Hacker News Reader

Comment by sixQuarks | Hacker News Reader

I love curation projects.

Here's a tip if you want to get people to submit more videos. Include a "Submit Video" button in each area. When someone knows of a great video for a category, having to sign up for an account is a huge hassle and de-motivator. So just turn the onboarding upside down. Make it easy to submit a link first.

Once the link is submitted, THEN ask them to fill out the Username/password/email. At that point, they're already invested in the process, already submitted the link, and it's a lot easier to finish.

View on HN

> At that point, they're already invested in the process, already submitted the link, and it's a lot easier to finish

As a user I really (!!) hate this, and consider it a grey pattern at best.

I greatly prefer to know up front whether I'll have to register.

Whenever I see this kind of practice, I see it as an indication that I will encounter similar UX all over the place, so I leave immediately and never go near it again.

I wasn't logged in to hacker news, but I logged in just to comment this that yes I also absolutely hate it when I discover later on in a process that I'll have to sign up and that just puts me off.

Honestly, if you're thinking this is a grey pattern, then you're going to be easy pickings for any competition you may have. By all means, respect your users, but there's no need to tie your hands behind your back when most users are not HN users. If they were, javascript would probably be disabled on most sites.

Note that the optional version of this works fine, but the more sites hide a requirement this way, the more users are justified in assuming that anything they do on a new site may shove random things in their way and get fatigued on doing so entirely except in places they already know. Save the trust environment!

I apologize for being pessimistic about this. Curation does not scale due to Metcalfe's law [0] and socializing it does not work properly due to the differences of interests. What works is curation for subtrees, then you have a social network. Good luck!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe's_la

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe's_law

The link was broken from a typo.

Thank you, my thought here was to make the registration as quick and easy as possible - no email or confirmation is required.

I figured that someone would have to be somewhat invested in order to want to make submissions anyway - it takes longer to get the video URL and go through the submission form than to register.

An OAuth2/"login with your YouTube account" might streamline this for you, and facilitate sharing of collections already created on YouTube through their Data API.

That's a lot of hassle just to submit a youtube url, isn't it?

Maybe we're talking about different things.

If I (as a user) am sharing a video link from YouTube, in many (most?) cases I will already be logged in to YouTube, and reusing that credential would be easier for me than creating a new account registration on the third party site.

Edit: There's more: once you (as the service) have a YouTube account connected, you can offer a variety of additional services related to the YouTube Data API that a local account registration does not.

(Also: depends on what you mean by "hassle".)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com