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Comment by nicksergeant | Hacker News Reader

Technical people don't like social login.

Real people (non-tech / nerd) prefer not having to create individual accounts for all sorts of different services.

I've seen proof of this time and time again.

Check the Techcrunch article I cited: http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/30/email-social-signup-rockmel... - major social sites have seen data indicating that 50% of potential users don't sign up if it's social only. This is a real-people issue.

Tangentially related, for similar reasons Paypal remains my payment processor. Lots of people have Paypal accounts and find it much more convenient to use it rather than haul out their credit card and hand key all of their address and payment info. Every time I think about switching I review how many people use PayPal Express checkout rather than credit card DirectPay (both of which I offer), and I think about how many people simply wouldn't pay if the minimal friction of the PayPal Express button wasn't there on my checkout form.

Lowest friction wins.

Totally agree! Because I am not the biggest fan of PayPal, one of the best things I did to speed up ecommerce for myself was to memorize my CC details.

I have recently been converted to the joy of filling in credit card details (and address and phone number and...) with LastPass' form fill function. I previously had my CC details memorized for similar reasons, but I didn't realize just how much time I was wasting typing this stuff in over and over until it was magically done for me. And since security is what LastPass does, I have no problem with having their extension save my CC info in a secure manner.

I am an avid LastPass user and I already have my CC details in LastPass. But, until now I didn't realize you can add them to the Form Fill details! Thank you tempestn!

I'm a technical person and I don't like social login and I don't like creating individual account for every site. What I would like is a decentralized single-login protocol like the article is talking about.

One example of this is pud's launching of fandalism.com. When he announced the site on HN[1] some HNers complained about Facebook only login. But he was still able to get 400,000+ signups within 3 month[2].

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3559081

[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3850739

A facebook "only" login is the key here. Given a choice many people rather create a new login or not use facebook.

It's neat that they apparently got 400k sign-ups, even though they only had the Facebook Login option.

I really do wish that people would at least offer something other than a single method for us that don't like linking together everything though.

MailChimp concluded that social login wasn't worth it. Would be interesting to know how much of their demographic consists of "technical people"

https://blog.mailchimp.com/social-login-buttons-arent-worth-...

Highly likely because MailChimp is a BUSINESS site, not some consumer site. Normal people love to just click a button and see their facebook image and name saying, "Welcome back, John Doe!" - without any pesky emails or other junk.

Aren't most of the people logging into Mailchimp online marketers? Maybe "technical" is the wrong word, but their customers are all in the tech business somehow or another. I think that qualifies.

Mozilla's user research group has done some qualitative research, and many subjects didn't like being forced to use a social login like Facebook.

Here is a presentation on one of their recent studies https://air.mozilla.org/online-identity/

Agreed -- this article shows not one data point to back-up their argument, but if you do look users actually opt for social login due to ease of access and use. Hell it's what makes paypal so easy and popular -- you put your data in one trusted service, and it works with minimal pain points across any site that requires payments.

Technical person here, and I will use Facebook or Twitter login 10 times out of 10. I do not want to create a new account for your service unless you absolutely force me to.

We're seeing the same thing. Almost everyone decides to sign up with Facebook with email being a single click away.

Wow, my experience and testing was quite different (not a huge site, a few hundred thousand users). When given the choice between creating a new login/password or using Facebook it broke about 70% to a new login/password. Demphasizing facebook login increased conversion rate pretty substantially.

There are obviously hundreds of variables in play here from the content of the site to the fundamental design that may be influencing this.

So really, just a data point:)

Interesting! That's what I expected but I think the vertical matters quite a bit. My old startup (http://getpressi.com/) that had more of a tech crowd focus definitely had more people signing up with email while the new one (https://makersalley.com/) has a more general population that tends to like using Facebook.

At this point our total users is in the hundreds so who knows how it'll turn up.

Yep - it's definitely just a data point.

Please don't generalize too much. There's different demographics and individuals who like things in different configurations.

A very small, and probably very uninteresting data point: I wouldn't sign up - if you'd only allow login through "social media" accounts.

(I would however, if you offer Persona or regular sign-up username/email accounts though)

Yea - I definitely agree. Just throwing in my experiences. I will never use Facebook or Twitter if I can help it but in my experience "mainstream" users tend to prefer that to using their email.

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