A third phase occurs when phase two is successful enough that competitors lose traction. If you can achieve a monopolistic position in your market, then you can stop asking for attention and money, and start demanding it. Pay up or else you don't get to stream music. Sit through more and longer ads with increasingly insipid UX and privacy issues, or else you don't get to stream videos.

My view is that the Internet is in a consolidation phase where a smaller number of companies are getting a larger share of traffic, resulting in monopolistic dynamics.

As your product becomes more monopolistic, demand more from users, and you also become the company really smart people want to work at. Thus furthers your innovation which leads to more monopolistic products.

Everything on the internet is a metric (likes, subscribers, mins viewed, followers, etc.) and pushing those metrics higher gets more money from advertisers. I'm finding less and less quality content across the board. That and the pushy-ness could result in less of those metrics they all want to increase.

There's something psychotic about it all.

The culprit has got to be all of the tech and more specifically, social media. It causes more damage than most realize. It's basically a narcissism breeding machine and the advent of social media lines up perfectly with so many serious problems in society.

Ergo, companies are getting ever more pushy, trying to convert the "78% of viewers who are not subscribed" (as YouTubers put it), so that they can continue hitting their exponential metrics and stave off the effect of their existing user base spending less.

There used to be a period of “Patrick McKenzie way of doing business” during 2005-2020 (https://www.kalzumeus.com/):

- Be nice with customers,

- Reimburse when they haven’t used the software,

- Provide value, even with 3 fields on a webform,

- And you’ll get positive feedback loop into higher revenue, even with a crappy layout,

It was the time of Basecamp and Joel on Software. It was the time of Atlassian. It was the time of entrepreneurs being cool kids.

What happened is the Schumpeter cycle (40-70 years, as opposed to Kondratiev cycles, 5-7 years due to stock movements). Internet entered a more stable phase, instead of the startup phase. The cake is now limited, everyone has reached peak time spent on phones, the eyeballs you get are eyeballs someone else doesn’t. The goal is to stay big. Now, to be heard, you need a designer, not only for your services, not even for your software, but even to publish your CVE (Heartbleed). If it’s not sexy it’s not worthy.

Unless, of course, unless all of these Twitters and AirBnbs were fluff that can go away without any part of the economy depending on it, in which case we’ll just see another short cycle until we invent the final technologies/services which will stay.

Revenue alone just isn't enough. You have to turn a profit

Now they are facing existential risk and they don't really have a choice, if pissing users off is the way they can punt on revenue then they are going to do it.

Ultimately I think it signals that a lot of these companies (not ones that have been bought by FAANG) are functionally insolvent and are in a slow death spiral.

I bet many of them will start looking to illegally broker user data as that reality gets closer.

Pushiness is advantageous to companies unless it disgusts so many people into leaving that it makes up for the added conversions (in the broadest sense: a conversion can be a sign-up, sign-in, consent for targeted ads, etc.)

People seem to be too willing to put up with them. Long term brand damage is likely not much of a concern nowadays, given that it has been normalized.

Everyone is now trying to become a unicorn and exit by selling the company for $$$$, and public-facing tech companies are mostly valued based on the number of users.

When people start publicly complaining about it, ending contracts and providing the popups as a reason etc., this will change. Until then, it will just become worse.

Edit: Rule-by-metric likely also contributes. "Signups go up" is easy to measure, "users hate it" and "the popup has put the user off so they will never trust us or sign up, ever" isn't.

My 5,000 foot philosophical take is because they were never making money in a day to day business way and relying on low interest rates to inflate values through money shuffling schemes to game attention.

Over time models made it apparent they would never make long term business sense as software improved and automation took over, so it’s a medium term pump and dump jobs program fueled by low interest rates to attract information workers into providing them code shapes to train AI that writes code and let big tech own all the copyrights.

So we’ll have MPAA/RIAA owning all art, and FAANG or whatever owning all technology. A modern patronage system kind of sort of.

Not saying it’s good or bad. Just an attempt at a meta viewpoint of society.

So, a store would open in a new city with very cheap prices. That individual store might be running at break even, or even at a loss. Once the various other local competitors have been driven out of business, they start to raise the prices, and become more profitable.

When competitors start coming back to town, they lower their prices and repeat.

Different individual stores would be in different stages of this at any time, so you wouldn’t really see the strategy by comparing various profit margins from different years, unless they were changing the rate at which they were in the expand phase.

Millions to billions in this case.

Don’t forget to add in the cost of social programs their employees rely on given the abysmal pay in order to keep your numbers down.

1. Obtrusive messaging / sign up modals / exit intent modals work. I hate them. But they convert.

2. There is a large group of people who don't blink at the 'account required' messages. They just sign up.

3. If you don't have an account, you're not a useful customer. There is no reason for the company to cater to you.

I get that a newsletter modal might be worth it, but there's just no way they're not losing users by making them close 3 bullshit windows (cookies, privacy, black friday!, newsletter) before they get to useful content. A user needs to see the site before they choose to subscribe/spend money on it!

