Walls never solved anything

If you make me fill out a login form before you let me read your stuff, I will never read your stuff.

It doesn’t matter how many times you try. It isn’t going to work. At best, I will resent you. At worst, you won’t get the precious click-through your sales team needs to justify its existence.

Too bad.

Google, you can throw as many pop-ups in my face as you want, I am never going to sign in to your search engine.

No, I don’t want to subscribe to YouTube, either. Why would anybody pay for that? Smash that bell. Don’t forget to like and subscribe.

Abort.

Hey Substack, if I wanted to subscribe, I would. All I want to do is read the article somebody sent me. Adding ‘let me read it first’ to your BS pop-up doesn’t enamour me. It makes you look like a twat.

No, Twitter, I don’t want to sign in. You can’t profess to it being ‘the town square of the internet’ if you require me to jump a barbed wire fence to get in. It’s a site where people become their most authentic racist selves, not Glastonbury.

If I read five articles on the bounce, sure, I should sign up, pay, or give you my passport number or whatever.

But crikey, whatever happened to foreplay?

Back in the 90s, when the world was still fun, people made things on the internet for the hell of it. To bring joy to others. They called it open source.

These days, every last goddamn move is measured, analysed, and reported.

If you think it’ll ‘create better touch points to provide a synergistic experience for our investors’, put down the meth pipe and reengage with reality.

If you think measuring your sales team on how many people cave into your UI anti-pattern is a way to build a good culture in your company, it isn’t.

If you’re thinking of walling off your website, don’t.

Your piece ‘Web3 Isn’t A Ponzi Scheme, Bro, Honest’ was never worth the signup anyway, trust me.

And breathe. Don’t forget to like and subscriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiibe!