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Comment by Simon_ORourke | Hacker News Reader

> In android, if I click on a link in facebook messenger that takes me to facebook, the back button takes me "back" to facebook's home screen instead of to the messenger app. Tapping back button again does nothing. I have to switch back to messenger manually. That's 5-6 taps/swipes instead of 1, because a product manager's bonus in FB depends on how well they beg for more engagement. As a result, I rarely use any of these products. I used to spend some time in Instagram/FB. I close LinkedIn immediately after an important interaction for similar reasons.

This! Each and every time I see an Instagram link I avoid clicking on it for the same click/login capture nonsense. If they opened it up for views only with out logging in, I'd probably actually end up using the service. Short-term protectionist strategies like these will be etched into the gravestone of Meta/Facebook.

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tbh, that's how a lot of apps do it, and it's wrong. The "Up" button in the navigation bar should always bring you to the hierarchically higher point in the app's own nav graph, while the back button in the device's navigation bar at the bottom should always bring you to the historically previous page.

Any app that does something other than that is wrong and should not have been approved.

Details like these go through extensive A/B testing. Clearly, Meta has found that gating their content behind a login prompt leads to greater engagement and revenue growth. For what it's worth, I eventually created an Instagram account because of these prompts. The strategy works.

it's just artificial growth, though. You're not generating any more engagement than if they'd just show you the content as a guest. Unless you also started using the app as a result of creating an account.

They've covered non-logged in engagement into logged in engagement, which lets them target ads better.

Or at least immediately fees you presumably more relevant posts from people you follow, so that you can engage more and they can serve more ads.

The growth may be artificial and not sustainable, but the money it brings is real, and can be invested (or consumed) sooner than later. Opportunity cost is a real thing :-\

Additionally the infrastrucutre is not free either. Even without ads (which is fine by me), serving up the full suite of tools to logged out users is very expensive and much harder to control

At our company we're trying to do the same thing now, supporting logged out users is just too expensive and not worth it.

I would argue it’s actually easier to serve content to logged out users as you can cache the whole response and serve it at the edge. Then it “just” becomes a cache expiration problem.

I have seen right here on HN where my request cannot be processed, but it loads fine in a private browser window.

Logged in users receive more errors.

Thanks, caching, for allowing me to continue procrastinating.

Correct, we push static assets to the edge. However not all SASS products are the same, there is a spectrum of features that can be pushed to the edge and some cannot. The engineering comes from cost, usability, reliability, etc...

Ultimately we prioritize our logged-in customers.

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