I'm happy to tell a company that doesn't want my eyeballs to pound sand. I'm not buying 200 subscriptions to yet another BS service.

Spotify in particular can go straight to hell (and the Amazon app+video stuff). If I'm paying money, don't hit me with billboards and ads.

Then I bought a device that doesn't support uBlock and got a taste of the modern web. Not pissing off your visitors has to be a competitive advantage by now.

Maybe it's only on desktop or because I have never logged in?

Lesson: target the content, not the viewer. You know the general demographics of who is engaging positively with the tweet, and you show ads relevant to that group. A small fraction of the viewers need to be logged in for that to work.

Where do designers learn to be so pushy when they are not acceptable in real life? Is there a reference guide for designers that teach these patterns?

Any data on the quality of the converions?

Like, if you convert more, but they're marginal customers who won't spend much, or quickly bail, and it negatively impacts conversion of high end "good" customers, it could easily be a net loss (not even counting things like reputational damage).

In case anyone hasn't seen it, here's a godsend to get rid of that crap: https://github.com/t-mart/kill-sticky Works on mobile, too.

It's a cancer that has infected the industry under the guise of being data driven. We've thrown out basic reasoning in favor of juicing vanity numbers. And then the people responsible for driving the product into a ditch fail upward to another company, get a bigger title and salary, and start grabbing at the wheel of a new car to repeat the cycle.

On Playstation starting the YouTube app now gets you a full screen unskippable ad before even reaching the app

Prime video show you ads even if you're a paying customer

Every now and then I listen to a podcast to fall asleep, 50% chance I'll be jump scared by a 0.1kbps ad in German that has the volume 4x louder than the podcast itself

Google removing video previews form YouTube links in search results so it's harder to visually ignore video tutorials when you look for a written one

The golden age of internet died a while ago but until recently it was still somewhat useable, it's degrading rapidly these days

I think this is surprising to people for two reasons:

1 - We've been told the "companies sell your data" narrative for so long that many people don't realize that Facebook and similar mega companies don't actually profit from selling your data. They target ads, and they keep their customer data close because it's their competitive advantage. Note that there are a lot of companies that do sell your data, but they're not the ones people generally think about (Facebook, etc.). It's a fundamental misunderstanding of these business models.

2 - The whole economy was unusually hot for many years, largely due to low interest rates. Funding was available everywhere in huge quantities, which drove tech companies into pure growth mode even if serving their websites came at a loss. That story doesn't work forever, though, and now we're seeing those companies turn the knobs to look for profits.

It's actually kind of amazing that we've been able to use gigantic Big Tech services, developed and operated by engineers making $$$ total compensation, for so long without actually paying for much at all. I wonder if we'll look back at this era as an unusually 'free' period of the internet, much like how we look back at the early days of VC-subsidized Uber as being very cheap relative to what it actually costs to buy these services today.

It is said that if you don't pay, you aren't the customer, but the product. Perhaps YOU never were the product either, but your mind and actions are?

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/technology/facebook-ma...

Tangentially, just last week I received an email from a product company that I'd purchased goods from before. It had probably been over a year since my last marketing email from them. I click on the link in the email to check their products, but don't buy anything primarily because I can't easily figure out the advantage of one particular product over the other. For the remainder of the week and this past weekend I have received one to two emails a day with additional offers and new products. Will I visit their website again? Probably not.

I think most people here know this. The difference doesn't actually matter as much as the companies think, though.

Does anyone on HN actually believe big tech companies are selling data as opposed to using it to target ads? I thought we were over that long ago.

For sure companies are still selling data from their platforms. Does that include what the company would consider to be a user's data? I doubt they are selling private contact data associated with their users but any user activity on their platform is likely being sold off in bulk. Whether they 'actually profit' from those deals is an accounting game.

I thought I was going to miss them, but I haven't.

It makes me feel a little sad every time I don't look at something there. There are a lot of Medium posts written by people that clearly thought (or think) that they're writing a blog that's available to all, when they're not.

just fyi: old.reddit.com accesses ALL subreddits

I use Apollo on iPhone, but I've heard Sync for Reddit is good on Android.

The sad thing is the next generation never sees what’s been taken from them, and our absence merely solidifies the new norm.

Why do you see intrusive cookie banners on every website? So they can force people to hit accept and get their GA metrics higher. Why do you see login required on many pages? So they can get their login / registration numbers higher. Companies might lose some anonymous viewer traffic when requiring a login, but the money is largely made off of targeted advertisements for logged in users so they want to push you in that direction and harvest that data.

