A pleasant Friday evening

Spending Friday night at an installfest for a beginners Python workshop... Good turnout, much geekery.

Slate.com as stalker

Slate.com has a social-media plugin thingy called MySlate. They really, really want you to use it. They put ads for it on every darn page. Sometimes when you're reading an article, a popup flies over from the side to try to get you to sign up for it.

This morning, I learned that clicking a link to read an article gets a full-page pop-up that blocks you completely because they just want you to know how incredibly amazingly awesome it is And of course, it's got the usual microscopically sized, barely-contrasting-color close button, so it keeps it right there on the screen in front of you as long as possible.

Apparently their theory is this: If they've ignored the other popups and closed them without following the links for the last 50 times, they're obviously just being coy, but if we bomb them enough with intrusive-enough ads for this thing they obviously don't want, they'll relent and give in. The behavior is exactly the same as an abusive stalking would-be lover.

Why do so many sites assume that readers have no other options, and that their precious 'content' is so amazingly unique that users will put up with any amount of harassment to get it? Dear Slate.com: If you annoy me enough, I won't give in; I just won't be back. You're dumping enough cookies on my computer already, a simple flag of "Hm, this guy's turned down joining our incredibly amazingly awesome crappy add-on 20 times already, maybe, just maybe, he's really not interested." Is that so hard?