The man who killed Google Search?

I think this article would work better if it were written entirely like textbook traditional investigative journalism. And less like the modern TV opinion personality, or the random strong-opinion Web comments in which many of the rest of us (including myself) indulge.

Just to chime in, I started reading the article due to this comment, as I wanted to check the style of the writing, but the amount of in-your-face insistence to subscribe to yet another newsletter just put me off entirely.

There was a CTA right at the beginning (which appeared suddenly after 4-5 seconds of reading so I lost my place), then another one a few paragraphs later, then less than 3 seconds after that, a pop-up to subscribe!

At that point I was so annoyed I just scrolled to the end to see how many more of these distractions I would have to endure, and then I found _yet_ another one and ALSO a bottom bar?

What gives? Is this really useful anymore? do people that subscribe after being harassed like this actually care about your articles?

I try to ignore these as much as possible, but holy cow, I just want to read this one article and maybe later _if_ I find it interesting I might read a couple more and THEN actually subscribe.

I am really annoyed by the amount of distracting stuff these "blogs" put in front you as if they wanted you to avoid reading the material. What is wrong with these people?

Aside from the annoying pop-up, I didn't actually notice the other calls to subscribe.

It's a bit of an unfortunate situation for the author, if any reasonable number of people are like me. If I didn't notice the less-intrusive efforts to get me to subscribe, and when I see the intrusive one (the modal pop-up), it makes me less likely to want to subscribe... oof.

I think the theoretical ideal from the reader's standpoint is that there's just one call to subscribe, at the very end, the idea being that if you can't make it to the end of the article, you probably aren't going to subscribe anyway.

And yet so many sites still do the modal pop-up that interrupts you while you're reading. So clearly they must work, at least well enough to get people to sign up? Then again, I do wonder how many people are so turned off by those pop-ups, people who would have subscribed, but decide not to?