The Internet has lately upped its count of roadblocks and dead ends: obligatory e-mail subscription forms, Facebook page "like" prompts, and pages that masquerade as informational only to be a page full of ads. The individual, instantaneous outrage that an encounter with, say, one mandatory e-mail address request is infinitesimally small. But as this strategy of information culling or attention-grabbing rises, the Internetgoers begin to cry out.

One pop-up-shaming site, tabcloseddidntread.com, specifically focuses on sites that tease you with their content before blocking it with some form that requires your attention (creator Andy Beaumont further explained the thinking behind the site in a Medium post). Sometimes they require an e-mail address, other times a social media interaction. Sometimes these things are optional—I can’t outright condemn a company for asking—but there are plenty of “membership” sites whose forms cannot be circumvented: Joss and Main, for instance, or Bespoke Post, the *mints (Shoemint, Homemint, etc.), or Fab in its olden days.

This is becoming an all-too-familiar request. It starts out innocently enough—an e-mail address! It just wants an e-mail address. An e-mail address is easy to give, and newsletters are easy to unsubscribe from. Better use a real one in case you actually like anything on the site.

But a “submit” later, and it turns out it’s not just your e-mail address that the site wants. Really, if you just give your full name and make up a password, the site promises, pinky swear, you’ll be able to get through to the actual material. You hand that over too, only to find yourself in the next few days on a 20-e-mail-a-week roller coaster ride, from which you can only get off if you unsubscribe by logging in using that password you’ve now forgotten. That's too much effort; you commit the e-mails to spam so they can backfill your Web e-mail storage for eternity.



The drop-in e-mail form must be somewhat effective, given that an increasing number of sites are using it. But for every instance that results in a pleasant, productive interaction with a website that it’s a pleasure to see in your inbox, there are 10 more crowding in there whose space and time are not worth the one chair or gadget you wanted to check out once. Hence, this form becomes a dead end—seeing it means saying goodbye to whatever content remains behind it, or else saying goodbye to your ability to innocently browse anonymously. One HackerNews user commented on a post about tabcloseddidntread.com that he keeps a bookmarklet to kill pop-ups such as these.

Perhaps as annoying as the form-request dead end is the mobile-design switchback, when clicking on a link from somewhere takes you anywhere but the intended destination. Another site, Crapshaming, highlights some of these problematic areas: for instance, a page requesting that you download the relevant app instead of using the site. Too often, when we respectfully decline, the browser takes the liberty of sending us to the site’s or service’s homepage rather than to the page we initially requested.

The problem with apps is that, particularly on iOS, they can’t open links from other sources. An app is not the solution to the problem at hand, which is accessing this one particular page on the site. Nor is it the solution to the problem of accessing the site going forward, unless the problem is "I want to use this site exclusively as a source but don't want to bother with a bookmark or typing the first few letters to autocomplete the URL."

Like the newsletter form, the app request is still a little coercive, with that tiny “…or continue to the mobile site” link. But there’s no way to explain to companies that no, we don't want your app. There’s no way to opt out of this notice, no way to ask the site to leave you alone about the app.

The problem is that asking to install an app presumes a relationship. If the site is being accessed via a Google result, there’s no precedent for that request. We’re not friends, site and/or app. We’ve only just met. Maybe we have met before, but for the purposes of evading this encounter, I’ll sure pretend like we didn’t.

Just as spam is effective because the cost of producing it is practically zero and hence any positive effect is a net positive, asking to install an app costs little other than our annoyance. But a relationship built on the backs of people who agree to install an app because they are hoodwinked into thinking it’s the only way—or fill out an e-mail form because they don’t realize they don’t have to—isn’t going to last.

The app request also assumes the mobile app is so much better than the mobile site that it’s worth the cost of navigating away from the general browser to a dedicated location. Given that mobile design is still well in its infancy, that is… unlikely. Trying to shepherd customers into being beta testers for a half-baked app is not the best idea either.

Generally speaking, most people don’t want the app like that. Most people don’t want the newsletter like that. There are newsletters I've signed up for and enjoy, and I didn't get them from an unwelcome form. Each individual action of refusing these things is itself not so bad. But totted up to a few dozen times a day, I’m becoming relieved when a site doesn’t have a newsletter or app to cram in my face. This teaches us to look for the tiny X or the "get me out of here" link with no attention paid to what's front and center, and we bail when it can't be easily found. The Internet has, for the most part, my trust that when I click on something, it will take me where it says it will go (assurances that I won the lottery or that my PayPal account has been limited excepted); it’s sad when otherwise good companies erode it.