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Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?

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Re: Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?

#21

Post by anm89 »

amflare wrote: post #6

IMO its because the demand for ever growing growth (not only must we grow on last year (growth up 5%), but our growth must be faster (growth trajectory up 5%)) is running headlong into a shrinking economy. Anonymous users have always represented the best potential growth since they already use the service, so convincing them to convert should be easier than convincing someone who has never heard of the product. Ergo,…

I think this is it. None of this stuff mattered when all of these companies were cool with losing unlimited money.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?

#22

Post by eastbound »

amflare wrote: post #6

IMO its because the demand for ever growing growth (not only must we grow on last year (growth up 5%), but our growth must be faster (growth trajectory up 5%)) is running headlong into a shrinking economy. Anonymous users have always represented the best potential growth since they already use the service, so convincing them to convert should be easier than convincing someone who has never heard of the product. Ergo,…

But every business is always looking to maximize, but why is there a sort of contraction, and why now?

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.

Re: Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?

#23

Post by switchbak »

themanmaran wrote: post #2

Things I've noticed: 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.

The obtrusive modals are a brutal trend in modern web design, especially the whole-page cookies thing. Now I sometimes see 2-3 modals stacked ... does anyone actually stay on such a site?

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.

Re: Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?

#24

Post by durnygbur »

I figure there are two main reasons. First are aggressive bots and scrappers, here the login walls are only a side effect. Everyone wants to be "smart" and takes but no one gives. Second are marketing and managers demanding more tracking and profiling. This is the New Internet for now, I don't see any seeds of paradigm change at this stage. Users will adapt unfortunately, at most they'll be pissed off by losing track of how many accounts they are signed in to.

Re: Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?

#25

Post by TylerE »

themanmaran wrote: post #2

Things I've noticed: 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.

Re: 1.

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).

Re: Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?

#27

Post by TylerE »

AlexandrB wrote: post #15
themanmaran wrote: post #2

Things I've noticed: 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.

What honestly bothers me more is how "Yes/No" dialogs are increasingly being replaced by "Yes/Later", even in paid products/services. Seems like companies are done with even pretending to take "No" for an answer when they want to push something on you.

Even more evil, I've started to see things (mostly apps) use "Miss Out" instead of No, explicitly and literally feeding FOMO.

Re: Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?

#28

Post by Pfhortune »

svnpenn wrote: post #13

> LinkedIn 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 u…

For twitter, I highly recommend nitter.net (or other nitter instances) for anonymous reading. You can drop-in-replace the `twitter.com` with `nitter.net` for any twitter URL, and it will just work.

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

Re: Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?

#29

Post by brk »

(Anonymous)Visitors is not a very useful or valuable metric. Blindly pumping content into the ether isn't going to convert to value, or cashflow.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Are companies becoming increasingly pushy? If so why?

#30

Post by qark »

I work for a popular web app. We restricted anonymous access just a few weeks ago. The argument was that “no other major platform offers so much without login”.

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

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