6 ms·

Logged out

48 points by patwalls 6y ago

marcinzm 6y ago
I have a curated list of subreddits I follow on reddit without any of the large default meme-spam ones. Without that reddit is basically useless to me as I don't need even more meme-spam in my life. Same with twitter, I use it to follow some engineers and artists while avoiding the mainstream accounts that have no relevance to me. I honestly want to know what these people are up so as it's usually either beautiful or interesting or insightful.
- mimimi31 6y ago
  I use Multireddits for that. They let you view a custom feed by concatenating subreddit names in the URL. No need for login or subscriptions. E.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux+privacy https://www.reddit.com/r/linux+privacy
liammonahan 6y ago
Even if you log out don’t they still know who you are based on IP or other fingerprints to serve relevant content? Anecdotally I’ve been on online shopping sites that will email me my cart to ask if I want to check out even when I’m not logged in, so it seems unlikely that you’ll be any more anonymous by signing out.
- gruez 6y ago
  IP: use commercial VPN so you blend in with thousands of other users fingerprinting: use firefox and turn on resistfingerprinting
Darky 6y ago
Having a browsable & searchable history of "every youtube video ever watched on any device" is something pretty valuable to me.
- gruez 6y ago
  Just use your local browsing history?
  - dan_can_code 6y ago
    That doesn't cover the 'on any device' requirement.
gruez 6y ago
This is pretty easy to do with firefox, just use the multi account containers and the temporary containers extension. During normal browsing you use temporary containers, which keeps you logged out and avoids anonymous session tracking. If you need to log in all you need to do is right click the tab and reopen in your dedicated "logged in" container
- y7 6y ago
  I just switched to this setup from Cookie Autodelete (or something similar), and I'm really happy with it. For some websites where you want to always login you can also set a URL to automatically open in a certain container.
- smichel17 6y ago
  I used to do this but have shifted my pattern somewhat. Now, I use many fewer permanent containers. When I want to log in, I'll do it in the temporary container. I use a password manager so this is barely less convenient than reopening the tab. To log out, I just close the tab.
- pteraspidomorph 6y ago
  Can't you just use a private window?
  - noman-land 6y ago
    Private windows are all linked to each other. Different private windows are not in different private sessions. They all share the same private session, so It's not really the same.
    - pteraspidomorph 6y ago
      Interesting, I didn't know that. Seems clear from the language in the initial view of the private window, but I hadn't really paid attention before. This isn't how I think private windows should work. They should be fully isolated (tabs within the same private window could share a session, though).
jabroni_salad 6y ago
My tweetdeck layout is by far the most effective way to use twitter. My youtube subscription page is my first port of call. Reddit.... its just highly vexing if you aren't logged in.
amadeuspagel 6y ago
Youtube's recommendation algorithm is one of the wonders of the modern world. I discovered so many incredible videos that I would never have searched for and that no one would have recommended to me, thanks to it.
- scottoreily 6y ago
  Nice anecdote. YouTube constantly recommends me stuff I have 0 interest in.
  - ubercow13 6y ago
    Did you give it any useful information? I mean for example, I am subscribed to a bunch of channels about music theory, and Youtube will put other videos about music theory and analysis in my feed. They are highly relevant and at least somewhat popular, so usually reasonable quality. Sometimes it will start recommending videos from a channel that is not so good, and you can tell it to never show you that channel again. If you only watch random Youtube videos linked from other sites with no particular theme, or generic news and political videos, or don't subscribe to any channels, I can imagine the recommendations would be pretty useless. But the algorithm does seem pretty good at recommending things related to your interests if those are clear from what you watch and subscribe to. It's probably the only recommendation engine I find useful.
    - patwalls 6y ago
      My point is less about the content being useful/interesting and more about being mindful of our information diet. How many videos do you need to watch about music theory? Does it ever feel like the same content but regurgitated in different ways? Do you watch this to genuinely learn? Or is it more enjoyment/infotainment? (honest questions) I don't study music theory, but this is how I feel about productivity/self-help/business videos, which dominate my feed. Although these videos were life changing at one point, I'm not sure how much more value I'm getting by continuing to watch these anymore. When I get to the end of these videos, nowadays, I just feel a bit 'bleh'. It feels nice to find new, refreshing content that is completely outside of what the youtube algo would give me, and sometimes that happens by talking to friends (esp in different industries), reading books, old blog posts, etc. I want to stay curious and proactive in finding discovering new things and hobbies and interests.
peignoir 6y ago
I like apple solution for that, logging using a randomized apple account ID per service
caiobegotti 6y ago
