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by afandian 3576 days ago
I hope this gets used for good, not evil. Lots of sites (you know, those sites, they crop on on HN from time to time) flash up "give me your email address so I can send you spam" boxes before I can read the blog post. Or when it thinks I've gone somewhere else when in fact I just opened it in a new tab. Or if a momentarily switched away. I mostly close blogs that aggressively try to sell me things, but sometimes I want to read the content.

Conversations about what's an app and what's a document aside, I'd much rather documents didn't know anything about how they were being displayed.
2 comments
nathancahill 3576 days ago
It's unfortunate. However, it's been shown over and over to have the best conversion rate for getting people's emails, so it's a trend that's only going to become more popular from here (until the next high conversion pattern is developed).
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Eric_WVGG 3576 days ago
Not necessarily. Google just announced that, in the name of accessibility, they will start penalizing sites that use them.

https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/08/helping-users-easi...

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globuous 3576 days ago
I think it's only for mobile versions of a website:

"To improve the mobile search experience, after January 10, 2017, pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as highly."

They define what is acceptable and not right after. I like the move though !

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halomru 3576 days ago
Sure, it's great in that one metric. But annoying me with the offer to get a bunch of emails I don't want isn't making me like your site.

Even if I was the odd one and nobody else would mind those pop-ups: In the context of multiple experiments showing that a few hundred milliseconds additional page load time have a very real impact on engagement rates it stands to reason that interrupting the user experience with unrelated email sign ups should have a similar effect.

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Senji 3573 days ago
Adblock fixed that for me.
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spython 3576 days ago
I am using this technique to lazy load and unload videos on my site[1]. Since there are many videos that autoplay on scroll, some mechanism is needed to stop loading a video that has been scrolled over.

I am using onScreen which I found more efficient than alternative solutions.

[1] http://rybakov.com/blog/

[2] https://github.com/silvestreh/onScreen

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