Webdevs, why, why o why, do you have to ask me to subscribe to the newsletter before you even let me read the first 5% of the article? Do you really thing people read the first sentence and then go "yes, i definitely want to receive spam from this website! here's my email address!" or what?
Modal windows are just popups reborn.
It blows me away that none of the web browsers are trying to fix this. We eliminated popups back in the 90s/2000s, but now they're back again and no one cares.
Anyway, install the Kill Sticky bookmarklet, it gets rid of all the incompetent webdev crap like popups and those stupid sticky headers/footers: https://www.smokingonabike.com/2024/01/20/take-back-your-web...
But like all recurring viruses, they are more difficult to eliminate and continue to spread and popup when you least expect it.
Webdevs aren't the ones making that decision unless they happen to own the whole company, product managers and marketing demand those popups. Also, unfortunately, they do tend to work better than other options like passively showing signup forms below content or on a dedicated page linked off of something.
404 does it because they don’t like AI scraping. https://www.404media.co/why-404-media-needs-your-email-addre...
I call BS on that. I can get the entire text of the article by just viewing the source, no email address needed. Even if it was somehow needed, it's trivial for a scraper to circumvent that.
I believe the sentiment they published at that link but it doesn't seem like the right method technically, and it conflates "AI is stealing from us" and "we need financial support," the latter of which has been true for independent journalism much longer than LLMs have trained on the web.
Because their other option is to wait until they have no leverage at all and then try to convince you to volunteer for spam