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Honestly, if I have to be logged in by default on a search page I'm not gonna use it. Assuming that people don't clear their cookies is wrong nowadays. Even wh

Honestly, if I have to be logged in by default on a search page I'm not gonna use it. Assuming that people don't clear their cookies is wrong nowadays. Even when your website is a little snowflake, the rest of the web isn't. I honestly would recommend a Web Extension that adds your search as a search provider, or something like an Open Search Description. Also: the landing page of GitHub annoys the shit out of me. Every damn time. I don't wanna register with three clicks if I already have an account. Make a landing page easier for regular users to login, and prioritize login over signups...otherwise those regular users won't be happy. Any company should focus on keeping the regular users happy (UX wise) and not focus on one time trial registrations that will be a burden on infrastructure.

dangus 5y ago
I don't even mind logging in, but it does seem weird to force it before letting potential customers interact with the product. Why not just prompt for registration when personalization features are used? What I do mind is the price...if you read the FAQ, they want to charge as low as $10/month, $30/month for families once it exits beta. ("As low as" means "possibly higher") That's very high. The family price equates to 16 Office 365 Family seats, which includes 16TB of cloud storage. In my opinion, the price for this kind of product should be more in the realm of $50/year. I'm thinking a price closer to what password managers charge. This price also will need to be adjusted for global customers if that is the eventual intention. Spotify in India costs less than $1.50 a month.
- burrows 5y ago
  - dangus 5y ago
    That's $130,000 in 30 years if invested at a 6% annual return, compounded daily. In other words, shave off a year of your career at least and retire instead.
    - waffle_maniac 5y ago
      - dangus 5y ago
        Just an example! Being frugal is a balance, because if you go too far on the extreme of that spectrum you end up doing really crazy stuff to save money, and then die and leave your stash to your next of kin. That's certainly not what I'm advocating for! Still, $5 for a cup of tea is a really terrible example because it's an incredible waste – tea is very easy to make. Technically, when you buy some tea somewhere else you're wasting time rather than saving it, since an electric kettle is much faster. A mildly better example: at least when you pay $5 for a Starbucks nitro cold brew, you're getting something that isn't realistically available at home (unless you want to buy/clean/store/operate a nitrogen coffee kegerator). $10/month for a search engine...I mean, you can just block ads and trackers for free. Microsoft literally pays you money to use their search engine. It's not like streaming services where paying for ad removal saves you time.
    - hetspookjee 5y ago
      I get that you live in a tent and eat peanuts and lentils everyday with water? Imagine if you calculate your savings with this lifestyle. You could retire a decade before everyone else!
      - dangus 5y ago
        No, I don't live in a tent, not at all! I have a gym membership that costs my family $500 a month. But, when we go there, we get unlimited classes, a pool, hot tub, sauna, steam sauna – it's good for our physical well-being, and it acts as extra rented real estate. They offer an hour of child care included per visit, so it's a break from parenting while we work out. $5 tea or coffee is just flavored water that I can make at home for 50 cents and minimal effort. Obviously, to each their own, but $5 tea was a bad example. And a $10/month search engine is a bad deal when ad blockers are free.
        5y ago
  - forgotmyoldname 5y ago
    Every product in the world sells itself as being as cheap as a cup of coffee or a cup of tea "so just pay it, cheapo". If that excuse actually worked, nobody would be drinking tea or coffee because we'd have spent our money on random apps and services. It's necessary to prove an app brings more joy than a good $5 drink does--most products fail to cross that threshold.
    - harles 5y ago
      I find such pitches more a reminder that we’ve somehow decided $5 is an acceptable price for a cup of flavored and slightly chemically enhanced water.
      - forgotmyoldname 5y ago
        People have been paying money for food and beverages forever. The cost of labor is a big factor in it. It's the foundation of the economy.
      - piaste 5y ago
        You're not paying $5 for the cup. You're paying $5 for the guy making it for you at a moment's notice, for the warm couch to sit in while you drink it, and for the other guy who comes after you leave and cleans after you.
    - eitland 5y ago
      Good point and I've also written elsewhere about subscription exhaustion or something like that (I think I had a better term for it then). I think I wrote something like "if a product requires a subscription I don't consider it unless it replaces another subscription - or is so good that it is obviously worth it". Well, for me this is the second category: For me Kagi is a fantastic deal at $10 (although I hesitate to say it since it probably means they'll end up charging more ;-)
    - burrows 5y ago
      Agreed, most apps are useless to most people, just like most people don’t read most books. And I’m not recommending the comparison to a cup of coffee as marketing. For me there is absolutely no difference in paying $1/month and $10/month for a daily driver search engine and I’m letting everyone know this to establish dominance over OP.
- freediver 5y ago
  The goal of Kagi is not to be a mass market product, but a premium search engine, offering best in class search product experience with top privacy guarantee (as the business model does not require fiddling with your data in bad ways). Search is arguably one of the most important activities we do every day both in personal and work setting. Unique Kagi features should be well worth the cost. It is also an independent company, bootstrapped by the founder, without a ton of VC money to subsidize the cost. And at $10/mo per user it would be barely breaking even, if at all. So there are a lot of factors of play, and I completely understand why $10/mo may sound excessive given all the free alternatives out there. It is just one of the many uphill battles we are fighting ;)
