Are you as sick as I am of stupid modal pop-ups interrupting almost everything you try to do on the web these days? Here’s the email template I’ve started sending to any site owner who I think might be receptive about the issue. Feedback welcome.

Hello NAME,

I was just trying to read this article on your website: URL but stopped pretty quickly because of the annoying modal pop-up window which showed up a few seconds in.

Decades worth of user research data has shown modal pop-ups to be a terrible, off-putting design pattern which will do nothing but irritate and drive away readers and users: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/popups/

Apologies for the weird email but I’m really sick of these annoying modals which pervade online life these days and decided that, in cases like this (where the website has an easily-reachable, potentially receptive contact person who is likely to both care about the issue and be able to implement a better solution) I would just write to them in the hope that it might result in the situation being improved.

All the best,
YOUR NAME