6 ms·

I tried something like this once and it worked surprisingly well, even for a UGC site. Years back we were doing something that included users documenting TV sh

I tried something like this once and it worked surprisingly well, even for a UGC site. Years back we were doing something that included users documenting TV shows. We had a big meeting where people put every feature they wanted on index cards. We laid the cards out a founder's dining room table. The host got their change jar and each person got a certain number of pennies to mark features they thought were vital for first launch. After the first round of token-voting, the "user accounts" card had no votes. At first it seemed impossible. But after some discussion, we realized that viewing users didn't need accounts for launch. For people who wanted to edit, we let them type in a name to take credit for their contributions if they wanted, but with no verification. At worst, we figured we could add something more robust if the need were stronger. It turned out fine. The launch got out earlier and we got to test a number of key product hypotheses without having to build any sort of user account system. Months later it did eventually become the highest priority. But not having accounts worked way longer than I expected.

sneak 5y ago
What about abuse/vandalism? If the whole web has edit privileges, what's to stop someone from scripting changing all of the titles to random strings every hour? Do you do a captcha on every edit or something? I think the main idea around user accounts is that they centralize a point of applying captchas as well as a tiny bit of data collection (some form of contact information) that can be used for antispam (e.g. banning certain email address domains from creating accounts, or banning certain email addresses, etc).
- wpietri 5y ago
  I'm familiar with the theory. But accounts just aren't a big barrier to determined bad actors. Note that the world's biggest content site, Wikipedia, allows anonymous edits and always has. And note also that some of big tech companies, despite having all the money in the world, still have problems with fake accounts. So at best, requiring user accounts is one possible anti-abuse step, but it's neither necessary nor sufficient to prevent abuse.
  - sneak 5y ago
    > Note that the world's biggest content site, Wikipedia, allows anonymous edits and always has. Not really. You can't edit Wikipedia from a VPN (even with a user account!), and I think they ban most datacenters. The edits aren't really anonymous if they publicly associate with a piece of PII that, for most people, directly maps to their name and home address.
    - wpietri 5y ago
      Oh? My current IP is 2601:646:4300:758:f676:3f1b:8b5:42a. Please show me how to turn that into my name and home address. Thanks!
      - sneak 5y ago
        Comcast has a portal for law enforcement to request subscriber information at https://lea.comcast.com https://lea.comcast.com . That IPv6 address, plus the current date and time, uniquely identifies you by name and service address. Any edits you make to Wikipedia from that address are not anonymous.
        wpietri 5y ago
        This is a use of "anonymous" that is unfamiliar to me. Do you mean something like "untraceable"? For example, when non-profits credit an anonymous donor, they know who the person is. In that more common sense of the word, Wikipedia's anonymous edits are indeed anonymous: they are published without a name attached. Anyhow, that seems besides the point. All HTTP requests come with IP addresses. That the police might be able to trace them back to a house eventually does not say much about either Wikipedia (who would give up an IP address with a warrant whether the edit was for a named account or an anonymous one) or no-user-account systems in general.
        maccolgan 5y ago
        You are confusing anonymous and pseudonymous. Tor for example can afford you request-level anonymity.
hinkley 5y ago
What's been professionally frustrating me for years as a developer is how much of the engineering and operational budget for a project is tied up into identifying and tracking users. The first time this happened to me we had some idiot who insisted that we needed to display exactly how many logged on users there were on every page load. There was no point in doing so, and we had proven that it was at least ten percent of the cost of each page load. In fact it was higher than that but 10% is what we could proved. My current project is about our customers, not the users, and probably 80% of the operating budget is about making the customer feel like they're running the show. Often with demonstrable and even clichéd consequences for the users. Without customization or user tracking, many, many workflows shift to read-mostly. Many are idempotent. Some can be fully cached. Some can be edge-cached. The dark secret of 'social' media that has been slowly coming out is that they aren't social. They aren't about 'Us', they're about me. Me, me, me. So of course the whole workflow is build around who I am and what I want. That's not just unhealthy, it's also really fucking expensive. And if it's really expensive we can't just eat the cost as a 'value add', we now have to monetize it. So things were already pretty dark and then compensation came into the picture and now it's positively dire.
- wpietri 5y ago
  Absolutely. I think your last point is especially good. Facebook consumes a ton of cash for what many people feel are disappointing results. Are they vulnerable to a competitor who is less about what users want than what they need? A competitor who can do that for 1/10th or 1/100th as much money? That could be very hard for the me-me-me companies to keep up with.
  - hinkley 5y ago
    The thing with fads, and adoption cycles in general, is that what people 'want' can be figured out pretty quickly, but as far as I'm concerned, The Trough of Disillusionment is what happens when people figure out that what they need is something else. So what you're asking is can someone come into the ToD and introduce a new product that steals people away? It's plausible and if I were in a better headspace I could probably name you a bunch of examples. But does it always happen? I don't think so. There are plenty of incumbents who manage to coast through and come out the other side having demonstrated a dilute form of change of heart - just enough to convince the customers that 'something was done' even if they can't quite put a finger on what exactly is better and how much.

