Here’s a followup for the author: follow your own advice. Remove the “Psst... Get the next post in your inbox” interruption midway through your post. Dare to remove the stupid button that follows you around as you scroll.
I counted five obvious ways to subscribe on that page alone. Five! Do you really need to shove them in our faces and in the middle of the freaking content? Do you think you get more subscribers by interrupting people and being annoying? Are those the kind of subscribers you want?
Removing stuff is often obvious, you just have to take your mind out of the “more more more, make money, attract customers, more more” gutter mindset and think “what is respectful to users, how can I help them while simultaneously treating them like human beings instead of wallets to be milked”.
I agree with you, but the data does not. These annoyances serve the business's goals really well. It's good to remember that most businesses exist to make money, not to be pleasant to us HN readers.
> It's good to remember that most businesses exist to make money, not to be pleasant to us HN readers.
HN does not have a monopoly on discerning users. We are not special. It would be unrealistic to think the number of people who care about this is but a subset of people who frequent one website.
>> It's good to remember that most businesses exist to make money, not to be pleasant to us HN readers.
> HN does not have a monopoly on discerning users
What he said (or what I understood) is the opposite:
Businesses can and will take advantage of less discerning users and they are in their right to do so because making money is their reason to exist. That's a terrible mindset that dominates the (big)tech/startup sector and the reason for the Great Enshittification. Let's see how far this can go before it collapses.
IIUC the lesson of blog SEO is that, if you want to grow your readership, copious attention-co-opting calls to action are unambiguously worth the annoyance foisted on discerning readers.
What’s respectful to users is a separate (but not wholly unrelated) question…
Even if that’s true (I’m not convinced it’s unambiguous), my points still stand: Are undiscerning readers the kind of subscribers you really want? Perhaps so if you are, as per my last paragraph, the kind of person concerned with profit over quality. If you are, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that you don’t see removing stuff as obvious and your mind only thinks of adding more junk.
> In my post history, I asked about newsletters and newsletter popups, and a few people confirmed that they work really well.
Ignoring for now that’s 100% anecdotal and that “a few people” is far from enough to make definitive claims, what post history are you referring to? Do you have a link?
> The goal is to get paying customers. We discerning readers are the high effort, low reward cohort that aren't worth losing sleep over.
I understand that. I’m lamenting we live in a world where we find it acceptable to purposefully produce shit to exploit others.
You're being overly pessimistic. It's not exploitation. You ask people if they want a thing and they say yes. It works predictably better than not shooting your shot.
Call it anecdotal evidence if you will. The matter of fact is that it seems to work well enough for people to keep doing it.
> You ask people if they want a thing and they say yes.
You call it asking, I call it nagging. And “yes” isn’t the only answer, there’s also “you annoyed me so much I’ll actively avoid you”. Have you never seen one-star reviews saying “the app keeps nagging me to review”? These have business consequences, it’s far from all positives as your responses imply.
> The matter of fact is that it seems to work well enough for people to keep doing it.
That’s like the old maxim that “nobody gets fired for buying IBM”. Just because “everybody does it” does not mean it’s the optimal approach. Things change and people get wise to common bullshit, even as this kind of “knowledge” and “best practices” keeps being shared by money-hungry pariahs. No one really tests these assumptions in depth, they just share them uncritically. If you’re so sure it’s the best approach, let’s see the data. Otherwise let’s just be honest and say we don’t know.
I counted five obvious ways to subscribe on that page alone. Five! Do you really need to shove them in our faces and in the middle of the freaking content? Do you think you get more subscribers by interrupting people and being annoying? Are those the kind of subscribers you want?
Removing stuff is often obvious, you just have to take your mind out of the “more more more, make money, attract customers, more more” gutter mindset and think “what is respectful to users, how can I help them while simultaneously treating them like human beings instead of wallets to be milked”.