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Comment by terra_t | Hacker News Reader

This is why I'm likely to use Facebook Connect. Sure, some people hate Facebook (maybe I lose 20% of sign-ups) but giving people 30 million choices causes them to freeze up (lose 80% of sign-ups)

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Is that all you're going to allow? I know I'm in the vast minority, but when sites only allow Facebook Connect, I don't use them. (still haven't made a Quora account).

Maybe a small link underneath "Use other identity providers..." for those of us who wont do it?

I'm not on Facebook and have a Quora account, is this a new requirement (I probably signed up during the betas)?

You're correct, I just checked. At one point, I remember there only being "Connect with Facebook" on the quora.com page for signing up. Now, both Twitter and Email are options.

I guess I'll check this thing out now

Or you could lose 0% of signups by asking for a username and password. (Well, okay, there might be a small margin of people who refuse to sign up -- but if they're that picky, you probably don't want them as your customers anyway.)

If it is some random site I am visiting where I have not been before, I will much more likely login via Facebook Connect or OpenID than going through some registering (where I usually have to figure out what types of passwords it accepts, about a free username, and wait for an accept mail and all that through a terribly annoying and slow guidance).

I definitely agree that for some sites, the signup process is too entailed. For me though, the barrier is usually identifying myself rather than having to create a login. If the site has something compelling enough for me to identify myself to it, then it's not that big of a leap to create a username and password.

I've seen signup success rates between 30-97% with conventional login systems. There are two things that appeal to me about Facebook:

(i) people take their Facebook identities seriously, so they're less likely to be griefers, and (ii) the like mechanism to push back updates about items that have changed

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