[hermitdev]

I had this happen today, in the wild, after visiting a HN linked Wired article. A few seconds on the page, a banner appears, blocking about a quarter of the page. Close it, start reading the article. 30 seconds later, the original banner reappears, again blocking a quarter of the page, and I close it again. I continue reading, think I hit a "click to read more button", another click. Keep reading, maybe two thirds of the way through the article, get bombarded with a modal dialog asking me subscribe to an email newsletter.

Who the fuck is implementing these things and how do they justify this shit as contributing to the user experience? I came to your aite to read an article, not to be bombarded with ridiculously distracting prompts, banners and subscribe prompts - and this completely ignoring the intrusiveness of the ads with autoplaying video and audio.

Shit like this really makes me rethink visiting sites like Wired, though they are by far not the only ones doing this, just the one that happened to me today.

Why do web devs think this a good thing to do? Pull this crap in a desktop, sure as he'll would uninstall.

/rant

[WrtCdEvrydy]

> Who the fuck is implementing these things

A developer being told by management that Optimizely showed this design gives a 20% boost in conversion.

I don't trust this tooling after creating 3 control groups, one A group, one B group and having the three control groups report different values (Control 1 was better than Control 3 but worse than A but better than B)

[whymauri]

I actually thought the name 'Optimizely' was a hypothetical parody startup, haha.

[WrtCdEvrydy]

Nope, it's owned by google and it's fucking expensive (surprise!)

[alanh]

when i see an interesting article, i just send it to Pocket (or Instapaper). I do this partially for time-shifting and/or text-to-speech purposes, but avoiding crap like this is a major benefit.

[joegahona]

It's not "devs" -- it's shortsighted business staff focusing on short-term goals rather than longterm value and user happiness. Now that Wired is paywall and has been upfront about its shift to paywall and affiliate revenue, be prepared for more dark patterns like the ones you articulated.