  - dangus 5y ago
    I definitely understand where you're coming from. One can make the argument that a search engine is used with an incredible amount of frequency for most people – dozens of times per day. It should be worth a lot. One thing that's great about search engines in terms of entrepreneurship fundamentals is that is is such a massive market. You only need a fraction of a percent to be a viable business, I'm sure. I can also understand how underpricing a product can be a big mistake. Somebody who wants this kind of product has already made the conscious decision to pay. Pricing a product too low can be a signal that it's not a good product. Perhaps one might say that this is an example of how complexity and cost of production is a bit detached from the customer's willingness to pay. The most complex software product, the operating system, is essentially given away for free. People are mostly not willing to pay for it, even businesses don't want to anymore. On the other end of the spectrum, there are SaaS products with very low levels of complexity pulling in a lot more than $0. If it's truly barely breaking even at $10/month, that fascinates me. It must mean that search engines have to do a lot of computing. In any event, I wish you the best, because the features do look cool. I like the idea of being able to set site preferences (e.g., when I search for a movie I might like to see Wikipedia over IMDB).
    - freediver 5y ago
      > Perhaps one might say that this is an example of how complexity and cost of production is a bit detached from the customer's willingness to pay. The most complex software product, the operating system, is essentially given away for free. Spot on. Not that long ago we used to pay for OS, even beta versions of OS. Nowadays, most complex software products imaginable, like OS, browser, search engine, social networking... - are all free, and over the years we as a society have been slowly drawn into an expectation of these to be free. Of course someone or something is paying for it, as all these also "magically" generate hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue. And when someone shows up with an idea to actually sell such product and tries to create a business where user is also the customer, and incentives between the user and the business are aligned, they are usually looked at with a raised eyebrow. I am personally of the opinion that you always get what you pay for and that one should not shy away from paying and supporting products they love. I hope we are building one such product, that some people (and admittedly you need to be a little different to use and pay for Kagi) will fall in love with.
- stanmancan 5y ago
  It’s unfair to compare pricing between two totally different products, especially when one of them is owned by one of the biggest companies in the world with millions of paying customers and a vast suite of products.
- eitland 5y ago
  > What I do mind is the price...if you read the FAQ, they want to charge as low as $10/month, $30/month for families once it exits beta. ("As low as" means "possibly higher") $10 a month is less than one lost hour of work. I hope they price it around there somewhere so that many will use it but even at $20 it is a no-brainer for me. The results are in another league compared to what I get elsewhere and by now it also feels like an insult every time I realize Google has altered my query: do you guys really think I don't know what I am doing? Google probably works better for illiterate people these days, but in the process they have alienated me. I have lost too many hours searching for things I knew used to be there only to be ignored and corrected by their AI. It is rather patronizing at this point.
  - maven29 5y ago
    For people who cannot afford the $10, I can unironically suggest bing. It actually responds to long queries much better than google. You should still use the website's search function first. Github issues/SO search often turns up results that google will ignore.
  - ralferoo 5y ago
    > $10 a month is less than one lost hour of work. This is a pretty feeble argument for something, especially for a product where the user perception is that it should be free, and there exist multiple free options already. While "one hour of work" might not seem a lot, a different way of looking at that is that for most people there are 160 hours of work in a month, and so this thing needs to be worth 1/160th of their life. It's not so hard to make that choice for a couple of things that are of obvious value, but when they start adding up in your life for basic things, people will question the value of it to them, and I'd argue for most people, search just isn't worth that much to them when there are so many good free options.
- no_time 5y ago
  >That's very high. The family price equates to 16 Office 365 Family seats, which includes 16TB of cloud storage. Offtopic: That must be one of the best deals on online storage Excluding Google's enterprise unlimited storage option which always felt like they could pull the rug under you any day.
freediver 5y ago
> Honestly, if I have to be logged in by default on a search page I'm not gonna use it. Curious how would you handle authenticating for a paid product on the web today?
- lovich 5y ago
  Not the person being asked, but unless it’s for work I just don’t use it. There’s more content online than I can ever consume and if it’s a tool I need for a side project I might as well build it myself since I work on side projects solely to keep my tech skills up Edit: I do authenticate on several paid products, but I was always introduced to them in some hassle free manner, and only got to the point of paying and dealing with adding another app to deal with maintaining after I’ve grown to like the service
  - stanmancan 5y ago
    You’re authenticated here? What’s the difference?
    - lovich 5y ago
      Did it after years of lurking and finally feeling like it’s worth it. This was in response to the application in question requiring authentication from the get go. Ultimately it’s laziness, but dealing with authentication is annoying and I can’t be assed to do it for something I’m not already valuing
      - thelittleone 5y ago
        Not just laziness but increased attack surface for compromised credentials. Just like physical things weigh us down (spring clean or donating old stuff is liberating) so too is having another login somewhere. I wish I knew all the sites I have logins too but I dont and its frustrating, risky and worrying.
