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Comment by nprateem | Hacker News Reader

A great example of a website that completely fails to clearly explain how it's different from the competition.

I think their Github "About" text is quite clear imho. An open source identity service that can be an alternative to similar commercial ones like Okta, Auth0.

Linked from the home page:

https://www.ory.sh/comparisons/

If this was all the way transparent about Keycloak they’d make it clear that Keycloak is the upstream for Red Hat SSO, which has support options from Red Hat/IBM and so on. It’s a little bit different model from theirs, but no less valid.

Which requires viewers be authenticated to show anything. Bleh.

Scrolling down from the "create an account" button, all the "Ory vs [thing]" links from that page open up just fine for me.

Just click the comparison links, e.g., ory vs keycloak leads to:

https://www.ory.sh/comparisons/ory-vs-keycloak/

the chart may be hidden "below the fold," so scroll down.

Ah I see. Terrible UI none the less.

I gave up previously because having the user create button "above the fold" implied that an account was needed to view the comparison. SMH.

Oh, yeah, it's lousy design. I don't think it's intentionally deceptive, but it was still offputting.

I agree that we can do better here. Do you have a comparison in mind that you really liked?

The frontpage should make it clear which open source project corresponds to which Ory Network product.

I was confused about that for a while.

Ex:

Permissions & Access Control -> Keto.

You could take some cues from Grafana here.

Similarly to Ory, their product is backed by OSS.

Their frontpage’s navigation bar makes it clear which is backed by which.

I understood its something to do with auth but even the comparison pages didn't clarify in meaningful ways how it's different. I don't see how this could help me get more users - that's my job not yours.

I was also confused what a network has to do with auth. Is this some kind of distributed auth product? Who knows.

Also, I don't think anyone looking at a saas auth product would consider rolling their own. Presumably they're on your site because they aren't interested in that.

So I just didn't know what your value proposition is.

Funny how you claim to support GDPR but your own site displays a non-compliant cookie banner.

Their cookie banner is provided by a 3rd party and I can’t see how it is non-compliant unless there is something I’m missing.

Because it's a 3rd party, it cannot be non-compliant?

Seems like it's 1 extra click to disallow compared to allow, so yeah, non-compliant. Should be exactly as easy to say yes as saying no. In this case it's not.

Hey. Ory PM here. Thanks for the info. We fixed the Cookie Banner now. So one click Deny is now possible.

> Because it's a 3rd party, it cannot be non-compliant?

Not at all. My point was that they are not offering that as product.

Overblown criticism like this give GDPR an undeserved bad rep.

Either we have regulation and call people out when they don't follow it and hopefully eventually fine them, or we can just skip it all together.

Incorrect implementations give GDPR a bad reputation, though there are worse ones.

It's not overblown criticism. They advertise their product as GDPR-compliant, and yet their website uses dark patterns to trick people into allowing tracking, and is not GDPR-compliant.

Do I trust them to be as diligent in their product?

And yeah, what gives GDPR bad rep is exactly these kinds of dark patterns and other forms of malicious compliance by non-caring companies.

It's their choice to chose that banner, and their choice to configure it this way. Most third-party banners are non-compliant, including this one. Which they should know, given that they advertise GDPR compliance for their main product.

The banner should have a Reject All option, preferably as default action.

Also relevant: https://noyb.eu/en/where-did-all-reject-buttons-come

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