Looking at your post and the HN discussion, I am also of the same impression.
7,698 karma · joined December 29, 2009
Email: matteo@purecreek.com
If I look at Google's guidelines, my articles follow all of them: in-depth, well-researched, demonstrating personal experience, better than other articles appearing in the search results. And yet, they were "penalized" by this update for who knows what reason.
I looked into it and some other websites benefited from the update, so who knows what changes they made and why.
One thing I noticed in the first chart displaying visits is that there is a sharp drop in April, which is just after Google deployed its last core update: https://status.search.google.com/incidents/Cou8Tr74r7EXNthuE...
Anecdotes are not data and correlation is not causations. That said, it's still useful to look at correlation between price and service all around the world, instead of making assumptions that might seem logical at first, but fail to consider the counterintuitive effects of a policy.
[1] https://nltimes.nl/2023/07/13/netherlands-public-transport-2...
Focused on iOS development, Swift, and SwiftUI
That does not guarantee are be able to cook it without burning it.
Granted, the guide needs to deliver some value and not just be a bait and switch. If it doesn't deliver any value, it's pretty much guaranteed you will lose that subscriber.
To give you a real example: I offer a guide about design patterns and most of my subscribers come from that pop-up. And they are developers, showing that while pop-ups are not popular on places like HN, they are definitely not despised by all developers.
I myself sing up when I find something I am interested in. For example, I got a nice free guide about photoshop blend modes which was very useful when I got it.
And sure, you can always rationalize anything, but I still see a difference between a pop-up that offers something the reader might like against a dark pattern that forces or tricks someone to sing up.
Actively disqualifying people that are not a good fit is a vital part of any business. The people that get easily annoyed are going to be a huge pain at every step, while the real customers buy silently.
Also, when people have a true need, the pop-up is not an annoyance. I do agree that "subscribe to our newsletter" is not a great pitch, but it's a problem of content, not of method. If you get a pop-up on a website offering you a solution of a pressing problem you have, that pop-up is not an annoyance, but an opportunity.
And finally, even if one would be interested in measuring how many of these annoyed visitors there are, that's not really something you can measure. Conversions, instead, are a concrete metric.
Disclaimer: I use them and so do many of my competitors.
"Does a poor job of increasing conversions" is the opinion of someone that has never looked at the data. You can be sure that the people interested in conversions run analytics and A/B testing on everything. If these pop-ups did a poor job and there was a better alternative, you can be sure that everyone would have already migrated to that alternative.
The "rule of seven" can also be used to counter her argument. That is precisely why businesses try to get the email of visitors: to have more interactions. Otherwise, for the vast majority of visitors, the first visit would be the only interaction they will ever have.
"Works against user goals" might be true for short term goals like jumping through the most amount of content. However, users have different goals and short-term ones are often not the best goals. A pop-up might address other long-term goals the visitor cares more about than going to yet another web page.
But more than anything, these pop-ups serve business goals because most of these websites exist only thanks to their revenue. Without them my business would probably not be viable. I assume that many accept the small annoyance of a pop-up as the cost of keeping the websites they like running. And if the pop-up appears when the user is about to close the window, it does not even stop a visitor in his tracks. He can still close the window without any extra click.
They can do what matters to them without cheating the system and getting rewarded a degree for it.
As for what mask do, if it was that easy, there wouldn't be the need of so many studies. But that is not even the claim here. The article says mask mandates make no difference.
Even if we assume that masks work, people wear them wrongly, they reuse them instead of using clean ones, fidget with them and then touch other parts of their face. There are plenty of reasons why a mandate could not work.
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
Unlike your study from November 2020, this one is from January 2023.
I once forgot a briefcase on the street out of a bar in the center after work. I realized only when I got home. I got back there, sure that I would not find it anymore. I come from Italy and that is just the norm there.
Not only I found it, but someone moved it out of the way of the bike rack where I forgot it. So it was definitely noticed, and yet nobody took it.
Another anecdote. Once at a dancing event, the organizer just left and went to sleep. He told me that if people wanted a drink, they could just grab one from the fridge and put money in the money box. Where I come from, the fridge would have been emptied and the money box would have disappeared.
It's not a matter of urban vs. rural. It's a matter of culture.
I don't think that refusing to speak about H.P. Lovecraft or teach you how to make a bomb will mitigate any risk, especially since you can coax it into revealing that information using properly worded jailbreak prompts.
First they build their case against libertarians going at length against Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Larry Page.
Then, they point at the hypocrisy citing Garry Tan, David Sacks, and Bill Ackman.
These are different people.
Where is the hypocrisy of Thiel, Musk, or Page? It makes me think there is none since they can't provide examples and they have to switch. But I guess building an article on the second set of people, which is far less known than the first, would have not attracted enough clicks.