I understand the sentiment, but those email signup begs are to some extent caused by and a direct response to Google's attempts to capture traffic, which is what this article is discussing. And "[sites like this] is what ruins content" doesn't really work in reference to an article that a lot of people here liked and found useful.
OP has a point.. Like-and-subscribe nonsense started the job of ruining the internet, even if it will be llms that finish the job. It's a bit odd if proponents of the first want to hate the second, because being involved in either approach signals that content itself is at best an ancillary goal and the primary goal is traffic/audience/influence.
Like I said, I understand the sentiment in the abstract. But my actual experience is that many good quality essays are often preceded by a gimme-yer-email popup. That's not causal - popups don't make content better - but it does seem correlated, possibly because the writers who are too principled to try to build an audience without email lists already gave up.
I'm not sure if I relate to the sentiment - in my experience, everything nowadays asks with mailing list ads. Every website from high-quality blogs to "Top 10 Best Coffee Makers in Winter 2024" referral link mills asks for your email. Worst thing is, many of them are already moving onto the "next big thing", which are registration gates. I feel like a huge portion of all Medium-hosted posts are already unreachable to guests because of that.
It's probably people who waste others' time with baseless complaints like this that completely ignore substance that have ruined the internet, and not the fact that authors of interesting substantive content that actually gets consumed, whom also ask for some form of support that have ruined the internet.
It's not a baseless complaint to observe that the internet was better when you could simply click on a website and read it, as opposed to dismissing several popups about tracking cookies or like-and-subscribe.
Lacking substance is one symptom, harassing users in various ways is another symptom. The common cause is prioritizing traffic/audience/influence over content. It's not like it's impossible to provide substance without popups. It's fine to have a newsletter, but the respectful thing is to let me choose and don't push it at me. This is obvious.. I'm not sure why you're so eager to defend the sad new normal as if this was unavoidable