        lovich 5y ago
ralph84 5y ago
> the landing page of GitHub annoys the shit out of me. Every damn time. I don't wanna register with three clicks if I already have an account. ? If you're not signed in, `Sign in` is available on literally every page in the upper right and one click takes you to the sign in box. If one click is too many just bookmark github.com/login. If you don't want to sign in the search box is also in the upper right on every page to take you wherever you want to go.
- injidup 5y ago
  It is expected that if you are logged in you stay logged in. Only a minority of users clear all their cookies at the end of every session. Sorry but that is true. Thus the landing page is optimised for the most common visitor, that is the one with no account yet, not the loudest complainer on a tech geek forum.
- cookiengineer 5y ago
  > just bookmark github.com/login This will make me be detected as a bot and I see captchas everywhere afterwards. I was using that for a while. A better alternative would be content identity through URLs. If your marketing page is at github.com/index.html, then make something like github.com/dashboard.html for logged in users, and redirect them to /login.html when they are required to be logged in. This way users can easily bookmark the page that they actually want to see.
  - dreamcompiler 5y ago
    Github already has my public ssh key so I can push/pull/clone without typing a password. Why the heck don't they support ssl client authentication so the same thing works when I use a browser? SSL client certs are an actual thing yet no web site I have ever seen uses them. Why?
dreamcompiler 5y ago
I get the impression that startups get something like a 10x multiplier in kudos, stock options, chances for a next round, (pick your reward) etc for signing up a new user than for a repeat visitor logging in. The former means growth; the latter doesn't. Hence it's always easier to find the signup button than the login button. Fucked up incentive structures like this are why we cannot have nice things.
- Griffinsauce 5y ago
  Having users that want to return is objectively good. We've just taken this to the wrong conclusions. I strongly suspect that this has to do with attribution and shallow "data driven" choices - there is a heavy bias towards things that are easier to measure. Especially in startups with limited resources. Measuring retained users regardless of anonymous/known state is very hard and lossy. So the nearest easy to measure analog that is often picked is logged-in users and we start the fucked up cycle you mention. Similar things happen around all metrics that have to do with retention. We know that a better experience through higher performance and better UX is likely to create happier users that return... but we cannot prove it (easily) so we focus on optimizing other things.
  - bregma 5y ago
    The minute something becomes a KPI it is no longer a useful KPI.
  - Jenk 5y ago
    I've been in more product meetings that have uttered a phrase like "we will work out what to do with all these users later" than I care to count. It really is a startup goal to sign-up as many users as possible. In most cases it is literally a metric for the next funding round ("Last quarter we had 100k signups!" Is a very attractive soundbite at the round table)
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  That's how extreme shortsightedness looks like. The number of users you lose by doing that is smaller than the number you gain as long as you don't have enough users (and spends enough on publicity). This is also the one thing that limits the number of users a company will ever have on most cases.
injidup 5y ago
Whitelist github.com from Auto cookie clearing. Takes less time than a rant on SO. I had a guy at work ask me to store the entire state of an internal web site in the URL. He went so far to go and get his change request approved by management, resources and time allocated. When it was passed to me to implement and I dug into why he wanted this, turned out he was auto clearing his cookies. I told him to whitelist our internal website from his cookie clearing Paranoia and stop wasting my time and company money.
- beebeepka 5y ago
  Wow, this guy must have some pull in the company for this to happen
black_puppydog 5y ago
Using google search without being logged in and clearing cookies regularly will constantly harass you with a very intrusive "cookie banner". Quotes because it's much more than that. The sole purpose of these is to get you to globally log into google and stay logged in. So I don't think it really makes much of a difference.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
  "I don't care about cookies" + "Cookie Autodelete" add-ons solve that problem easily for me.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tinus_hn 5y ago
  The sole result for me has been a pretty insistent reminder that I should not be using this service.
  - tjoff 5y ago
    Agree. The routine of opting out of that every day is very important. It is a constant reminder that I absolutely need to further reduce the use of google services.
- jkaplowitz 5y ago
  That's true in Europe but not in the US, I believe. It is indeed one of the more obnoxious cookie consent banners I've seen.
- axiosgunnar 5y ago
  It‘s annoying as fuck but tbh I got used to it, it‘s second nature to me now.
spurgu 5y ago
> Make a landing page easier for regular users to login, and prioritize login over signups... This. I suppose it's become so prevalent due to A/B tests finding it more efficient to optimize for new users, but at some point in a company's growth it would make sense to put the focus on user retention. Then again, it wouldn't be that hard to make both signing up and logging in easy and attractive.
tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
> Make a landing page easier for regular users to login, and prioritize login over signups...otherwise those regular users won't be happy. This is one of the first "asshole design" moves that I recognize, that unfortunately most sites use. If the "Sign up" button (which will be used once by each user) is highlighted more than the "Sign in" button (which will be used hundreds of times), I know that your company doesn't really care about its users. I'm surprised how common it is.

