It’s still obnoxious behavior that IMO should not be rewarded with a share. On my device, the “ad” was offscreen. Highly suboptimal UX. I saw the "Continue without an email address" prompt and thought “fuck them”, crashing my attention sphere like that. And forcing me to scroll-scan to get my place back. The web is full of startup how to stories; I’ll just wait for the next one to pop up on HN.
I mean that's fair enough, but do you have the same complaint about companies like NYTimes or other paywalled content? I only mentioned it because numerous people seemed to be very offended by it which seemed a bit odd to me considering you can just close it, but maybe that's just me.
NYT doesn’t force me to lose my place in the middle of reading. They have the mini bar at the bottom and when you’re out of free reads for the month, they are up front about it and don’t let you read a word. They also don’t offer to spam me in exchange for reading the article.