Sorry you feel that way. I'm an independent creator and agree there's lots of room for improvement on everything I build, sometimes I do the thing that works/is quickest to do, move on, and then revisit when I have time - the design of the site, web optimisation techniques, a11y best practices, offline support, less gimmicky call-to-actions, marking deprecated features are examples of things I defo want to prioritise and get done - but I agree with you, I don't want to annoy anyone so I should focus what you mentioned first.

Btw using mobile emulation I tried iPhone 5/SE/6/7/8/X, and on none of those did the signup form take up the whole screen. Maybe it's because the emulation doesn't have browser frames? Either way will eventually shrink that down so it doesn't occupy so much screen real estate.

> Why if I’ve never even seen your site, do you think that the first thing I want to do is divulge my email address to you and receive spam?

Don't know why you think my emails are spam! I think there are nicer way to convey your message, but appreciate you are sharing your thoughts. I myself often use uBlock origin to select + remove sticky headers/sidebars/ads which often detract from the main reading experience.

> Don't know why you think my emails are spam!

Remember, we don't know anything about your site yet. We haven't read any of your content yet. How would we possibly know that your emails might be worthwhile?

It's like when an app asks you to rate it the first time you've opened it. Maybe it is a good app, and maybe it deserves a great rating after a week of use. But it's a very bad first impression.

> I myself often use uBlock origin to select + remove sticky headers/sidebars/ads which often detract from the main reading experience.

So then the question arises: why do you have a popup on your site that does exactly that?

To answer your q (btw it's not a popup), I tried to explain in my comment you're replying to:

> sometimes I do the thing that works/is quickest to do, move on, and then revisit when I have time

Knowing me, it was probably something where, at the time of building (2015), I saw elsewhere - naively assumed it was a good idea/it works, copied it and moved on. I didn't give it as much thought as I could have. Now it's a case to prioritise that and improve it, along with some other much needed optimisations.

I wouldn't worry about it. It's something almost all blogs do, because it works! HN is the minority in... just about everything, but particularly how they feel about folks promoting their own work. 99.9% of readers just close the popup if they don't want to sign up. You're not driving anyone away who wasn't going to pick some other random thing to get overly angry about anyway.

> Btw using mobile emulation I tried iPhone 5/SE/6/7/8/X, and on none of those did the signup form take up the whole screen.

I should have specified here: I didn’t open the site all the way, instead I did a long press on the link from HN which shows a preview of the page in a smaller-sized frame. This frame only showed me a signup link, so it was enough for me to determine your site must not be worth my time, and I closed the preview. I do this with nearly all links to sites I haven’t been to, exactly because it’s easier to close the preview when it’s something like this signup link.

> Don't know why you think my emails are spam! I think there are nicer way to convey your message, but appreciate you are sharing your thoughts.

Others have chimed in to clarify here, but I haven’t seen anything on your site yet but a signup form. How am I to know it’s not spam?

If you’re like me, you don’t just go putting your email into random fields on the web, because the probability a given signup link will eventually give your email away to scammers is really high. If not because the site you’re on is a scam site, then because the database it’s using will probably get hacked some day. Or maybe they’ll sell the site to somebody else some day, and the whole mailing list goes with it. Who knows. But a general policy I have is, I just don’t give my email out to people I don’t trust. (And I just arrived at your site, how would I know to trust you? Because you say so?)

Since this sub-thread intrigued me... I went to check this out. 11” iPad Pro running latest iOS gives me: https://imgur.com/ZSGMrC0

The only actual content is one headline at the bottom. Mailing list signup occupies the rest of the screen.

That's really useful, appreciated.

The basic reason this is incredibly tempting to do is that it works. Not just a little, but it works radically better than the alternative or politely or subtly asking or providing the option tastefully at the bottom of the article or whatever.

I don' really have a good model of why, but empirically it does. And it's not what you'd think either: it's just be spam or bot or something. It's real people who actually do it, and do it a huge percentage of the time, and who collectively make a categorical difference to your viewership.

It's weird, honestly. I wish I understood better why it was such a strong effect.

Thanks for answering.

Follow-up questions if you don’t mind:

- How do you know it’s not just bots filling in email addresses?

- Do you get analytics showing how many people leave the page when they get the signup dialog?

To be clear, my information is out of date because I don't do this kind of work anymore, but my understanding is that it's largely the same now.

1. I know because I sold to my list, and the people who signed up from intrusive signup popups were just as likely to buy my products as anyone else, and their virality was the ~same as other sources (ie. the rate at which they shared my stuff). I guess it's possible that an army of bots was sharing my posts and buying my products, but..?

2. Yes, bounce rate is a basic thing almost everyone monitors, and yes, intrusive popups increase bounce rate. But less than you might imagine, and not nearly enough to turn the tide of increased signups.

Like I said, I find it counter intuitive myself, and have no real explanation, just made up stories about it. All I know is that what I consider to be intrusive signup processes have had a life altering effect on my bank account.

My speculation (I have no data) as to why it works:

Showing this to everybody shows it more reliably to those who actually will sign up. It is hard to target the right people reliably (maybe they deleted their cookies, maybe they use a different device...) so if you just show it to everybody the right people will definitely see it. First time visitors still won't sign up, but significantly more established readers will.

Because when someone is asked to do something, generally their first reaction is to do it because that's how they've been conditioned. Especially if they don't really understand that saying no is a totally valid response.

You see this exploited constantly by GDPR popups designed to default to giving the site everything and requiring the user to put an ounce of thought into opting out.

It is by definition not spam if you sign up to receive it. Let's not use the wrong words to discuss thing because we get a bug up our butt about a website popup, of all things.

It happens because it works. If bounce rates went up by any statistically significant measure that wasn't more than offset by conversions, sites would stop doing it. There are entire businesses around teaching bloggers how to monetize their blogs, do you think they're not testing the effect this has?

> My policy is to always close the tab when I get an email signup form, and so far I’m sticking to that.

And it's your loss.

FWIW, I turned on Reader mode by default in Safari's prefs in the system settings. It gets around these things by just showing the content of the page without any of the junk.