Please, don't force me to log in | Hacker News Reader

Please, don't force me to log in

hamatti.org

67 pointscdme25 comments

Buy a Ring doorbell? Just don’t. Ring requires a login AND enforces absolutely strict 2FA. You need to re-login periodically. It’s a doorbell! WTF. Doorbell rings, you are now fumbling to try and get a passcode—-delivery guy has given up. Absolutely horrible. It’s a doorbell. Get lost Ring

i got one as a gift and i can't get it to work because of the terrible account system. pure e-waste!

I've been looking for a job recently, and almost every applicant tracking system I've been shoved through requires an account. The ones that use "vanity" domains (like `companyname.superats.com`) require a unique account for each of those domains. I have something like 40 new accounts on services I'm never going to use regularly or consistently once I succeed, just in the last couple of months :( A few of those jobs actually required that I go through a specific resume-crafting-via-AI service with no other way to apply.

Now I get emails from at least a dozen services several times a week saying I'd be a perfect fit for positions that are in-office but not in my province (or even country sometimes), that are not things I'm interested in (retail lead in a piercing shop, for example), and are not things I'm even remotely qualified for (chemical engineer has popped up a couple of times, weirdly).

Not only do these systems suck, they're invasive, annoying, and counter-productive to the job searcher in many cases. If I could only have "guest" access to apply for that specific job....

But from their perspective accounts are awesome, they get to build a contact base that can be monetized (in some way I'm guessing). You pain is someone else's profit!

Any app/website that forces me to sign up = immediate uninstall/close tab.

Unless I really really need it like my life depends on it, in which case Thank God for Apple's Hide My Email <3

Its only going to get worse as companies want to defend their data against AI scrapers

Fully agree. I won't buy from a site if the only way to do so is via a forced account creation. I won't touch anything from Meta so cannot even see FB-only businesses! I won't install native apps on my phone: please just make the Web interface work properly...

I don't understand how a person that writes this is even interested in letting stuff like Warp Terminal land on their system, let alone use it, let alone consider it as a daily-driver. I simply don't get it. Trust your gut; it's easy to ignore this hyped soon-to-be-enshittified SaaS.

I'm always interested in checking out new tools. That's how I noticed Warp in the first place if it wasn't for the account requirement, I would have given it a go to see if it would have improved my workflow compared to what I currently use (iTerm).

I never got as far as figuring out if it would be that because the requirement for account stopped me on my tracks at the very beginning.

Excalidraw, for example, does an amazing job keeping your information locally without needing to log in. However, saving data to their cloud requires log in. There is another option: generate a shareable link, which does not require a log in. I wonder how they defend against DDoS attacks or spam when it's so easy for a non-authenticated user to generate a shareable link (which involves securing a couple megabytes of data and creating an endpoint). How do you prevent bad actors from consuming the resources of a central server without a log in? Honestly curious, not trying to start a flame war :)

I really like that approach: provide an opt-in for people who need or want the extra features that require login (for example, cloud sync or saving history in cloud or whatever).

If there was a book like "How to lose customers and alienate people" mandatory logins, 2FA and modern account systems with their captchas and phone/SMS verifiers would be the first chapter.

and while we're at it, please stop harassing me to install your "app" that is just a browser wrapped in spyware. (looking at you reddit, and your annoying user hostile features like not adjusting the browser based view on ios for the notch/island in iphones).

Seriously. I've been looking for ways to turn that off, without luck.

No Reddit/YouTube/Facebook/Twitter I'm not installing an app just to use your browser based service. Stop asking every time I browse your site.

Is it a mobile browser feature or something built-in to the website?

I've read Chrome used to have some setting to disable it, but of course Google removed it because users found it too useful.

If you’re interested, Brave has a setting to block “switch to app” notices. Haven’t seen one of these since enabling it.

Reddit actually has a particularly cursed combination of the two: "Log in or install app to see this content".

No idea why the (SFW!) content I wanted to look at was considered "18+" in the first place; it was just a discussion of a company that I was curious about. I can't help but think that they're getting more and more liberal in applying this content flag, since it must drive either account creations or app installs (and often both). I even have a Reddit account, but now I just can't be bothered to follow any search results there anymore.

The web is really getting smaller and smaller by the day, with large platforms gobbling up content and engagement under the guise of being "just another website/forum/blog/..." at first, but inevitably ending behind a paywall, login-wall, or in a mandatory app install, and often even all three.

You can still view the content if you replace `www` with `old`. It's annoying, but works.

Not sure about other browsers, but Brave has a “website redirects” setting to do this automatically.

Ah that's good to know. I use Brave and didn't know that!

I totally agree with this sentiment!

But one detail of the article caught y attention: "I installed Adobe’s Acrobat Reader..."

If you're trying to reduce surveilance, why would you install acrobat?

There are many GPL'd PDF readers for android. Use them...

https://search.f-droid.org/?q=pdf

The utter horse shit from Hue came at an opportune time: I was about to place a large order to replace all the can lights in my house with their Hue equivalents. That business is obviously lost to them - not so much for the feature, but for the obvious nonsensical corporate-speak lie that was trotted out to defend it.

Next up is to find a replacement bridge that will work with my existing bulbs though...

Hue light bulbs still continue to work just fine on zigbee with Home Assistant, with or without their hub. The Home Assistant community does a great job of shaming companies that become hostile, so I personally still feel fine with buying their bulbs, since they actually are better.

Have auto updates turned off just in case though.

On one hand I totally agree with hamatti, on the other hand: I just have a couple email addresses for this very purpose. These services can send me as much spam as they wish, I will never get to see it. All they get from me is a fake name and a fake email address.

please don't force me to use oauth providers either.

I mean, sure, but these articles are so naive. Does the author think these companies are like "we just want better service for our customers, hmm we haven't thought there are privacy risks?". These are blunt moves for profit and data mining. No reason to beg to corporations, just plain don't trust them.

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