Yes exactly, the popups that make the user feel bad if he doesn’t click the continue button are a bad experience. They rely too much on using cognitive dissonance to persuade people to click continue.

It is much better approach to use small steps where even if there is cognitive dissonance you wait for it to be resolved by the users themselves. People usually are quite good at justifying why they did something.

After that you can ask for more. Like “become a paid member” for example.