The interstitial popup needs to be delayed until about 750ms after the first scroll action for that extra insult.

You forgot the sign-up "CTA" button bold and wide, with a microscopic "Sign-in" button somewhere in the footer.

The worst patterns:

1) scroll hijacking (this should be a felony) 2) stupid cookie popups/banners 3) useless hero images (clients love them, users hate them)

I made this 6 years ago but it still applies today.

Cookie banners are a great example of regulation gone wrong.

Me having to make a legal agreement with every website is absurd and totally predictable.

Damn, yeah this is exactly how I make my websites look.

If the traffic to the site drops dramatically because of the “features”, we would have seen the features removed already.

Yeah, I hand-rolled my site. Not even Google analytics. I have absolutely no idea if anyone even visits my site.

Oh well.

Maybe also it could randomly jump to different vertical scroll positions while you are reading an article?

There are more creative ones. Check out https://shellbox.dev