dangus 5y ago

I don't even mind logging in, but it does seem weird to force it before letting potential customers interact with the product. Why not just prompt for registration when personalization features are used? What I do mind is the price...if you read the FAQ, they want to charge as low as $10/month, $30/month for families once it exits beta. ("As low as" means "possibly higher") That's very high. The family price equates to 16 Office 365 Family seats, which includes 16TB of cloud storage. In my opinion, the price for this kind of product should be more in the realm of $50/year. I'm thinking a price closer to what password managers charge. This price also will need to be adjusted for global customers if that is the eventual intention. Spotify in India costs less than $1.50 a month.

burrows 5y ago
- dangus 5y ago
  That's $130,000 in 30 years if invested at a 6% annual return, compounded daily. In other words, shave off a year of your career at least and retire instead.
  - waffle_maniac 5y ago
    - dangus 5y ago
      Just an example! Being frugal is a balance, because if you go too far on the extreme of that spectrum you end up doing really crazy stuff to save money, and then die and leave your stash to your next of kin. That's certainly not what I'm advocating for! Still, $5 for a cup of tea is a really terrible example because it's an incredible waste – tea is very easy to make. Technically, when you buy some tea somewhere else you're wasting time rather than saving it, since an electric kettle is much faster. A mildly better example: at least when you pay $5 for a Starbucks nitro cold brew, you're getting something that isn't realistically available at home (unless you want to buy/clean/store/operate a nitrogen coffee kegerator). $10/month for a search engine...I mean, you can just block ads and trackers for free. Microsoft literally pays you money to use their search engine. It's not like streaming services where paying for ad removal saves you time.
  - hetspookjee 5y ago
    I get that you live in a tent and eat peanuts and lentils everyday with water? Imagine if you calculate your savings with this lifestyle. You could retire a decade before everyone else!
    - dangus 5y ago
      No, I don't live in a tent, not at all! I have a gym membership that costs my family $500 a month. But, when we go there, we get unlimited classes, a pool, hot tub, sauna, steam sauna – it's good for our physical well-being, and it acts as extra rented real estate. They offer an hour of child care included per visit, so it's a break from parenting while we work out. $5 tea or coffee is just flavored water that I can make at home for 50 cents and minimal effort. Obviously, to each their own, but $5 tea was a bad example. And a $10/month search engine is a bad deal when ad blockers are free.
      - 5y ago
- forgotmyoldname 5y ago
  Every product in the world sells itself as being as cheap as a cup of coffee or a cup of tea "so just pay it, cheapo". If that excuse actually worked, nobody would be drinking tea or coffee because we'd have spent our money on random apps and services. It's necessary to prove an app brings more joy than a good $5 drink does--most products fail to cross that threshold.
  - harles 5y ago
    I find such pitches more a reminder that we’ve somehow decided $5 is an acceptable price for a cup of flavored and slightly chemically enhanced water.
    - forgotmyoldname 5y ago
      People have been paying money for food and beverages forever. The cost of labor is a big factor in it. It's the foundation of the economy.
    - piaste 5y ago
      You're not paying $5 for the cup. You're paying $5 for the guy making it for you at a moment's notice, for the warm couch to sit in while you drink it, and for the other guy who comes after you leave and cleans after you.
  - eitland 5y ago
    Good point and I've also written elsewhere about subscription exhaustion or something like that (I think I had a better term for it then). I think I wrote something like "if a product requires a subscription I don't consider it unless it replaces another subscription - or is so good that it is obviously worth it". Well, for me this is the second category: For me Kagi is a fantastic deal at $10 (although I hesitate to say it since it probably means they'll end up charging more ;-)
  - burrows 5y ago
    Agreed, most apps are useless to most people, just like most people don’t read most books. And I’m not recommending the comparison to a cup of coffee as marketing. For me there is absolutely no difference in paying $1/month and $10/month for a daily driver search engine and I’m letting everyone know this to establish dominance over OP.
freediver 5y ago
The goal of Kagi is not to be a mass market product, but a premium search engine, offering best in class search product experience with top privacy guarantee (as the business model does not require fiddling with your data in bad ways). Search is arguably one of the most important activities we do every day both in personal and work setting. Unique Kagi features should be well worth the cost. It is also an independent company, bootstrapped by the founder, without a ton of VC money to subsidize the cost. And at $10/mo per user it would be barely breaking even, if at all. So there are a lot of factors of play, and I completely understand why $10/mo may sound excessive given all the free alternatives out there. It is just one of the many uphill battles we are fighting ;)
