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Ask HN: What percentage of your users are using social login?

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Re: Ask HN: What percentage of your users are using social login?

#61
post #51

There's an evil with social login in that you give up the knowledge of your social (presumably personal) network to random 3rd parties. That's even worse than email address. With password managers being essentially mandatory now, it's not too hard to create a new email/password based account for every new site. But recently I realized that I don't use my FB for anything. I have zero friends, don't allow friend reques…

I don't think password managers have as much penetration as you think and they only work on devices you own. Social login doesn't necessarily give up that much info. Your social network knows who logged in to. The third-party only gets whatever info you accede to which usually is just an email address or name. The huge bonus to users and site owners is that that site isn't storing a password for you. It's easy to scr…

I think you just made a case for DuckDuckGo or (e.g.) LastPass to provided an authentication servive.

Mind you, products would have to adopt it. But from a sec + privacy perspective it makes sense to have a 3rd party whose biz model isn't to harvest your personal details.

Re: Ask HN: What percentage of your users are using social login?

#62

There's an evil with social login in that you give up the knowledge of your social (presumably personal) network to random 3rd parties. That's even worse than email address. With password managers being essentially mandatory now, it's not too hard to create a new email/password based account for every new site. But recently I realized that I don't use my FB for anything. I have zero friends, don't allow friend reques…

Hey, that’s a really bad idea, jiveturkey. Facebook flags and disables accounts with zero friends and zero activity outside of apps. Sometimes they allow you to restore the account by uploading a picture of yourself and waiting for verification. I don’t know how often they do this vs. not, but remind yourself that they could do it to you at any point.

Re: Ask HN: What percentage of your users are using social login?

#63

There's an evil with social login in that you give up the knowledge of your social (presumably personal) network to random 3rd parties. That's even worse than email address. With password managers being essentially mandatory now, it's not too hard to create a new email/password based account for every new site. But recently I realized that I don't use my FB for anything. I have zero friends, don't allow friend reques…

Wouldn't that be just as bad as using one password for every site? One account gets compromised they all get compromised.

Re: Ask HN: What percentage of your users are using social login?

#64
I have a B2B app. It allows Google Sign-In only. My last B2B app was the same. Nobody complained.

Understand your audience. If you can just go with something like Google, do it; you'll save a ton of time and can focus on developing features your customers are willing to actually pay money for. Authentication method is not usually a value proposition.

Only implement multi-service auth as a last resort. It's great for mass-market consumer apps, but the development workload is significant and you will end up with a support workload for merging accounts no matter how clever your implementation is.

Re: Ask HN: What percentage of your users are using social login?

#65

I have a B2B app. It allows Google Sign-In only. My last B2B app was the same. Nobody complained. Understand your audience. If you can just go with something like Google, do it; you'll save a ton of time and can focus on developing features your customers are willing to actually pay money for. Authentication method is not usually a value proposition. Only implement multi-service auth as a last resort. It's great for…

> development work is significant

Not true, these guys invested a lot in making their sdks easy to integrate. You should be able to have fb/twitter/Pinterest/etc login in an afternoon

Re: Ask HN: What percentage of your users are using social login?

#66

There's an evil with social login in that you give up the knowledge of your social (presumably personal) network to random 3rd parties. That's even worse than email address. With password managers being essentially mandatory now, it's not too hard to create a new email/password based account for every new site. But recently I realized that I don't use my FB for anything. I have zero friends, don't allow friend reques…

You must be fun at parties.

Re: Ask HN: What percentage of your users are using social login?

#67

There's an evil with social login in that you give up the knowledge of your social (presumably personal) network to random 3rd parties. That's even worse than email address. With password managers being essentially mandatory now, it's not too hard to create a new email/password based account for every new site. But recently I realized that I don't use my FB for anything. I have zero friends, don't allow friend reques…

You must be fun at parties.

I downvoted this comment because it was ad hominem and did not add to the conversation.

Re: Ask HN: What percentage of your users are using social login?

#68

For my little side project I’m using email only. Tangentially related, I quite like Medium’s workflow where you don’t need to enter passwords anymore. You just enter your address, they send a login email, you click the link in your email, and it redirects you to Medium, logged in.

Interesting, I always assumed this would be too much hassle for users since after the first login, the browser (mobile or desktop) would remember the password. Certainly seems like an optimum solution to typing a password on first login though (assuming the email is prompt).

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What percentage of your users are using social login?

#69
post #65

I have a B2B app. It allows Google Sign-In only. My last B2B app was the same. Nobody complained. Understand your audience. If you can just go with something like Google, do it; you'll save a ton of time and can focus on developing features your customers are willing to actually pay money for. Authentication method is not usually a value proposition. Only implement multi-service auth as a last resort. It's great for…

> development work is significant Not true, these guys invested a lot in making their sdks easy to integrate. You should be able to have fb/twitter/Pinterest/etc login in an afternoon

Parent is talking about the time it takes to integrate multiple ways to login, and I agree with him. When you implement only one way (be it social login with Google/Facebook/etc or an email/password combination depending on your target audience) it's usually easy. When you have multiples ways to login, you end up having to (1) maintain more code, but also (2) need a way to reconcile users who end up signing in with multiple methods.

Re: Ask HN: What percentage of your users are using social login?

#70

For my little side project I’m using email only. Tangentially related, I quite like Medium’s workflow where you don’t need to enter passwords anymore. You just enter your address, they send a login email, you click the link in your email, and it redirects you to Medium, logged in.

> Tangentially related, I quite like Medium’s workflow where you don’t need to enter passwords anymore. You just enter your address, they send a login email, you click the link in your email, and it redirects you to Medium, logged in.

That's absolutely crazy, I've always thought it didn't make any sense.

Browsers have autofill, and even if you don't want to use it it takes a lot less time to type your password than to click on a button, open your email client, wait for the email to arrive, click on a link, be taken back to the browser, yack!

It only make _kind_ of sense on mobile where typing is harder, but then again it's also a pain to switch to email and back.

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