To be fair, you can just click “continue reading” which will close the popup, but Substack does a pretty well job applying UX anti patters that some readers don’t notice tiny greyed-out link and just walk away.
I think the fact that Substack is both widely popular with authors and provides one of the few modern viable platforms for these authors to get paid, just further proves the point of the article.
Yeah but they're trying hard to make it invisible.
Plus you have trained yourself to know 'continue reading' means 'close this damn popup'. So have I, but there was a time I was closing such sites with the article unread.
I think the fact that Substack is both widely popular with authors and provides one of the few modern viable platforms for these authors to get paid, just further proves the point of the article.