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Comment by qmarchi | Hacker News Reader

There are going to be people complaining about the new requirement to have an account to view content.

To the publishers, you should _really_ use some kind of federated login. Google, Apple, Facebook, etc. but don't forget those who are willing to have a unique account.

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At this point, publishers should probably just accept that any tracking is unacceptable, so if they want people to pay (and therefore login), then they need to stop funneling data to ad networks and other PII aggregators.

Who says it’s unacceptable? The incredibly tiny minority of readers coming from HN?

I used to think this was a tiny minority, too. But a key takeway from https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-n... was this statistic: "26% of Internet users are now blocking ads." Its a minority, but its not tiny.

Very, very probably only to declutter their screen. Does the survey collect intent about why they install it?

I doubt anywhere near 26% block ads because of tracking. I doubt even 1% if users even understand what tracking means.

Many of them probably also didn't set the ad blocker up themselves - they have tech-savvy relatives handle their computer stuff, and those tech-savvy relatives have realized that fewer ads means fewer malicious social engineering ads means less malware to remove during the next visit.

I doubt that even 1% of internet users understand the extent of the PII that is collected. I would guess if the general public understood how all this worked, there would be many more people who objected to the practice.

It's only my personal opinion, but I don't care at all about tracking. They can track me all they like. I block ads because they make my browsing slow, cause my CPU to turbo boost, interrupt my browsing, clutter the web pages excessively. I suspect a huge majority of that 26% is similar to me in this.

Where do you get the impression that it's a minority?

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/technology/most-americans...

As a publisher, there's absolutely no way I'm letting Google, Apple or Facebook manage the identity or control the authentication of my readers.

Why not? Saves you the trouble of building and maintaining a secure access system. You likely gain more users because of network effects, which doesn’t cut your advertising budget so much as supplements it. If your trying to preserve user privacy, there’s a good chance you’re too late there - they most likely already gave that up a long time ago.

My relationship with my readers is our most valuable asset, and I don't want it mediated by companies who compete with me for ad dollars. It's the same reason I publish content on our own domain and not Medium or Facebook or LinkedIn.

> there’s a good chance you’re too late there - they most likely already gave that up a long time ago.

People on HN keep using this in a number of contexts as an excuse to not even try.

I'm tired of it. Maybe we are to late. But if try to avoid failure then at least we have a small chance.

What are you using for analytics or ads placement?

As a user, there's absolutely no way I'm going to give you a real name and email address if you roll your own authentication. I probably won't use your service at all.

Who said anything about real names?

When you use a federated login, you still can assign an email address to the federated user. Most of them will even pass one to you.

But, do you really want your users to have the added friction and probably just move on to another site, and do you really want the responsibility of providing your own authorization? I work for a B2B SASS company and we highly encourage users to use their company’s AD account that we federate with.

Publishers actually do use something of a federated service to manage subscriptions for the most part. I'd say those services have some catching up to do. Hearst runs such a service:

https://www.cds-global.com/

The problem with requiring an account to view content is doing so removes your content entirely from Google, and probably from most social media snippet generators.

Google will only include your content in their search results if the user can see your content. The "metered paywall" trick is a loophole to get around that.

If you put all your content behind a paywall, you're siloing yourself off from the entire rest of the internet, at least as far as discoverability goes.

> The "metered paywall" trick is a loophole to get around that.

Do keep in mind that this isn't so much a loophole, but an agreement that Google made with publishers so that they could stay ranked on Google. In the wake of this they might reach a different agreement.

If Google had a setting for "I am a subscriber to x,y,z -- please include them in my results" I would be so happy. I want to tell Google that I'm a Red Hat subscriber and want their KB articles first.

> Google will only include your content in their search results if the user can see your content.

That's not true for the WSJ.

They seem to allow enough of their pages to appear to enable Google to see it. I can always see the first few sentences and the titles of WSJ articles, that's probably what google can see too.

I don't think it's that -- the amount shown to Google isn't enough to provide any kind of meaningful SEO. My guess is WSJ has something worked out with Google.

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