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I think the title is a little misleading. They still require users to confirm their email, although they postpone that. From the title it sounds like they have

I think the title is a little misleading. They still require users to confirm their email, although they postpone that. From the title it sounds like they have a revolutionary solution to avoid this altogether, which they don't. Besides the title, this might work for their specific case, but I don't see it working in general. From my experience, lots of emails are fake. Either gibberish, or not the user's. You need an actual email to send communications and somewhat reduce spam and abuse. Postponing confirmation doesn't help with that. The author fails to even mention the actual solution to avoiding email confirmation and reducing onboarding steps: social login. With social login, users start using the app immediately, and site owners have a validated email (and optionally a lot more). If your app is targeted to developers, use GitHub login. Otherwise Facebook, Google, Twitter or similar, and you'll have a 90% coverage. Some people are paranoid about giving access (although IMO is safer), so also support signing up via email, but at that point it would be the "user's fault" if extra steps are required.

NTripleOne 9y ago
>With social login, users start using the app immediately Given that 99% of the time sites implement social logins as "let's automatically fill out your username and email address in the sign up form", that's far from true.
- YCode 9y ago
  It comes off as lazy, but as long as they don't make me remember a password I don't mind confirming a few details.
- nkkollaw 9y ago
  99% seems excessive. That hardly happens to me.
  - NTripleOne 9y ago
    I mean yeah it's hyperbole but still, it seems like it happens on the vast majority of sites I try to do a social registration with.
karellm 9y ago
I'm the author of the article. I agree that looking at the title today, it is misleading. I wrote that as a case study of an experiment we did at Visible. I think it is important to keep that in mind, I do not pretend it is THE flow to use or that it makes sense for other websites. We were trying different things to reduce the friction when onboarding users. I agree with social login, except that I personally traded the convenience for privacy. Most website grab way too much data and as a result I rarely use social login. And in the realm of enterprise Sass I think it is a fair concern to have; Security is taken more seriously. That said, it doesn't mean that we could have implemented social logins without grabbing unnecessary data!
- nkkollaw 9y ago
  > I personally traded the convenience for privacy You can choose what to do with the data. I assume you trust yourself to save only what you need (even just the social network ID if you really want to?) > Security is taken more seriously I trust Facebook to keep my password safe more than a random website I know little or nothing about (not yours, any website), if anything because Facebook has 100 times more resources than most other services. Also, most people use the same password for everything, the less places it's stored, the better. :-)

NTripleOne 9y ago

>With social login, users start using the app immediately Given that 99% of the time sites implement social logins as "let's automatically fill out your username and email address in the sign up form", that's far from true.

YCode 9y ago
It comes off as lazy, but as long as they don't make me remember a password I don't mind confirming a few details.
nkkollaw 9y ago
99% seems excessive. That hardly happens to me.
- NTripleOne 9y ago
  I mean yeah it's hyperbole but still, it seems like it happens on the vast majority of sites I try to do a social registration with.

karellm 9y ago

I'm the author of the article. I agree that looking at the title today, it is misleading. I wrote that as a case study of an experiment we did at Visible. I think it is important to keep that in mind, I do not pretend it is THE flow to use or that it makes sense for other websites. We were trying different things to reduce the friction when onboarding users. I agree with social login, except that I personally traded the convenience for privacy. Most website grab way too much data and as a result I rarely use social login. And in the realm of enterprise Sass I think it is a fair concern to have; Security is taken more seriously. That said, it doesn't mean that we could have implemented social logins without grabbing unnecessary data!

nkkollaw 9y ago
> I personally traded the convenience for privacy You can choose what to do with the data. I assume you trust yourself to save only what you need (even just the social network ID if you really want to?) > Security is taken more seriously I trust Facebook to keep my password safe more than a random website I know little or nothing about (not yours, any website), if anything because Facebook has 100 times more resources than most other services. Also, most people use the same password for everything, the less places it's stored, the better. :-)