flashy work, whatever that means in a given situation
What I have seen lead to failure or, at best, being undervalued and ignored:
* Caring about teammates and your future self
* Caring about the end user and the business itself, when it conflicts with something sales, marketing, or a PM want
* Creating resilient, well-engineered systems
It's the same problem as anywhere else. Well-crafted systems are invisible and taken for granted. Saving the day by putting out a fire is applauded, even when you're the one who laid out the kindling and matches. Managers at all levels care about their own ego more than the company, product, or team.
Maybe I just spent too much time with ex-Microsoft hacks.
Early on in my career I couldn't understand why it was always the worst and most incompetent people who got promoted.
Then I realized that it's not their incompetence that gets them promoted per se, it's that if they're employed while being utterly useless and incompetent they have SOMETHING else going on that keeps them employed.
And it's that something else (whether that is politics, brown nosing, nepotism, bullying) that also gets them promoted.
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Overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer
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This can applied to a lot of sectors, look at the arts and culture for example
Yep that sounds about right.
No, the first one thrives because they know how to play politics, the second one fails because they don't know how to play politics.
You described word for word the archetypical engineer, competent technically, incompetent politically. A liability to his team and superiors in a cut-throat corporate environment. That's why they fail, they can't be trusted to not screw their team over to do the right thing.
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No, you are right
Quite true. Sundar Pichai got his start on the path to fame at Google by getting the Google Toolbar install injected into things like the Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Flash installers. Look at him now.
Oh man I totally forgot about that Toolbar scourge back in the day day! These trash piles were all over and everyone’s mom that I knew had like 3 or 4.
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Similar people who used animated banners in '00s.
And as they don’t use Posthog or any other tool for monitoring users’ behaviour, they don’t see patterns.
Yes, websites popups, asynchronous ads or autoplay videos are such annoying that someone should come with a solution. I think that a lot of people would pay for it - e.g. collected money could be redistributed back to visited sites. (As micropayment projects weren’t successful due to transaction fees.)
I use Adblock, cookies consent autoclick, Facebook antitracker - but others must be mad as they see all popups and ads.
But I understand that sites have to have some revenue stream to pay authors…
There are other approaches than ads.
(1) Be a business that makes an actual product that people want sufficiently to buy it and cover the costs, because your website is in itself the ad for your company and product.
(2) Have your small blog as a private person and shoulder the minimal cost of running a blog, if any.
(3) Have valuable content and ask people for donations, if you are not willing to shoulder it yourself.
(4) Have a community of people, who are interested in keeping things running and chipping in.
We would be better off following those approaches, than infesting everything with silly ads, which don't work anyway and are blocked by 60% or more, depending on viewership.
> Be a business that makes an actual product that people want sufficiently to buy it and cover the costs, because your website is in itself the ad for your company and product.
And how do you suppose people find out about that product?
Like, I hate the modern ad ecosystem as much as the next person, but I also understand the abstract need for the existence of advertisements of some kind.
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It's not just transaction fees, since Patreon succeeds while Flattr (2.0) failed.
I think it’s caused my data asymmetry. It’s very easy to show that x users signed up for the newsletter and to show that newsletter subscribers have a better retention rate or whatever. However it’s much harder to quantify the negative impacts, so pop ups proliferate. At least this is my experience anyway time I tried to push back against this sort of pattern.
1. Pop up demanding I make a choice about their cookies.
2. Pop up telling me my adblocker is bad and I should feel bad.
3. Pop up suggesting I join their club/newsletter/whatever.
Every. fucking. site.
The newsletter one is especially obnoxious because it’s always got a delay so it shows up when I’m actually trying to read something or do something.
Edit: Oh, yeah. 4. Pop up to remind me I should really be using their app.
Your feedback is important, Take a survey about our site… after I just got there for the first time and haven’t even seen enough content to make any worthwhile observations about the site other than “leave me alone”
Bonus points if they never tested this in mobile so they don’t realize (don’t care?) that they completely broke the website because the ‘X’ to close the popup was rendered offscreen and they broke scrolling so you can’t get to it.
For the cookies you have the Consent-O-Matic plugin. For the rest Ublock Origin is pretty effective with the optional Annoyances lists switched on.
But Consent-O-Matic is a trap doing the wrong thing. It shouldn't be accepting everything automatically, leading to what businesses want, manufactured consent, but it should be rejecting everything. Of course that's a lot harder, because of websites engaging in illegal practices / dark patterns.