Because I find video recommendations useful, because I want to upvote good content on the internet just like I do here on HN and because I actually have a nice timeline with curated content. The points of the article are rather weak to me, specially considering you are supposed to have good security for your accounts so even if you decide to actively log out yourself the next time you'd like to interact with any of these networks you will at least have to go through a manual login, 2FA using your phone and an authenticator app etc, it's a bummer so convenience wins there. If this is a problem then, I believe convincing people to never save login passwords in their browsers is more compelling than suggesting to log out. That said, if I could log in with Face ID in like 2 seconds everywhere I'd probably stay logged out until I wanted to interact in SOME networks.
- codetrotter 6y ago
  With a MacBook Air and iPhone it's not too much hassle. I use Touch ID on the MacBook Air to fill in the username and password, and then I open the 2FA app on my iPhone and tap the code to copy it. The clipboard is synchronised between the MacBook Air and the iPhone in their out-of-box configuration, so I can immediately paste the 2FA code on the MacBook Air by just pressing ⌘+V. Thanks to this, I log out a lot of the time. However, to make it even more friction-less I am also going to make a simple little 2FA app myself for the MacBook Air, where I just glue together a couple of libraries and make it more effortless than having to touch the phone at all.
kyriakos 6y ago
Reddit is a pointless stream of memes if you are not logged in to see your subscribed subreddits.
jypepin 6y ago
I am subscribed to a lot of small subreddit I would not see content from if I wasn't logged in. I follow people on Twitter. But most importantly, I _really_ started using youtube about a year ago. I replaced my TV watching at 90% (everything except movies at night). Not only I am subscribed to enough channels that there are at least 2-3 new videos per day I would want to watch, the recommendations algorithm is very good and I can literally go on Youtube multiple times a day and be recommended new videos that I like and introduce me to new channels I will subscribe to.
timelincoln 6y ago
Today being logged out might equate to choosing the “default” view of the world (as far as the internet is concerned) while the AI creates a view for every “logged in” person that distorts the world to fit their biases almost completely
worik 6y ago
Golly. I almost never log in to any of those services. Am I missing out? Yikes. Self doubt starts, gnawing at me....
- derefr 6y ago
  Presuming you "browse" the service (e.g. look at whatever equivalent it has to a front page), you're seeing only the "mainstream" of its content, without any "niche" content. For many of these services, most of the reason that people even use/recommend them is that they allow each person to conveniently "browse" within the set of long-tail niches that interest them. Reddit, for one, is certainly not popular because of its mainstream/default subreddits. It's popular in spite of them. On the other hand, presuming you do no "browsing" of the service, but just get linked to specific content on the service from elsewhere, you're pretty much getting the full experience either way. (I think one difference is that some services won't show you all the comments unless you log in; and sometimes the comments themselves are what was interesting-enough to link to.) Also, some particular services (e.g. YouTube) track you and build a viewer profile of you even if you never create an account there, and so "browsing" them will still result in niche content if that's what you've previously visited there. But most services don't do this.
wrs 6y ago
YouTube still recommends content when you’re logged out. In fact, I used YouTube for years logged out, and when I started having to log in because I got YouTube Premium, I was unhappy to find all my recommendations reset! I’m starting over from the generic recommendations (which are quite frankly a little terrifying). I wish there was a way to move the recommendation data between accounts.
- wayneftw 6y ago
  I wish Reddit would implement a recommendation engine like YouTube. I don't want to ever log into Reddit and I just treat it as my funny pages, but every single day without fail I am subjected to all sorts of abhorrent, deviant content that is essentially forced onto their "popular" timeline despite the fact that it's not really popular. Many times when you read the comments on these types of posts, if you sort by controversial, you can see people asking "Why is this on the front page?" or, just by counting the number of deleted comments you can see how unpopular that content really is.
onyva 6y ago
There’s invidio.us to avoid YouTube as much as possible. Also, strongly disagrees with >> While logged in, my YouTube recommended feed is doing a great job of serving me interesting content - but is that a good thing? I see one related item and then a barrage of the worst of humanity.
agakshat 6y ago
> Why do we need to be constantly logged in to YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, and Twitter?...These apps all work fine anonymously Instagram most certainly does not work without logging in. I don't have an account, and it only lets you see at max 1 or 2 posts before prompting (and mandating) a login. Also, I don't know how Twitter is useful without being logged in - you're just seeing the "trending", very little of which is statistically likely to be interesting to you.
mgraczyk 6y ago
Question for anyone working on ranking at Youtube: Recommendation quality got way worse ~March of this year, presumably due to capacity restrictions after a surge in post-shutdown usage. Anecdotally, the quality has not recovered and is still worse than pre-COVID. Is my experience widespread? What's going on? I ask as somebody working on a similar product, where capacity caused recommendation quality degradation in March/April but recovered soon after.
- lostmsu 6y ago
  Maybe you just run out of interesting content to watch?
lazyjones 6y ago
But what is the benefit of logging out? It's not like these websites can't track you and your interests anyway.

