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Comment by kmill | Hacker News Reader

This is a game made by a research lab for fun, celebrating the 50th anniversary of Unix. I'm not sure they're too interested in funnels, beyond letting people have a little fun (and some advertising that something like the Bell Labs of old might still exist).

The signup annoyed me, too, but it just wants a username and password for the leaderboard. It's not collecting your e-mail address. (There was some kind of bug with the user creation step where it would keep prompting for your country. Reloading the page is a workaround.)

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> I'm not sure they're too interested in funnels, beyond letting people have a little fun (and some advertising that something like the Bell Labs of old might still exist).

I picked the word funnel because I'm on HN and that's the quickest way to convey that showing me a signup screen before I've done anything of value is going to lose me. Unless I clicked a button to sign up or went to do something that I have an intuition would result in a signup page, I usually click control-w before I'm conscious of why.

Most users don't care about leaderboards and global leaderboards have been shown to have a demotivating effect. There's a reason why most games that show leaderboards now default to a friends leaderboard, with the global one tucked away behind it.

Forcing a signup to enable something I don't care about doesn't seem like a great bargain to me. Prompt me to sign up in order to save my progress and I might do it. Prompt me as soon as I interact with the page and I'm out.

Next to no one cares about the free signup. Get a second email account for free and sign up and have fun. If you don’t like it, it’s your choice, but seems like it isn’t a big deal to me.

Ten years ago,maybe. Today my techie friends are guarded (and the way everybody is correlating and analyzing everything, a single “throwaway” email is again a decade past it’s usefulness as a construct), whereas my non techie friends are merely impatient and will go to buzzfeed to get their non-signup fun (rather than any conscious concern). So it’s mostly an attention span thing in my mind .

Always ask yourself what is that signup/gate costing vs what is it gaining you. If you are losing X percentage of users for no identifiable gain, the question should be why is it there, not why should it be removed / why is it a big deal to somebody .

You say "next to no one" but I certainly feel the same way, and his comment was the highest voted. So...

Forced account creation prompts are, in fact, a huge source of traffic bounce on most web apps despite most of them being free of charge. So your statement is plain false. Many people do find them to be a significant source of annoyance.

And it is self selecting. Filter for peeps who just don't care, and the ones who are really interested.

The hard cases are out of the funnel.

Maybe that has merit?

Not that I'm advocating forced signups. Hate em. But, I can see the logic in play here.

The point is: if you do it too early, you eliminate also those who could care, if you didn't break the delicate bonding proces with a brutal sign-up form.

Maybe. They could just as easily be hard cases too.

It is not always seen as delicate.

You don't even need an email account to sign up, but I certainly understand a reflexive rejection of unnecessary sign-ups.

Signing up for and keeping track of alternate email addresses is fun?

I care. Forced signup is an instant tab close for me.

Unfortunately a new generation of the funnel is gaining popularity in the last years: "sign up with your work e-mail", where Gmail etc. are rejected. So you need to make some effort to find a free e-mail provider that is not on their banned domains list. Unless of course you actually don't mind spam and pseudospam ("Hi it's Mike from MyStartup. Just checking up as you haven't replied to my previous message...") in your work mailbox.

The average HN user might balk on an early sign up wall (and become very upset), but that doesn't preclude it being the optimal placement for most undifferentiated users of your metric is purely the number of sign ups completed.

If it's made for fun, why is sign-up mandatory at all? Why can't I play the game without creating an account?

A bookmarkable private URL, ie some kind of unique token for each user, would have been easier than messing around with emails and annoying users.

There are no e-mails involved if you choose to create an account, just a choice of username and password.

Sure, there are lots of things they could have done better, but I admire outreach projects like this from research labs.

> There are no e-mails involved

That's not obvious from the sign up dialog, and like the top post I closed out of the site as soon as the dialog appeared.

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