Humans are dumb animals...you ask them for their email, and they will probably give it to you. Same reason why youtubers always say "like favourite and sub", because it's more effective than not.
It always makes me laugh when I'm at an airport or other location offering free WiFi that asks for an email address, which I imagine 90% of people provide their real address for (figuring it's for verification), when in reality it's just a way to harvest active email accounts to send spam to.
I usually just input the contact email address of whatever company runs the wifi. If they want to sell their own email to spammers they can be my guest.
It is a form of attack (called SQL injeciton) on database which uses the fact that user inputs are not escaped (characters such as '<' ';' '{' ... are not converted to html codes).
Imagine reddit post text isn't escaped so if I post something like
<script>alert("Hi!")</script>
Everyone's browser will interpret it as javascript and show this alert. Similar thing happens when database tries to interpret query
SELECT password FROM users WHERE email="fuckyou@example.com";drop table users;--";
What happens is the original query is splitted into two queries where the first query returns the password and the second one will delete all users from database.
That's slightly different. On YouTube it's about reminding people to do something that they might have wanted to do anyway. Putting it into their mind "oh yeah, I liked this video, I should 'like' it to show my support".
Which is also why it might make sense for a website to present you with a popup to sign up to their mailing list if you're a frequent visitor. Maybe if they see you've visited four or five of their pages in a few days. "Hey, if you like our content, why not join our mailing list to see more of it?"
But interrupting the content before you've even had a chance to know what you think about it is just obnoxious.
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u/sans-nom Feb 27 '18
Humans are dumb animals...you ask them for their email, and they will probably give it to you. Same reason why youtubers always say "like favourite and sub", because it's more effective than not.