[TeMPOraL]

Looking at all the hate toward sing-up overlays one can wonder why websites still do this. The answer is simple, an unfortunately very sad.

Users value content. That's what they visit the webpage for. However, businesses like this (i.e. the ones inventing ideas like sign-up overlays) do not care about the content. They might say they do, but that is a lie. Website content is only a means to an end - extracting money from users. It's a bait for the fish.

This fundamental mismatch of values is - I think - the main reason why people still can't get why websites implement annoying sign-up pop-ups and stuff. Such companies don't really want to provide value to their users, they only pretend they want, to the extent that maximizes profit.

I'm fine with people earning money and charging for their work. But I believe that this relationship should be up-front. Running heavy maths to figure out the optimal amount of pretending-we-care to maximize profits is not only annoying, but dishonest.

I wish there was a way to reward businesses that actually focus on benefit to their customers, while punishing the ones who only pretend. Right now the only thing I can do, whenever I see annoying sign-up box or other signs of someone doing "clever things" to extract money from me, is to say "fuck you, I'm not coming back".

As for the usability part, [0] summed it up perfectly:

"(...) you have no fucking idea what a website is. All you have ever seen are shitty skeuomorphic bastardizations of what should be text communicating a fucking message."

[0] - http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

[logicallee]

Good businesses don't care about the content the same way that Michaelangelo didn't care about content: he would paint, or sculpt, or whatever. Whatever the patron would pay for.

Naively, you could say he just didn't care that much about either (painting or sculpture). If he really cared, he would have commmitted to it and not just done it because that's where the money was.

That's obviously dumb though. Business owners aren't forced to be in the business of attracting intelligent, engaged readers to great, engrossing content. They could be operating a porn video feed.

The truth is this: great content doesn't write itself, and web contents are perfectly within their bounds to try to monetize the experience or convert their visitors to a bit more.

Is there a way to do it in a more subtle, less distracting fashion? There might be.

Let's work on it. I don't mind the overlay on the economist web site's articles, at the moment, for example - do you? Is it still too much?

How do we allow customers to know that the content they are engaging wtih for minutes at a time is worth something to write, and requires a level of relationship, while still letting them read them quickly and effortlessly?

A subtle hint about this that would let people realize what is going on, while allowing them to engage without distraction, would be good for everyone.

[aj_ycombinator]

While each of your objections are a matter of personal preferences and there can be discussion around them, you are certainly not entitled to label asking for sign-ups as 'dishonesty'. Using unnecessarily strong words without knowing the entire context (did you read the entire post or have seen the nature of our content or where we are trying to "milk" you?) is uncalled for. We don't track user with cookies, don't block our content (the overlay is dismissible), aren't showing any advertisements. Dishonesty is when I claim that I will not share your personal information with third party and still do so. How a sales process should be driven is a function of both being ethical as well as being cognizant of human behavior / market paradigms / reality. Both have to co-exist. And just to tell you what the actual behavior of our target segment is, they don't see everything in such stark light of suspicion (and neither do we misuse that) and thinking themselves to be the sheep. You can definitely judge us, but you could be doing that with lesser bias and pre-suppositions.

[cdr]

They obviously want signups at all costs, but I can't see where they monetize these signups that makes it worth degrading the user experience. Signup numbers for VC investment, then eventual advertising?

[eloisant]

That, plus sign-up is usually the top of a funnel to ask you for money later on.

So they want to have as many signup as possible, and they also want as many conversion from free users to pay users or whatever. The reasoning is that if they double the number of signup, they'll double everything down the line (forgetting that the "quality" of signups matters and making a user create a phony account just to access one page one time is useless).

[TeMPOraL]

Probably. New users is a primary "growth" metric, and as we all know, startups have to grow fast to get VCs to invest.