Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank god, I stopped clicking twitter links due to this crap
Reddit and Instagram is even worse. Besides cookie boxes (which all have different UIs and rarely a good no button) it's probably the most annoying thing on an ad-blocked internet. How do the designers who work at these tech companies not understand that repeatedly annoying non-user visitors doesn't make them want to sign up? Nor incentivize others to link to it?
It absolutely does, and that is precisely why they keep doing it. It doesn't work for the kinds of people that browse hackernews, but that's not their core audience anyway.
It's like saying ads don't work because you and me never click them because we use an adblock. Clearly they do work, and quite well...