Closed the page before reading the article for the fact that they popped up a modal advertisement window with a black background - ironic is that Adblock removed the ad content so it was a white box on a black background.
And I'm sick of going back in time ten years when ads would pop up or under the page you were viewing. Then ad blockers were invented. Then popups were re-invented in the form of modal dialogs.
Seriously. If you're so [self-]important that you can't be bothered to close a modal window, you clearly don't have time to be reading articles from HN.
I wouldn't refuse to read an article because of something like that (unless it made it overly difficult to read the article), but I think bad design habits do need to be called out. They seem to be becoming more popular on sites that really should know better. If your design choices make the article uncomfortable or annoying to read, it detracts from the content.
You're not the target audience (if you're the average HN reader, that is, don't actually know you personally.)
HBR gets a high price for its ads because its audience is older businesspeople (decision makers on high-priced services and products) who consider its content high-worth and authoritative (this attitude rubs off on the ads around the content.) Having a gating ad that scares away people who don't value the content enough to close it probably increases the price per ad more than enough to make up for the slightly decreased viewership of the ad.
Calling out bad design habits would be useful if people making those decisions were HN regulars. Otherwise you're just preaching to the choir and distracting everyone from the content.
What about "if you're so [self-]important that you can't be bothered to disregard comments that don't conform to your idea of how the discussion should go". (I don't believe that BTW, surely there's space for discussion and meta-discussion).
Forget Adblock, just use NoScript. The article was perfectly viewable for me.
Not trying to start a holy war, NoScript isn't a universal cure. There is plenty of content linked to from HN that requires JS. (However, I don't bother reading most of it!)
I think the consequences of using NoScript outweigh the benefits. I don't think I could stand 40% of the sites I use being unusable due to lack of JavaScript, that's not how it's meant to be.
If the site doesn't work, you can enable scripts one by one until it does. Usually you just have to allow scripts from the domain you're visiting, and you can prevent most abuses that use third party scripts that way.
Occasionally you'll run across a site that has scripts from 30-odd domains, and after enabling a few, it still doesn't work. Those sites aren't worth visiting.
But NoScript gives you the degree of control you want. It's possible to enable all scripts by default, disabling them only when you feel there is a problem. Or you can use it for information purposes only, so you know what third party domains have scripts running on that page.
I'd rather say it's a lack of resources and interest in addressing a minority and jumping through hoops to make functionality that wouldn't work without JavaScript work without it. I'm not saying it shouldn't work when JavaScript is disabled, but some sites have functionality that cannot be easily (or quickly) reproduced without JS. They don't do it because they hate you or because they hate proper user experience.
The problem is not the minority you are thinking of: most of that minority can enable JavaScript if it's genuinely required.
The problem is people on poor or mobile connections - the majority - who have to suffer that little bit longer to wait for the blocking JavaScript to load and then burn down their limited battery for the sake of parallax scrolling or a marginally prettier icon or button on the static text site they are trying to read.
JavaScript-requiring designers do hate proper user experience.