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Comment by vaporary | Hacker News Reader

I didn't even get three minutes; as soon as the page opened, I couldn't do anything without signing into Google or creating an account. Closed the tab.

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Ugh fine I’ll take the bait. If you all don’t want to create an account, don’t expect to try anyone’s products! It doesn’t even make sense from a software perspective: A spreadsheet needs to belong to a user. You can’t edit a google doc or sheet without being logged in. Sure, they could create a sandbox demo of their product that works without an account, but that’s kind of an unreasonable feature expectation to thrust onto every website.

"Sign up to save" is a quite common pattern these days and what I would suggest they are doing here as well.

Jupyter online test page, no login: https://jupyter.org/try-jupyter/retro/notebooks/?path=notebo...

Online python REPL, no login: https://replit.com/languages/python3

Another generic online REPL service, with pandas example, no login: https://onecompiler.com/python/3x7an28pr

ReactJS online playground, no login: https://playcode.io/react

You can still read the tutorial without getting a Google Account, and that can be more than enough to get a feel for the product. At least enough to decide if you want to get a test account.

Here the Tutorial is Login Gated. That's just going to turn people who are curious and have 2-3 min to look at it, away.

I already had a google account when it came time to try Google Docs.

I'm not going to make a new account somewhere just to demo what they offer. I have to be convinced before I enter my personal info

Modern problems require modern solutions. I keep a separate gmail id just for this. Also I signed in using gmail and redirect didn't work in firefox.

Don’t studies show that you have to make users do something that requires friction to boost conversion? Otherwise they’re not valuable leads

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