I thank Mozilla almighty for Firefox' 'Inspect Element' feature allowing me to block that intrusive element full of social networking cruft that was obscuring much of the content. If it wasn't for that, I wouldn't attempt to read this article at all.

Presumably some browser/window size configurations wouldn't have a chunk of article text blocked by an obnoxious window demanding I shill this article on a bunch of websites I never visit, so I figure it's bad website design rather than an intentional retro throwback to 1998-style popup-heavy browsing, but still - if you made that site, and you're reading this, make it not happen anymore.