48 points by patwalls 6y ago

I have a curated list of subreddits I follow on reddit without any of the large default meme-spam ones. Without that reddit is basically useless to me as I don't need even more meme-spam in my life. Same with twitter, I use it to follow some engineers and artists while avoiding the mainstream accounts that have no relevance to me. I honestly want to know what these people are up so as it's usually either beautiful or interesting or insightful.

mimimi31 6y ago
I use Multireddits for that. They let you view a custom feed by concatenating subreddit names in the URL. No need for login or subscriptions. E.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux+privacy https://www.reddit.com/r/linux+privacy

liammonahan 6y ago

Even if you log out don’t they still know who you are based on IP or other fingerprints to serve relevant content? Anecdotally I’ve been on online shopping sites that will email me my cart to ask if I want to check out even when I’m not logged in, so it seems unlikely that you’ll be any more anonymous by signing out.

gruez 6y ago
IP: use commercial VPN so you blend in with thousands of other users fingerprinting: use firefox and turn on resistfingerprinting

Darky 6y ago

Having a browsable & searchable history of "every youtube video ever watched on any device" is something pretty valuable to me.

gruez 6y ago
Just use your local browsing history?
- dan_can_code 6y ago
  That doesn't cover the 'on any device' requirement.

gruez 6y ago

This is pretty easy to do with firefox, just use the multi account containers and the temporary containers extension. During normal browsing you use temporary containers, which keeps you logged out and avoids anonymous session tracking. If you need to log in all you need to do is right click the tab and reopen in your dedicated "logged in" container

y7 6y ago
I just switched to this setup from Cookie Autodelete (or something similar), and I'm really happy with it. For some websites where you want to always login you can also set a URL to automatically open in a certain container.
smichel17 6y ago
I used to do this but have shifted my pattern somewhat. Now, I use many fewer permanent containers. When I want to log in, I'll do it in the temporary container. I use a password manager so this is barely less convenient than reopening the tab. To log out, I just close the tab.
pteraspidomorph 6y ago
Can't you just use a private window?
- noman-land 6y ago
  Private windows are all linked to each other. Different private windows are not in different private sessions. They all share the same private session, so It's not really the same.
  - pteraspidomorph 6y ago
    Interesting, I didn't know that. Seems clear from the language in the initial view of the private window, but I hadn't really paid attention before. This isn't how I think private windows should work. They should be fully isolated (tabs within the same private window could share a session, though).

jabroni_salad 6y ago

My tweetdeck layout is by far the most effective way to use twitter. My youtube subscription page is my first port of call. Reddit.... its just highly vexing if you aren't logged in.

amadeuspagel 6y ago

Youtube's recommendation algorithm is one of the wonders of the modern world. I discovered so many incredible videos that I would never have searched for and that no one would have recommended to me, thanks to it.

scottoreily 6y ago
Nice anecdote. YouTube constantly recommends me stuff I have 0 interest in.
- ubercow13 6y ago
  Did you give it any useful information? I mean for example, I am subscribed to a bunch of channels about music theory, and Youtube will put other videos about music theory and analysis in my feed. They are highly relevant and at least somewhat popular, so usually reasonable quality. Sometimes it will start recommending videos from a channel that is not so good, and you can tell it to never show you that channel again. If you only watch random Youtube videos linked from other sites with no particular theme, or generic news and political videos, or don't subscribe to any channels, I can imagine the recommendations would be pretty useless. But the algorithm does seem pretty good at recommending things related to your interests if those are clear from what you watch and subscribe to. It's probably the only recommendation engine I find useful.
  - patwalls 6y ago
    My point is less about the content being useful/interesting and more about being mindful of our information diet. How many videos do you need to watch about music theory? Does it ever feel like the same content but regurgitated in different ways? Do you watch this to genuinely learn? Or is it more enjoyment/infotainment? (honest questions) I don't study music theory, but this is how I feel about productivity/self-help/business videos, which dominate my feed. Although these videos were life changing at one point, I'm not sure how much more value I'm getting by continuing to watch these anymore. When I get to the end of these videos, nowadays, I just feel a bit 'bleh'. It feels nice to find new, refreshing content that is completely outside of what the youtube algo would give me, and sometimes that happens by talking to friends (esp in different industries), reading books, old blog posts, etc. I want to stay curious and proactive in finding discovering new things and hobbies and interests.

