[themanmaran]

Things I've noticed:

1. Obtrusive messaging / sign up modals / exit intent modals work. I hate them. But they convert.

2. There is a large group of people who don't blink at the 'account required' messages. They just sign up.

3. If you don't have an account, you're not a useful customer. There is no reason for the company to cater to you.

[AlexandrB]

What honestly bothers me more is how "Yes/No" dialogs are increasingly being replaced by "Yes/Later", even in paid products/services. Seems like companies are done with even pretending to take "No" for an answer when they want to push something on you.

[TylerE]

Even more evil, I've started to see things (mostly apps) use "Miss Out" instead of No, explicitly and literally feeding FOMO.

[JohnFen]

Things like that are a clear and obvious indicator that whoever is producing it are scumbags and shouldn't be trusted even a little. I never feel FOMO from them.

[elcritch]

Even traditionally legitimate sites are doing it more often now, unfortunately. Still, I view it as neediness or manipulation though and it makes me think less of the site.

[nicbou]

It's interesting to see tech behave in ways that would get people banned from pubs. I'd worry if I dated someone with a product manager's understanding of consent.

[avereveard]

Even game mods now come with intrusive "subscribe to my patron" popups there's no rock unturned for monetization

[quickthrower2]

"npm i" even had someone begging for a job in standard out.

[switchbak]

The obtrusive modals are a brutal trend in modern web design, especially the whole-page cookies thing. Now I sometimes see 2-3 modals stacked ... does anyone actually stay on such a site?

I get that a newsletter modal might be worth it, but there's just no way they're not losing users by making them close 3 bullshit windows (cookies, privacy, black friday!, newsletter) before they get to useful content. A user needs to see the site before they choose to subscribe/spend money on it!

I'm happy to tell a company that doesn't want my eyeballs to pound sand. I'm not buying 200 subscriptions to yet another BS service.

Spotify in particular can go straight to hell (and the Amazon app+video stuff). If I'm paying money, don't hit me with billboards and ads.

[nicbou]

My website has none. I thought it was normal because I've had the "annoyances" uBlock filters turned on for so long.

Then I bought a device that doesn't support uBlock and got a taste of the modern web. Not pissing off your visitors has to be a competitive advantage by now.

[niklasd]

The last point always confuses me. Twitter can show ads to me without me having an account. Instead, they block me from reading on Twitter after a few tweets, thus loosing my eyeballs. Maybe that's compensated by signups, but it certainly didn't work for me.

[wincy]

Good news, one of Elon’s top priorities is to remove this nagging stuff and make Twitter fully usable via browser again.

[anigbrowl]

Believe it when you see it, not when you hear it.

[bombcar]

I was just able to doom scroll Elon's feed back into October, so maybe it's only enabled on some accounts?

[anigbrowl]

Try it and see, I suppose. My experience of it is that you can read an individual conversation but if you just look at some random person's timeline it will only show you a few tweets before asking you to log in.

[Arrath]

That specific behavior seems to have gone away when musk culled a whole bunch of microservices a couple weeks back. I know well what you're talking about and it annoyed the hell out of me, but now its gone! For now, on desktop browsers, anyway.

[bombcar]

That's what I did (I think, I don't know how to use twitter) - went to https://twitter.com/elonmusk and kept spinning my mouse wheel down.

Maybe it's only on desktop or because I have never logged in?

[nonameiguess]

That seems to not be true. I just made the mistake of not noticing a Hacker News post was to Twitter a few minutes ago, clicked on it, and couldn't even read the Tweet because it was covered by a modal telling me to turn on notifications, which I'd never seen before. What can Twitter even notify me of if I don't have an account? Everything that is ever Tweeted globally? That would probably be billions of notifications a day.

[acedTrex]

Twitter makes more money showing TARGETED ads, ads that dont have a demo targeting are not nearly as valuable

[klyrs]

Old school webmasters (perhaps this is redundant phrasing) know that's okay. Back in the day, you'd say "I'll put your animated gif on my site for $500 per month" and if you had a networking forum Cisco or whoever would happily pay that secure in the knowledge that your viewers were in the market for their product.

Lesson: target the content, not the viewer. You know the general demographics of who is engaging positively with the tweet, and you show ads relevant to that group. A small fraction of the viewers need to be logged in for that to work.

[aparks517]

Print magazines worked on the same principle; the ones that are left still do. I subscribe to one magazine. In it, all of the editorial content is up front and the back third is nothing but ads. I still read them -- sometimes I start there! -- because I genuinely want to know what's going on and what products are available in the niche this magazine covers.

[bee_rider]

This seems like so obvious an observation that I don’t get why advertisers haven’t made it. If I’m in work-mode, and you show me an ad related to a hobby of mine, I have a 0% chance of clicking it. If you show me an ad related to my work, it is probably more like .01%. Which is still an infinite-times improvement.

[klyrs]

It's because there's an arms race to maximally exploit the massive amount of data they're collecting about individuals. The more specificity you can claim, the more the ad-buyers will pay. I'm not convinced it's doing any good, but I think a draw-down would be a hard sell for all parties involved in that market.

[jrs235]

Re-targeting ads seem like a joke. Many times I've already bought their product or competitor's and am no longer interested. Hopefully they are paying for click throughs and not impressions.

[belkarx]

Conversely, making accounts with a VPN has become essentially impossible, which is extremely limiting even if the rationale makes sense

[wolpoli]

We now also have sign-in modal appearing after clicking on a button labelled "Generate 4 images". There are clear contextual clues that images will appear on the side after clicking on the button.

Where do designers learn to be so pushy when they are not acceptable in real life? Is there a reference guide for designers that teach these patterns?

[nicbou]

Maybe look at Calm Technology? NN group?

[TylerE]

Re: 1.

Any data on the quality of the converions?

Like, if you convert more, but they're marginal customers who won't spend much, or quickly bail, and it negatively impacts conversion of high end "good" customers, it could easily be a net loss (not even counting things like reputational damage).

[coldpie]

> Obtrusive messaging / sign up modals / exit intent modals work. I hate them.

In case anyone hasn't seen it, here's a godsend to get rid of that crap: https://github.com/t-mart/kill-sticky Works on mobile, too.