Hacker News Reader

Comment by rcfox | Hacker News Reader

I've always wanted sort of the opposite. I'd sign up to a website, and they wouldn't ask for a password. To login, they would email a link to click and I'd be logged in for however long that cookie lasted. Why don't sites do that?

(Is email still considered slow? I remember having wait times in the hours back in the 90s, but I'm not sure I've ever waited anywhere near a minute in the past decade.)

View on HN

> I've always wanted sort of the opposite. I'd sign up to a website, and they wouldn't ask for a password. To login, they would email a link to click and I'd be logged in for however long that cookie lasted. Why don't sites do that?

> (Is email still considered slow? I remember having wait times in the hours back in the 90s, but I'm not sure I've ever waited anywhere near a minute in the past decade.)

Tumblr does this at the moment. It asks for either email click or a traditional username/password setup.

Passwordless authentication exists, Medium has it, I've implemented it before, and I prefer it myself. The biggest issue being it adds an additional step, that most don't want to deal with. What if they don't have access to their email on that machine? Blasphemy, but it happens.

This is basically how steam works these days.

Sure, there is a "password" - but they won't let you log in without also verifying you have access to your email account - and you can reset that "password" only knowing the username and having access to the email account.