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Comment by transition | Hacker News Reader

Annoys me when i can't create an account on a site without a twitter or facebook account. Not everybody uses these services.

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A twitter account is a pretty low bar. You don't have to use your real name and you don't have to tell anyone it exists.

But enough people do. Time to get on the bandwagon.

I view Facebook and Twitter as unnecessary playgounds for me. My objective is to limit my channels of communication so i don't have to micromanage all these unproductive services. I don't see why you'd want to limit your user base like this.

At what point did you stop applying that argument to sites that require an email address to sign up?

I'm not sure I understand your question - and if I do it sounds like you're trying to frame a very poor argument.

He's saying Twitter and Facebook are becoming, for today, what email was 10 years ago. You may have seen email as "an unproductive service" back then, because why would you email when you could call and write letters?

Then sites started requiring emails to sign up - and you signed up anyway. Why wouldn't sites just let you register through snail mail? They're limiting their user base!

In all seriousness, Twitter and Facebook are trending, and you might as well adopt them. Not doing so would strike me as a bit of technological ignorance.

Difference - all e-mail addresses follow the same standard. Twitter & FB are just two of many competing "social media" places.

I should join Twitter and Facebook just because everyone else is? And if I don't I'm technologically ignorant?

Isn't... that the definition of "technologically ignorant"?

I guess i'll go signup for every third party service to reach enlightenment. Thanks

I see this fairly often. Why not make an account solely for auth/signup on these sites. Most of the time people who say this talk about how they don't have the time, don't want to be on social media, concerns about privacy, etc. If you have an account just for logging in to FB Connect, it seems like the problems are alleviated.

I think the concern here is that, even if you make an account specifically for the purpose of authenticating to other websites, you're still telling Facebook, Google, Twitter... which websites you're signing up on, which they of course have an interest in knowing so that they can better profile you as a user.

Note: I have accounts on these sites and actively use them, just my guess as to other peoples' rationale behind not getting an account.

Implement Facebook Connect: 5 minutes. Implement own login system (with login screen, register screen, forgot your password screen, CAPTCHA, and making sure BCrypt is working properly): X hours. I'll do the former, even if it annoys 0.1% of possible users.