Yeah well my life would be sweeter if I conned pensioners out of their savings. It's always easy to follow how people explain their unethical decisions - but it doesn't make them an inch less unethical though and people that use your line of thought to do harmful things are scum.

Sign-up popups are annoying, but not inherently unethical. Nobody's on the street because one dev tried to convert people.

We’re not talking about sign-up pop-ups though. Those are an annoying fact of digital life that isn’t _really_ that bad.

We’re talking about creating a flow and perception that you can use a thing built around an assumption that you then intentionally change at some next step. It’s a breakdown of an implicit contract you create with the user, for the purposes of farming data, getting more signups, increasing conversions, or whatever else. It’s just dishonest.

A few years ago a family member contacted me about this very thing. They had found a nice looking website to accomplish a thing. The website had published pricing for packages of their service, and provided a “free” sample. Except after you spent all the time to get that free sample running, you couldn’t actually use it without paying.

If feels to me like estoppel: misleading someone to do something to then use against them later.

It is a tragedy of the commons. My Internet is shittier because other people are trying to monetize it. Same as my back yard and the air I breath.

What I hear you saying is that you're OK with harming others as long as it lines your pocket.

Harming? By asking for an email address?

No, not by asking for an email address. By not asking for the email address until after the user has invested time and energy into things.

That's pure psychological manipulation, and is harmful.