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No user accounts, by design
11–20 of 147 posts
Re: No user accounts, by design
#12How do you solve problems arising from bad actors without an object representing the user?
We're just talking about software delivery here. Its the same as Debian not requiring you register before using `apt` to install packages (or every other linux distro).
The article gives specific examples like virtual meeting software that doesn't have users, just URLs. It's more than that.
Re: No user accounts, by design
#13Love the sentiment & love F-Droid. Vote for non-dark patterns with your patronage wherever possible!
It's a bit sad how a website not employing a dark pattern inspires explicit praise these days...
Re: No user accounts, by design
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
We're just talking about software delivery here. Its the same as Debian not requiring you register before using `apt` to install packages (or every other linux distro).
The article gives specific examples like virtual meeting software that doesn't have users, just URLs. It's more than that.
The solution for that is easy:
Don't share the new URL with someone that was a jerk in the past. (And don't make it easy to guess meeting URLs)
Re: No user accounts, by design
#15> Mozilla has taken this idea a step further with Firefox Klar (also known as Firefox Focus similar to Firefox Klar but with less private default settings). Nope, Klar == Focus in German-speaking markets, the rename was caused by an existing trademark: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/difference-between-fire... Speaking of which, Focus fits my flow of incidental, one-off browsing quite well — it’s my default brow…
It’s actually not that simple – Firefox Focus and Firefox Klar are two different apps, with different packages.
The official Firefox Klar builds originally contained slightly less tracking than the official Firefox Focus builds. Nowadays it might be only the trademark that keeps them separate, but originally there were clear differences in code.
Re: No user accounts, by design
#16I have been thinking how we can incentivize people building netizen friendly website/app. Creating users, cookies, javascripts heavy, paywall, analytics, etc all share a common incentive of ease of monetization. Privacy, usability, performance, all important stuff, but apparently not important enough, as a result plummeted. Would love to learn the options!
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Re: No user accounts, by design
#17I tried something like this once and it worked surprisingly well, even for a UGC site.
Years back we were doing something that included users documenting TV shows. We had a big meeting where people put every feature they wanted on index cards. We laid the cards out a founder's dining room table. The host got their change jar and each person got a certain number of pennies to mark features they thought were vital for first launch.
After the first round of token-voting, the "user accounts" card had no votes. At first it seemed impossible. But after some discussion, we realized that viewing users didn't need accounts for launch. For people who wanted to edit, we let them type in a name to take credit for their contributions if they wanted, but with no verification. At worst, we figured we could add something more robust if the need were stronger.
It turned out fine. The launch got out earlier and we got to test a number of key product hypotheses without having to build any sort of user account system. Months later it did eventually become the highest priority. But not having accounts worked way longer than I expected.
Re: No user accounts, by design
#18App developer's perspective. I have a few apps on all major places, including F-Droid. The 'no user accounts' thing makes developing and distributing on F-Droid a freeing experience, as compared to the G/A 'jails'. There is no pressure to meet arbitrary undocumented restrictions, you are not subject to the whims of dehumanizing AI routines, there are no ratings and reviews (the feedback is direct). The build and depl…
I find the distributor-does-the-building-and-signing to be problematic from a security point of view. I would much prefer that each developer does a build, signs it, and a notarization of some kind is added by the distributor.
It seems to me that if you can compromise the f-droid infrastructure you can compromise millions of handsets.
Re: No user accounts, by design
#19I tried something like this once and it worked surprisingly well, even for a UGC site. Years back we were doing something that included users documenting TV shows. We had a big meeting where people put every feature they wanted on index cards. We laid the cards out a founder's dining room table. The host got their change jar and each person got a certain number of pennies to mark features they thought were vital for…
What about abuse/vandalism? If the whole web has edit privileges, what's to stop someone from scripting changing all of the titles to random strings every hour? Do you do a captcha on every edit or something?
I think the main idea around user accounts is that they centralize a point of applying captchas as well as a tiny bit of data collection (some form of contact information) that can be used for antispam (e.g. banning certain email address domains from creating accounts, or banning certain email addresses, etc).
Re: No user accounts, by design
#20How do you solve problems arising from bad actors without an object representing the user?
It depends on context, but often having an object representing the user is at best a speed bump to a bad actor. Social media's an obvious example here. I know Twitter does quite a lot to limit bad actors, but the outcome is still not great.
The vast bulk of sites want to make signup easy, meaning user objects are cheap. Cheap user ids are easily disposed of and replaced. So if you need to keep bad actors out, user accounts may not help a ton.