- dangus 5y ago
  I definitely understand where you're coming from. One can make the argument that a search engine is used with an incredible amount of frequency for most people – dozens of times per day. It should be worth a lot. One thing that's great about search engines in terms of entrepreneurship fundamentals is that is is such a massive market. You only need a fraction of a percent to be a viable business, I'm sure. I can also understand how underpricing a product can be a big mistake. Somebody who wants this kind of product has already made the conscious decision to pay. Pricing a product too low can be a signal that it's not a good product. Perhaps one might say that this is an example of how complexity and cost of production is a bit detached from the customer's willingness to pay. The most complex software product, the operating system, is essentially given away for free. People are mostly not willing to pay for it, even businesses don't want to anymore. On the other end of the spectrum, there are SaaS products with very low levels of complexity pulling in a lot more than $0. If it's truly barely breaking even at $10/month, that fascinates me. It must mean that search engines have to do a lot of computing. In any event, I wish you the best, because the features do look cool. I like the idea of being able to set site preferences (e.g., when I search for a movie I might like to see Wikipedia over IMDB).
  - freediver 5y ago
    > Perhaps one might say that this is an example of how complexity and cost of production is a bit detached from the customer's willingness to pay. The most complex software product, the operating system, is essentially given away for free. Spot on. Not that long ago we used to pay for OS, even beta versions of OS. Nowadays, most complex software products imaginable, like OS, browser, search engine, social networking... - are all free, and over the years we as a society have been slowly drawn into an expectation of these to be free. Of course someone or something is paying for it, as all these also "magically" generate hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue. And when someone shows up with an idea to actually sell such product and tries to create a business where user is also the customer, and incentives between the user and the business are aligned, they are usually looked at with a raised eyebrow. I am personally of the opinion that you always get what you pay for and that one should not shy away from paying and supporting products they love. I hope we are building one such product, that some people (and admittedly you need to be a little different to use and pay for Kagi) will fall in love with.
stanmancan 5y ago
It’s unfair to compare pricing between two totally different products, especially when one of them is owned by one of the biggest companies in the world with millions of paying customers and a vast suite of products.
eitland 5y ago
> What I do mind is the price...if you read the FAQ, they want to charge as low as $10/month, $30/month for families once it exits beta. ("As low as" means "possibly higher") $10 a month is less than one lost hour of work. I hope they price it around there somewhere so that many will use it but even at $20 it is a no-brainer for me. The results are in another league compared to what I get elsewhere and by now it also feels like an insult every time I realize Google has altered my query: do you guys really think I don't know what I am doing? Google probably works better for illiterate people these days, but in the process they have alienated me. I have lost too many hours searching for things I knew used to be there only to be ignored and corrected by their AI. It is rather patronizing at this point.
- maven29 5y ago
  For people who cannot afford the $10, I can unironically suggest bing. It actually responds to long queries much better than google. You should still use the website's search function first. Github issues/SO search often turns up results that google will ignore.
- ralferoo 5y ago
  > $10 a month is less than one lost hour of work. This is a pretty feeble argument for something, especially for a product where the user perception is that it should be free, and there exist multiple free options already. While "one hour of work" might not seem a lot, a different way of looking at that is that for most people there are 160 hours of work in a month, and so this thing needs to be worth 1/160th of their life. It's not so hard to make that choice for a couple of things that are of obvious value, but when they start adding up in your life for basic things, people will question the value of it to them, and I'd argue for most people, search just isn't worth that much to them when there are so many good free options.
no_time 5y ago
>That's very high. The family price equates to 16 Office 365 Family seats, which includes 16TB of cloud storage. Offtopic: That must be one of the best deals on online storage Excluding Google's enterprise unlimited storage option which always felt like they could pull the rug under you any day.

