From the guidelines:

> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.

Your snarky comment doesn’t belong to a sanguine forum like HN.

If someone’s being gracious enough to share their hard work with the rest of us, we should appreciate it, especially on HN.

The popup shows up only when you scroll down to the bottom at the end of the article.

I not only got a dark pattern cookie consent popup, but also the newsletter popup after just scrolling a few lines down. That was enough for me to close the page, sorry.

That’s still not an experience people want to read about.

don't shoot the messenger

Yes, I do want to read about that, because it tells me that this is an article I do not want to click on.

As a reader I do not want to contribute to the analytics and click count of a website that uses these engagement tactics.

nobody can judge other's experiences.

In this case it is judged, though, by the HN guidelines and the many users who support them.

I would argue that hard work, when combined with inappropriate practices, should not be appreciated. It's unfortunate that hn rewards these sorts of behaviours.

What about the consent form that has individual preferences for over 200 vendors with no way to opt-out of data collection in bulk?

The page works perfectly fine without javascript enabled.