peignoir 6y ago

I like apple solution for that, logging using a randomized apple account ID per service

caiobegotti 6y ago

Because I find video recommendations useful, because I want to upvote good content on the internet just like I do here on HN and because I actually have a nice timeline with curated content. The points of the article are rather weak to me, specially considering you are supposed to have good security for your accounts so even if you decide to actively log out yourself the next time you'd like to interact with any of these networks you will at least have to go through a manual login, 2FA using your phone and an authenticator app etc, it's a bummer so convenience wins there. If this is a problem then, I believe convincing people to never save login passwords in their browsers is more compelling than suggesting to log out. That said, if I could log in with Face ID in like 2 seconds everywhere I'd probably stay logged out until I wanted to interact in SOME networks.

codetrotter 6y ago
With a MacBook Air and iPhone it's not too much hassle. I use Touch ID on the MacBook Air to fill in the username and password, and then I open the 2FA app on my iPhone and tap the code to copy it. The clipboard is synchronised between the MacBook Air and the iPhone in their out-of-box configuration, so I can immediately paste the 2FA code on the MacBook Air by just pressing ⌘+V. Thanks to this, I log out a lot of the time. However, to make it even more friction-less I am also going to make a simple little 2FA app myself for the MacBook Air, where I just glue together a couple of libraries and make it more effortless than having to touch the phone at all.

kyriakos 6y ago

Reddit is a pointless stream of memes if you are not logged in to see your subscribed subreddits.

jypepin 6y ago

I am subscribed to a lot of small subreddit I would not see content from if I wasn't logged in. I follow people on Twitter. But most importantly, I _really_ started using youtube about a year ago. I replaced my TV watching at 90% (everything except movies at night). Not only I am subscribed to enough channels that there are at least 2-3 new videos per day I would want to watch, the recommendations algorithm is very good and I can literally go on Youtube multiple times a day and be recommended new videos that I like and introduce me to new channels I will subscribe to.

timelincoln 6y ago

Today being logged out might equate to choosing the “default” view of the world (as far as the internet is concerned) while the AI creates a view for every “logged in” person that distorts the world to fit their biases almost completely

worik 6y ago

Golly. I almost never log in to any of those services. Am I missing out? Yikes. Self doubt starts, gnawing at me....

derefr 6y ago
Presuming you "browse" the service (e.g. look at whatever equivalent it has to a front page), you're seeing only the "mainstream" of its content, without any "niche" content. For many of these services, most of the reason that people even use/recommend them is that they allow each person to conveniently "browse" within the set of long-tail niches that interest them. Reddit, for one, is certainly not popular because of its mainstream/default subreddits. It's popular in spite of them. On the other hand, presuming you do no "browsing" of the service, but just get linked to specific content on the service from elsewhere, you're pretty much getting the full experience either way. (I think one difference is that some services won't show you all the comments unless you log in; and sometimes the comments themselves are what was interesting-enough to link to.) Also, some particular services (e.g. YouTube) track you and build a viewer profile of you even if you never create an account there, and so "browsing" them will still result in niche content if that's what you've previously visited there. But most services don't do this.

wrs 6y ago

YouTube still recommends content when you’re logged out. In fact, I used YouTube for years logged out, and when I started having to log in because I got YouTube Premium, I was unhappy to find all my recommendations reset! I’m starting over from the generic recommendations (which are quite frankly a little terrifying). I wish there was a way to move the recommendation data between accounts.

wayneftw 6y ago
I wish Reddit would implement a recommendation engine like YouTube. I don't want to ever log into Reddit and I just treat it as my funny pages, but every single day without fail I am subjected to all sorts of abhorrent, deviant content that is essentially forced onto their "popular" timeline despite the fact that it's not really popular. Many times when you read the comments on these types of posts, if you sort by controversial, you can see people asking "Why is this on the front page?" or, just by counting the number of deleted comments you can see how unpopular that content really is.

onyva 6y ago

There’s invidio.us to avoid YouTube as much as possible. Also, strongly disagrees with >> While logged in, my YouTube recommended feed is doing a great job of serving me interesting content - but is that a good thing? I see one related item and then a barrage of the worst of humanity.

agakshat 6y ago

> Why do we need to be constantly logged in to YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, and Twitter?...These apps all work fine anonymously Instagram most certainly does not work without logging in. I don't have an account, and it only lets you see at max 1 or 2 posts before prompting (and mandating) a login. Also, I don't know how Twitter is useful without being logged in - you're just seeing the "trending", very little of which is statistically likely to be interesting to you.

mgraczyk 6y ago

Question for anyone working on ranking at Youtube: Recommendation quality got way worse ~March of this year, presumably due to capacity restrictions after a surge in post-shutdown usage. Anecdotally, the quality has not recovered and is still worse than pre-COVID. Is my experience widespread? What's going on? I ask as somebody working on a similar product, where capacity caused recommendation quality degradation in March/April but recovered soon after.

lostmsu 6y ago
Maybe you just run out of interesting content to watch?

lazyjones 6y ago

But what is the benefit of logging out? It's not like these websites can't track you and your interests anyway.