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Details like these go through extensive A/B testing. Clearly, Meta has found that gating their content behind a login prompt leads to greater engagement and rev
by xvector 3y ago
Details like these go through extensive A/B testing. Clearly, Meta has found that gating their content behind a login prompt leads to greater engagement and revenue growth. For what it's worth, I eventually created an Instagram account because of these prompts. The strategy works.
- lacerrr 3y agoit's just artificial growth, though. You're not generating any more engagement than if they'd just show you the content as a guest. Unless you also started using the app as a result of creating an account.
- patmorgan23 3y agoThey've covered non-logged in engagement into logged in engagement, which lets them target ads better.
- alluro2 3y agoOr at least immediately fees you presumably more relevant posts from people you follow, so that you can engage more and they can serve more ads.
- nine_k 3y agoThe growth may be artificial and not sustainable, but the money it brings is real, and can be invested (or consumed) sooner than later. Opportunity cost is a real thing :-\
- mlrtime 3y agoAdditionally the infrastrucutre is not free either. Even without ads (which is fine by me), serving up the full suite of tools to logged out users is very expensive and much harder to control At our company we're trying to do the same thing now, supporting logged out users is just too expensive and not worth it.
- zeitg3ist 3y agoI would argue it’s actually easier to serve content to logged out users as you can cache the whole response and serve it at the edge. Then it “just” becomes a cache expiration problem.
- doubled112 3y agoI have seen right here on HN where my request cannot be processed, but it loads fine in a private browser window. Logged in users receive more errors. Thanks, caching, for allowing me to continue procrastinating.
- mlrtime 3y agoCorrect, we push static assets to the edge. However not all SASS products are the same, there is a spectrum of features that can be pushed to the edge and some cannot. The engineering comes from cost, usability, reliability, etc... Ultimately we prioritize our logged-in customers.