freediver 5y ago

> Honestly, if I have to be logged in by default on a search page I'm not gonna use it. Curious how would you handle authenticating for a paid product on the web today?

lovich 5y ago
Not the person being asked, but unless it’s for work I just don’t use it. There’s more content online than I can ever consume and if it’s a tool I need for a side project I might as well build it myself since I work on side projects solely to keep my tech skills up Edit: I do authenticate on several paid products, but I was always introduced to them in some hassle free manner, and only got to the point of paying and dealing with adding another app to deal with maintaining after I’ve grown to like the service
- stanmancan 5y ago
  You’re authenticated here? What’s the difference?
  - lovich 5y ago
    Did it after years of lurking and finally feeling like it’s worth it. This was in response to the application in question requiring authentication from the get go. Ultimately it’s laziness, but dealing with authentication is annoying and I can’t be assed to do it for something I’m not already valuing
    - thelittleone 5y ago
      Not just laziness but increased attack surface for compromised credentials. Just like physical things weigh us down (spring clean or donating old stuff is liberating) so too is having another login somewhere. I wish I knew all the sites I have logins too but I dont and its frustrating, risky and worrying.
      - lovich 5y ago

ralph84 5y ago

> the landing page of GitHub annoys the shit out of me. Every damn time. I don't wanna register with three clicks if I already have an account. ? If you're not signed in, `Sign in` is available on literally every page in the upper right and one click takes you to the sign in box. If one click is too many just bookmark github.com/login. If you don't want to sign in the search box is also in the upper right on every page to take you wherever you want to go.