You might be deterred into not using a service by that popup, but the data shows that enough people will just go ahead and sign in or register and so it's worth it to the company to add it. One of the first companies I work for had me add a big modal that asked you to sign up for their newsletter when you visited their homepage after you scrolled down for a second. I thought it was intrusive, but it absolutely got people to sign up so I couldn't really argue with it.

I wonder what the end game is for all of this. Is this just the way things are going to be from now on? Is the pushiness going to die down a little bit?

It certainly makes me want to visit sites less. If there's any friction now on a site, such as a pop up requiring sign in, I simply don't have the patience to try it out and more often than not just close the tab. It makes my experience of reading dead-tree books and magazines such a joy nowadays. I know I can flip the page without anything popping up.

At this point it seems like actual email newsletters are kind of a nuisance to them, and they're trying to be more Medium than Medium.

Lest you think that’s cynical, note that all the companies focused on what is likely to be our “next generation computing experience” are all advertising giants.

My take on is that it’s a trend to follow the big guys, just like other faang-led movements like microservices etc

- Browser privacy / VPNs lead to an arms race where account. age/reputation become critical signal.

- Apple/Google play store apps provide device integrity check which improves confidence in account reputation / Ad targeting.

- Everyone already has a Google/Apple account and are unlikely to convert if they wont just signup via SSO which takes couple of clicks.

yeah, I basically just stopped using the site. I used it for a while when job hunting, but now I maybe login once a week or something. otherwise, since the site blocks anonymous use, I simply don't use it.

> Instagram

I have an account, but I don't post or comment, so I am not going to log in just to view shit. So I basically don't use the site anymore. If someone links to a post I will check it out, but usually you get login prompt after viewing like 5 posts, so at that point I am just done with Instagram for the day.

> Twitter

Twitter gives you like 10 comments before login prompt, so I just leave the site for the day after that.

> Medium

Medium is horrible, so nothing lost.

At least... this will work until Elon kills the API, which I fully expect to happen eventually...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33724569

I've not seen one for awhile now, but I have no logged in ever.

Reddit, Pinterest et all definitely were super pushy before the economy changed to the worse.

How did the "wild west" of the internet become New England Puritan culture of 1620? Makes me sick.

Substack and Medium are clear poster children for this.

I think we are seeing the advancing erosion of (generic)ad-supported free content and services. Which is not necessarily a Bad Thing.

If you can't be bothered to identify yourself with an account, then these services do not get much value from you, and many times see you as loss/overhead, so limiting access to their content is logical on their end.

A company starts with a product, sees growth and investors pour in with the expectation of accelerated growth (and hence profits), at some point their product can't really attract many more customers, it grows until the market it is in starts to saturate and growth slows down. They need to chase other verticals to validate to their shareholders they are still aa valuable and so it begins the slow downfall of the product, not necessarily of profits.

I really don't see another way given the incentives of the current crop of capitalism, a public company that stops chasing growth will see their valuation drop and with that the board might decide it's time for a new CEO. If the board sticks to their guns and stop chasing growth, a mutiny of shareholders will ensue to replace the board.

The incentives are wrong if what you expect is the best product ever, they're aligned to chase growth as the only metric and everything goes to Goodhart's Law from there.

Quora.com

Luckily both of those websites have almost no value to me.

And what happened to BugMeNot [0] ?? Saved a lot of time.

And Mailinator [1] email addresses are now blocked from so many websites.

These types of demands have C-suite loud talkers written all over them.

[0] https://bugmenot.com/

[1] https://www.mailinator.com/

Modern tech is a non-stop sales pitch, and it keeps getting worse.

I think that the modern business model is to grow at any cost, take over a market, and extract a toll. We're experiencing the toll being raised.

They want your info so they can track you more easily. This is mostly about selling ads.

Because companies dominate the product and so they feel they can get away with it? Because companies grow and lose their first principles? Because of the pressure to always be growing?

It's like passive income or free money.

Why? Capitalism. Money to be made capturing a particular market. Quarterly goals at each company to increase X by Y%, so how do we do that...

Best way to stop people from scraping (and getting fines) is to require an account.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_capitalism

Yes, this trend is increasing. And it's essentially a long-term consequence of the laissez-faire capitalist model of attempting to govern almost entirely via the profit motive. It strongly incentivises businesses to prioritise profits at all costs (and those who don't will be outcompeted by those who do). And while most businesses will prioritise value-generating activities in their attempt to generate profit, eventually that isn't enough and so they turn to aggressive user/consumer hostile approaches.

Can we do something about this? Yes, we can regulate and heavily penalise companies who do this. We can also bias the economy towards smaller companies (through progressive taxation on businesses) who are much less likely to engage in such activities as they tend to be more connected to their customer bases and subject to much stronger competitive pressures.