I also bounced after getting signup clicking #programming FYI.

Either make those 3-5 categories free or make them with like 24h refresh because so far I saw that your page has 5 not interesting articles and wants me to create an account.

This is too little to give you my precious email address or apple throwaway mailinator email.

From my perspective I still have a backlog of 200 items in my rss reader for today. It would be better for you to show slightly more value of what your product gives us. As from the comments it seems that it was interesting for a lot of people to at least try and open the page!

In money, not in time.

> So I feel like it's a fair ask

You do. But a lot of the people you'd like to sign up don't. You can argue all you like here, but it's not going to change many minds. And it certainly won't change the mind of anybody who just sees your home page and bounces.

So given that you're not going to win the argument, what's your next step?

Sure, but that's not the only thing that makes registration a high-friction event. For instance, any time I register for something, free or not, I am also aware that I'm probably getting my name on a marketing list (and probably sold to other lists) as well. So I'm not registering for anything unless there's already a very well-established value exchange for it.