sneak 5y ago

What about abuse/vandalism? If the whole web has edit privileges, what's to stop someone from scripting changing all of the titles to random strings every hour? Do you do a captcha on every edit or something? I think the main idea around user accounts is that they centralize a point of applying captchas as well as a tiny bit of data collection (some form of contact information) that can be used for antispam (e.g. banning certain email address domains from creating accounts, or banning certain email addresses, etc).

wpietri 5y ago
I'm familiar with the theory. But accounts just aren't a big barrier to determined bad actors. Note that the world's biggest content site, Wikipedia, allows anonymous edits and always has. And note also that some of big tech companies, despite having all the money in the world, still have problems with fake accounts. So at best, requiring user accounts is one possible anti-abuse step, but it's neither necessary nor sufficient to prevent abuse.
- sneak 5y ago
  > Note that the world's biggest content site, Wikipedia, allows anonymous edits and always has. Not really. You can't edit Wikipedia from a VPN (even with a user account!), and I think they ban most datacenters. The edits aren't really anonymous if they publicly associate with a piece of PII that, for most people, directly maps to their name and home address.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    Oh? My current IP is 2601:646:4300:758:f676:3f1b:8b5:42a. Please show me how to turn that into my name and home address. Thanks!
    - sneak 5y ago
      Comcast has a portal for law enforcement to request subscriber information at https://lea.comcast.com https://lea.comcast.com . That IPv6 address, plus the current date and time, uniquely identifies you by name and service address. Any edits you make to Wikipedia from that address are not anonymous.
      - wpietri 5y ago
        This is a use of "anonymous" that is unfamiliar to me. Do you mean something like "untraceable"? For example, when non-profits credit an anonymous donor, they know who the person is. In that more common sense of the word, Wikipedia's anonymous edits are indeed anonymous: they are published without a name attached. Anyhow, that seems besides the point. All HTTP requests come with IP addresses. That the police might be able to trace them back to a house eventually does not say much about either Wikipedia (who would give up an IP address with a warrant whether the edit was for a named account or an anonymous one) or no-user-account systems in general.
        maccolgan 5y ago
        You are confusing anonymous and pseudonymous. Tor for example can afford you request-level anonymity.

hinkley 5y ago

What's been professionally frustrating me for years as a developer is how much of the engineering and operational budget for a project is tied up into identifying and tracking users. The first time this happened to me we had some idiot who insisted that we needed to display exactly how many logged on users there were on every page load. There was no point in doing so, and we had proven that it was at least ten percent of the cost of each page load. In fact it was higher than that but 10% is what we could proved. My current project is about our customers, not the users, and probably 80% of the operating budget is about making the customer feel like they're running the show. Often with demonstrable and even clichéd consequences for the users. Without customization or user tracking, many, many workflows shift to read-mostly. Many are idempotent. Some can be fully cached. Some can be edge-cached. The dark secret of 'social' media that has been slowly coming out is that they aren't social. They aren't about 'Us', they're about me. Me, me, me. So of course the whole workflow is build around who I am and what I want. That's not just unhealthy, it's also really fucking expensive. And if it's really expensive we can't just eat the cost as a 'value add', we now have to monetize it. So things were already pretty dark and then compensation came into the picture and now it's positively dire.

wpietri 5y ago
Absolutely. I think your last point is especially good. Facebook consumes a ton of cash for what many people feel are disappointing results. Are they vulnerable to a competitor who is less about what users want than what they need? A competitor who can do that for 1/10th or 1/100th as much money? That could be very hard for the me-me-me companies to keep up with.
- hinkley 5y ago
  The thing with fads, and adoption cycles in general, is that what people 'want' can be figured out pretty quickly, but as far as I'm concerned, The Trough of Disillusionment is what happens when people figure out that what they need is something else. So what you're asking is can someone come into the ToD and introduce a new product that steals people away? It's plausible and if I were in a better headspace I could probably name you a bunch of examples. But does it always happen? I don't think so. There are plenty of incumbents who manage to coast through and come out the other side having demonstrated a dilute form of change of heart - just enough to convince the customers that 'something was done' even if they can't quite put a finger on what exactly is better and how much.