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Comment by mikeryan | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to be fascinated to see what this does for conversions. My company built the Neil Young Archives, when doing so we initially launched with Social log ins and at one point Neil decided Facebook and Google were evil and wanted to remove the access. According to our logs a full 2/3s of all users were registering with a social account and we were having great success getting folks to log into a free service (We had 250k sign ups over the first weekend, we thought Auth0 might turn us off as we started on a tier capped around 40k)

We assumed this success would quickly taper off if it wasn't "one click" to sign up with your Google/Faceboook account an talked Neil off the ledge.

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This escenario seems an clear candidate for A/B testing since I would be conflicted by wanting to provide privacy but understanding it might impact user signups.

Seeing some actual numbers would help me in making that decision.

I don't disagree with you and it was proposed. However we didn't have A/B infrastructure in place then and on a project that may never make money it just wasn't a high enough priority to justify the spend.

Fair enough, sometimes you have to make a decision with what you have. A/B testing adds complexity and specially when doing contract/agency work you don’t have either the time nor the budget to pull it off. Been there myself.

Personally I would have considered to hack something on my own time just out of curiosity :D

A/B testing auth methods is tricky. It's fine for "can we get better sign up rates" but it wreaks havoc on "can my previous users still sign in". At best you can AU/NA test - show different pre-auth treatments in different, very distant geographies that nevertheless have roughly similar user characteristics.

I just gotta say I both love and hate the Neil Young archives. I hate them because the website is genuinely awful, and a chore to navigate around. However, I love that I have access to a load of stuff I haven't heard before.

At any rate, thanks for the hard work you put into it and I've used this site a lot.

Yeah we didn't design it. Just did the best we could to make it all work. The design is actually a bit of a legacy as the original version was actually an interactive blu-ray set[1]

I kind of ended up with a love hate thing as well, it breaks pretty much every responsive, UX, accessibility rule out there, but at the same time it was Neil's vision. It's at least somewhat intentional that you have to dig at it a bit.

All that being said my first meeting with Neil I told him "This won't work on mobile" and his exact words were "Fuck Mobile ..."

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Neil-Young-Archives-One-Blu-ray/dp/B0...

But you didn’t try anything to confirm/infirm this hypothesis?

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