Sorry you feel that way. I'm an independent creator and agree there's lots of room for improvement on everything I build, sometimes I do the thing that works/is quickest to do, move on, and then revisit when I have time - the design of the site, web optimisation techniques, a11y best practices, offline support, less gimmicky call-to-actions, marking deprecated features are examples of things I defo want to prioritise and get done - but I agree with you, I don't want to annoy anyone so I should focus what you mentioned first.
Btw using mobile emulation I tried iPhone 5/SE/6/7/8/X, and on none of those did the signup form take up the whole screen. Maybe it's because the emulation doesn't have browser frames? Either way will eventually shrink that down so it doesn't occupy so much screen real estate.
> Why if I’ve never even seen your site, do you think that the first thing I want to do is divulge my email address to you and receive spam?
Don't know why you think my emails are spam! I think there are nicer way to convey your message, but appreciate you are sharing your thoughts. I myself often use uBlock origin to select + remove sticky headers/sidebars/ads which often detract from the main reading experience.
Remember, we don't know anything about your site yet. We haven't read any of your content yet. How would we possibly know that your emails might be worthwhile?
It's like when an app asks you to rate it the first time you've opened it. Maybe it is a good app, and maybe it deserves a great rating after a week of use. But it's a very bad first impression.
To answer your q (btw it's not a popup), I tried to explain in my comment you're replying to:
> sometimes I do the thing that works/is quickest to do, move on, and then revisit when I have time
Knowing me, it was probably something where, at the time of building (2015), I saw elsewhere - naively assumed it was a good idea/it works, copied it and moved on. I didn't give it as much thought as I could have. Now it's a case to prioritise that and improve it, along with some other much needed optimisations.
I wouldn't worry about it. It's something almost all blogs do, because it works! HN is the minority in... just about everything, but particularly how they feel about folks promoting their own work. 99.9% of readers just close the popup if they don't want to sign up. You're not driving anyone away who wasn't going to pick some other random thing to get overly angry about anyway.
> Btw using mobile emulation I tried iPhone 5/SE/6/7/8/X, and on none of those did the signup form take up the whole screen.
I should have specified here: I didn’t open the site all the way, instead I did a long press on the link from HN which shows a preview of the page in a smaller-sized frame. This frame only showed me a signup link, so it was enough for me to determine your site must not be worth my time, and I closed the preview. I do this with nearly all links to sites I haven’t been to, exactly because it’s easier to close the preview when it’s something like this signup link.
> Don't know why you think my emails are spam! I think there are nicer way to convey your message, but appreciate you are sharing your thoughts.
Others have chimed in to clarify here, but I haven’t seen anything on your site yet but a signup form. How am I to know it’s not spam?
If you’re like me, you don’t just go putting your email into random fields on the web, because the probability a given signup link will eventually give your email away to scammers is really high. If not because the site you’re on is a scam site, then because the database it’s using will probably get hacked some day. Or maybe they’ll sell the site to somebody else some day, and the whole mailing list goes with it. Who knows. But a general policy I have is, I just don’t give my email out to people I don’t trust. (And I just arrived at your site, how would I know to trust you? Because you say so?)
Btw using mobile emulation I tried iPhone 5/SE/6/7/8/X, and on none of those did the signup form take up the whole screen. Maybe it's because the emulation doesn't have browser frames? Either way will eventually shrink that down so it doesn't occupy so much screen real estate.
> Why if I’ve never even seen your site, do you think that the first thing I want to do is divulge my email address to you and receive spam?
Don't know why you think my emails are spam! I think there are nicer way to convey your message, but appreciate you are sharing your thoughts. I myself often use uBlock origin to select + remove sticky headers/sidebars/ads which often detract from the main reading experience.