[yarianluis]

This article makes points that sound fine on the surface, but ignore reality. There's a very good reason why a lot of sites do this and won't stop any time soon--it works. The article claims some effects to "conversions, usage and how people feel about your product" but is very light on the details of how it actually affects those things.

Getting a user to sign up facilitates a whole range of options (promotional emails being just one of them) that help drive user retention and engagement. I am not advocating making your product obscure until they sign up. The value proposition of your product should be clear, regardless of whether someone signs up or not. But it is not clear that making them signup before they can actually use it for themselves decreases conversion or usage.

The complaint made here will become ever weaker as "Sign Up with Google" and other single-sign-on services become more widespread. Signing up in those cases takes a single click, and my experience is in many cases instantly personalized with my data from other services. This might make some HN denizens cringe, but the average person seems to not mind.

[Silhouette]

I don't understand why the parent is getting downvoted. It is one of the few rational, realistic posts so far in this discussion. [Edit: In the time it took to write this post, a few other people now seem to have expressed similar views.]

Of course visitors would rather try everything for free indefinitely and never give anything up in return. That's obvious.

On the other hand, in today's world, web sites are often transient things you find via social networks and search engines and visit only briefly the first time. Even if you find a site interesting, if you forget to bookmark it somewhere obvious or you found it at work but get distracted by the time you reach home, you might never think to go back. From the site owner's point of view, if subsequent more deeply engaged visits never happen and they have no way of re-engaging with genuine prospective customers, they could be losing a huge proportion of their potential revenues.

There's always a balancing act in these things, trying to demonstrate enough value to a prospect as easily as possible that they engage, yet not giving away so much that they have little incentive to engage and don't see enough extra value to justify becoming a paying customer. Trying to get people to sign up when they don't even know what you do yet is probably not a good strategy, but neither is letting them see so much that they wind up just circulating around your site and never converting.

Ultimately, if being a little more aggressive about getting people to the next stage of conversion puts some people off, that's good. Those people probably weren't going to sign up anyway, and all they were doing was wasting your resources and polluting your data about genuine prospects. It sounds harsh and unpleasant to say it so bluntly, but it's probably the reality if you're running a modern commercial site that offers genuine value but isn't an essential service where visitors are certain to come looking again later.