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Comment by mrspeaker | Hacker News Reader

Ha ha, I'm at the same "get off my lawn!" moment in my internet life to. The barrier "first, create an account and login..." is a one that very very few products can tempt me to do.

I realized recently that I have space in my life for three log-in websites (HN, a gamedev site, one subreddit), three web apps (gmail, github, slack), and three non-built-in phone applications (instapaper, ride sharing app, twitter). If there's something new in town - it needs to be more valuable than these to knock someone else out of rotation!

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could this be alleviated by password managers or is the act of logging in, in and of itself, a burden you would prefer not to do?

I'm not mrspeaker, but I have a similar stance regarding apps/logins/etc.

For me, it is the burden of having to create accounts for stuff I'll probably only use once, plus the mental burden of knowing that the website has my personal information and might leak it.

That, and the fact that having an account/app these days is synonymous with "oh, sure, send me all the spam you have!", via e-mail or mobile notifications.

If anything, password managers help me see which accounts I should be deleting.

> If anything, password managers help me see which accounts I should be deleting.

I think this is a hint towards what, IMO, password managers should be moving towards. I would like a password manager to really be an account manager that can do things like:

* Alert me if a site I have an account on has a publicly declared breach

* Let me manage personal details (such as associated email address, phone number, etc.) all in one place

* Tell me how often I use each account (and when I login to them from 'unusual' locations/computers)

etc.

With Dashlane and LastPass, there's a "password changer" feature. You click on a button and it changes your password without having to login to the website. There are also alerts if a website had a data leak. iPassword does this also (Watchtower).

Oh, I have been fantasizing about a similar thing for about a decade! Currently my "account manager" is either an e-mail folder (I save the welcome e-mails), or my Facebook/Google account (the "authorized apps" page), and this is far from ideal.

I also wish I could sign up for new websites/services using such a manager. If it already had all my personal info, it would take just one click to sign up. And maybe selecting which personal details I would like to disclose with the website.

Mozilla Persona with browser integration[1] was the closest thing to that. Too bad it was abandoned.

[1] https://people-mozilla.org/~faaborg/files/projects/firefoxAc...

The stickyness of email addresses (having to update email/recovery contacts) and proliferation of user ToSes is yet another limiting factor.

Increasignly I just say "no". I've been cutting back on services and apps. It's something of a relief.

Most logins don't solve any of my problems, exceptions include things tied to a credit card. The more typical best case is that a login solves problems around site administration. A lot of login requirements seem to be based on logins being easy to implement in frameworks or being the designer's concept of how web sites work.

The last one is often a bit of an anti-pattern. For most websites a person who actually lands on and engages with the site is pure gold and putting friction on that interaction adds noise...there are people who won't bother to create an account in the absence of more information than can be gleaned from the 'public' resources (often because most functionality gets hidden behind the login).

More and more commonly, logins are a way of growth hacking: Look at all these email addresses that we can pretend are users and sales prospects.

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