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For a while I would put “f***yournewsletter@gmail.com” but then I realized no one would ever see it, and it probably just helps their click numbers.
I detest newsletter modals.
I used to do that too, but now I go to my spam folder and grab the latest phishing email and use the reply-to address. I like the idea of some sales guy following up a lead with a Nigerian scammer, but sadly I’ll never see the email exchange.
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In the days when running one’s own mailserver was the common case for small business websites, root@localhost was a fun one. “Why does this freaking thing keep filling its hard drive with our own newsletters?”
I used to go to the trouble of looking up the company's own sales contact or cxo or whatever and subscribing them to themselves, but now I just close the tab.
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You forgot to sub to push.
It’s because they care about your privacy, they want you to know just how much their care, so much so they’re ready to show you popups /s.
“We care about your privacy..”
Followed by something about 1800+ companies they want to sent my data to .. :|
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> We and the 1600 third-parties care about your privacy.
> Do so many people really sign up for newsletters when prompted?
It's the same economic model as for spam: You'd need only to get a critical number of clicks for it to become profitable.
At a small company I used to work for, a couple of marketing adjacent people occasionally advocated for a modal newsletter sign-up pop-up on the homepage.
Each time it came up, I would argue against it, believing that it was not only a bad experience and that people would click away, but that few people would actually sign up.
Eventually, a more assertive marketing person came on board, made the case for the pop-up, and won the argument. We added the pop-up.
The result?
I was wrong. 100% wrong. Not only did our site metrics not suffer in any way, but tens of thousands of people signed up to the newsletter and it became a much more important communications and conversion channel than it had been.
To this day, I still hate it, and I hate pop-ups in general, but I try to have some humility about it. I have no doubt that my previous intransigence cost the company some business.
>I was wrong. 100% wrong. Not only did our site metrics not suffer in any way, but tens of thousands of people signed up to the newsletter and it became a much more important communications and conversion channel than it had been.
You were absolutely correct that it's a bad experience, and that probably a lot of people hated it and think less of your company for doing it. But since every site behaves this way it's not a deal-breaker for people anymore. People either find a way to get around it or just suffer with the crappiness of the modern web and your metrics just go brrrrr.
Clearly the market is always efficient and optimal. This is the solution it chose.
The market did choose it's most optimal. The real burning question is who's the customer.
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The Market didn't create mandatory EU-banners.
EU law is not at fault here. At fault are the websites that feel the need to be so obnoxious in their behavior, that they are told to have those consent prompts for all the obnoxious shit they engage in. Basically, the EU is doing the Lord's work here, making these sites annoying, so that people might be persuaded to leave those websites. Unfortunately, the EU does not persecute harshly enough, so that all kinds of grifters do not follow the law and get away with it.
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The market didn't create hazard warning signs - the government did. Therefore, hazard warning signs must be abolished.
Ah yes. The Market only created "we care about your privacy by selling your precise geolocation data to be stored for 12 years" https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1817122117093056541
Me too!
I once dated a woman who had every store card, always signed up for the coupons, sign up here for free checkout, etc... and NO it did not bother her. She would see 'sign up now for 20% off!' and smile! like it positively hit her like she just won the lottery
> She would see 'sign up now for 20% off!' and smile! like it positively hit her like she just won the lottery
If you intend to purchase an item from the merchant anyway, why would you pass on 20% off?
I sign up for newsletters to get a discount then immediately unsubscribe. If merchants are going to offer a discount for me to input my email, copy the code they email me, and GMail unsubscribe why would I turn that down?
> If you intend to purchase an item from the merchant anyway, why would you pass on 20% off?
Most discounts I run into seem to be based on incredibly inflated pricess to begin with. If a shop offers me a 20% discount on something it is often cheaper to buy it somewhere else.
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This sort of person is a spend-a-holic. They use "sales" as an excuse to engage in unnecessary discretionary spending.
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Because once they have your email and can link it to your identity via your purchase details they’re going to sell that list to some marketer sleazeball and you’ll get spam from other sources until the end of time?
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the vast majority of web users arent technical like HN readers. especially boomers, they actively solicit ad's to tell them what to buy.
If it takes an ad for someone to buy something, chances are they shouldn’t buy anything.