injidup 5y ago
It is expected that if you are logged in you stay logged in. Only a minority of users clear all their cookies at the end of every session. Sorry but that is true. Thus the landing page is optimised for the most common visitor, that is the one with no account yet, not the loudest complainer on a tech geek forum.
cookiengineer 5y ago
> just bookmark github.com/login This will make me be detected as a bot and I see captchas everywhere afterwards. I was using that for a while. A better alternative would be content identity through URLs. If your marketing page is at github.com/index.html, then make something like github.com/dashboard.html for logged in users, and redirect them to /login.html when they are required to be logged in. This way users can easily bookmark the page that they actually want to see.
- dreamcompiler 5y ago
  Github already has my public ssh key so I can push/pull/clone without typing a password. Why the heck don't they support ssl client authentication so the same thing works when I use a browser? SSL client certs are an actual thing yet no web site I have ever seen uses them. Why?

dreamcompiler 5y ago

I get the impression that startups get something like a 10x multiplier in kudos, stock options, chances for a next round, (pick your reward) etc for signing up a new user than for a repeat visitor logging in. The former means growth; the latter doesn't. Hence it's always easier to find the signup button than the login button. Fucked up incentive structures like this are why we cannot have nice things.

Griffinsauce 5y ago
Having users that want to return is objectively good. We've just taken this to the wrong conclusions. I strongly suspect that this has to do with attribution and shallow "data driven" choices - there is a heavy bias towards things that are easier to measure. Especially in startups with limited resources. Measuring retained users regardless of anonymous/known state is very hard and lossy. So the nearest easy to measure analog that is often picked is logged-in users and we start the fucked up cycle you mention. Similar things happen around all metrics that have to do with retention. We know that a better experience through higher performance and better UX is likely to create happier users that return... but we cannot prove it (easily) so we focus on optimizing other things.
- bregma 5y ago
  The minute something becomes a KPI it is no longer a useful KPI.
- Jenk 5y ago
  I've been in more product meetings that have uttered a phrase like "we will work out what to do with all these users later" than I care to count. It really is a startup goal to sign-up as many users as possible. In most cases it is literally a metric for the next funding round ("Last quarter we had 100k signups!" Is a very attractive soundbite at the round table)
marcosdumay 5y ago
That's how extreme shortsightedness looks like. The number of users you lose by doing that is smaller than the number you gain as long as you don't have enough users (and spends enough on publicity). This is also the one thing that limits the number of users a company will ever have on most cases.

injidup 5y ago

Whitelist github.com from Auto cookie clearing. Takes less time than a rant on SO. I had a guy at work ask me to store the entire state of an internal web site in the URL. He went so far to go and get his change request approved by management, resources and time allocated. When it was passed to me to implement and I dug into why he wanted this, turned out he was auto clearing his cookies. I told him to whitelist our internal website from his cookie clearing Paranoia and stop wasting my time and company money.

beebeepka 5y ago
Wow, this guy must have some pull in the company for this to happen

black_puppydog 5y ago

Using google search without being logged in and clearing cookies regularly will constantly harass you with a very intrusive "cookie banner". Quotes because it's much more than that. The sole purpose of these is to get you to globally log into google and stay logged in. So I don't think it really makes much of a difference.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
"I don't care about cookies" + "Cookie Autodelete" add-ons solve that problem easily for me.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tinus_hn 5y ago
The sole result for me has been a pretty insistent reminder that I should not be using this service.
- tjoff 5y ago
  Agree. The routine of opting out of that every day is very important. It is a constant reminder that I absolutely need to further reduce the use of google services.
jkaplowitz 5y ago
That's true in Europe but not in the US, I believe. It is indeed one of the more obnoxious cookie consent banners I've seen.
axiosgunnar 5y ago
It‘s annoying as fuck but tbh I got used to it, it‘s second nature to me now.

spurgu 5y ago

> Make a landing page easier for regular users to login, and prioritize login over signups... This. I suppose it's become so prevalent due to A/B tests finding it more efficient to optimize for new users, but at some point in a company's growth it would make sense to put the focus on user retention. Then again, it wouldn't be that hard to make both signing up and logging in easy and attractive.

tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago

> Make a landing page easier for regular users to login, and prioritize login over signups...otherwise those regular users won't be happy. This is one of the first "asshole design" moves that I recognize, that unfortunately most sites use. If the "Sign up" button (which will be used once by each user) is highlighted more than the "Sign in" button (which will be used hundreds of times), I know that your company doesn't really care about its users. I'm surprised how common it is.