Yikes, I'm the founder of this company (one of my colleagues wrote this piece) - just saw it appear here. We shipped a rather huge change to the website recently (we're trying to let other people post stuff too), think we accidentally made it janky and missed this. Will fix when the right person wakes up - he's west coast US! Sorry for QA via HN :)
FWIW, fully a quarter of the screen is taken up by fixed position elements that are entirely irrelevant to a reader. When I see this on sites I want or have to use, I add cosmetic rules to delete the sticky elements. When I see it on sites I don't have to use, I close the tab.
I don't claim that this makes it a net loss for you from a money standpoint, nor that I'm representative of a majority of your market, but I _do_ suspect I'm the sort of potential customer that isn't easily studied in an A/B test.
If you're talking about that obnoxious left sidebar, I agree. The table of contents widget on the right too. The article itself is squeezed between a bunch of shit I don't want to look at. It makes the page feel crowded and like it's trying to get me. Please just let us read the content! If it's any good, it'll speak for itself.
Can confirm this. When scrolling down to about half-way through the article it jumps back up. It appears to happen when the blog list on the left is loaded (which takes like 5 seconds to load).
I can see why the dev didn't notice this when debugging locally, as there it probably loads the left menu without delay.
