Substack has a pop-up that’s really in your face and kind of annoying. I figured that Substack has probably A/B tested that pop-up thoroughly, and decided the tradeoff is worth it.

So I copied it for the Ghost theme running on this blog, and made it slightly less annoying. (Instead of a popup, it’s a full viewport shown to logged-out users, with only one clear thing the user can do other than scroll: subscribe!) I discovered that it worked staggeringly well: 10–20x more subscribers than the normal opt-in forms.

I congratulated myself for my incredible audience funnel and moved on to other things, like trying to write more than 6 posts per year, and keep my server from crashing.

After a while, I started to worry. Goodhart’s Law states, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”. Conversion rate is probably the most common target metric.

Maybe it works so well because people don’t realize they can just scroll down? Maybe they think they’re stuck there, and it is just a newsletter? Maybe I am selecting an audience of people who don’t know how to scroll down, while driving away the people who are most like me: the people who don’t like marketing, popups, captchas, and anything that smells like a “funnel” or “content”.

I turned it off for a long time. Then I turned it on. There’s a 50% chance it’s on the homepage right now.

I’m going to go on an entomological tangent. Suppose you want to fill an aquarium with cool bugs. You are lazy and ask someone else to do it, and you pay them by the bug. You don’t specify the task quite clearly enough. They optimize their acquisition, put out flypaper next to the compost pile, and fill your aquarium with dying flies.

This seems to be what many internet content businesses are doing.

No no no no.

The coolest insects are the ones that are out in the grass, and the coolest wild insects are the ones that are sneaky and hard to catch.

The person with the most teeming and vibrant aquarium is the one who goes crawling around getting mud and grass-juice on the knees of their jeans, finding the bugs where they are. Or, maybe, attracting the bugs to them. But if you just dig through the compost, it will all be worms. Good for the metrics (if you’re into bait fishing or vermiculture), but missing the rest of the ecology.

The capturing part of this metaphor is problematic, but has some truth.

If you capture a stink bug or cedar bug, it will spray you. Skunks, also, don’t like to be captured. (The list of creatures that dislike captivity is long, and I am on it.) But cedar bugs are pretty nifty creatures, if you just hang out with them without making them feel trapped. Cedar bugs like me thrive as RSS subscribers, who can come and go as they please.

If you want to write for a living in the 21st century, you have to be a ridiculously good writer, or a solid writer with great marketing.

Hence, the flypaper popup I installed on this blog, which tripled my readership — but at what cost?

How much quality makes up for how much lack of quantity? How much growth hacking odor will your best readers tolerate before they unsubscribe?

Where is the balance between having no one find the things you make, and making the wrong things and having too many of the wrong people like them? The balance, where you make the things that matter, and get them to the people who care about them?

I recently updated my social media byline to “get your answers questioned”, and I seem to have been hoist by my own petard.