I’m perplexed by one particular piece of user interaction design: the subscribe-to-my-newsletter popup.

Not that it exists, but rather the timing with which people choose to deploy it. Substack is the worst example here, because they show it pretty much as soon as you start scrolling. This is (a) deliberately interrupting me in the middle of a task, so my motivation is to just close the box and return to the task, and (b) I will never want to subscribe to someone’s newletter before I’ve finished reading what they wrote.

I imagine that this is something that has been a/b tested to death, and “wait until the end to show the subscribe popup” presumably converts readers at a lower rate. It’s wild to imagine such a person existing, though.

That said, given that it’s Substack, maybe it’s a mismanaged nazi thing?