My latest project was a sunglasses/eyewear design site, where people could design their own glasses (I had a tech stack on the backend to make the glasses in my studio - the company is an experiment in mass customization).
I went to great lengths to allow people to use the software without creating an account. In the end, I probably spent two weeks trying to get it to work properly with all the edge cases - saving the anonymous design when they do finally create an account, locking out certain features that required identity, appropriate warning dialogs when work was going to be lost, etc.
And I still had edge cases. I burned two or three weeks trying to accommodate account-averse people, then had to spend another two days yanking it. That effort was based on my personal distaste at having ten billion website accounts, a distaste probably widely shared here on HN and likely nowhere else.
(This isn't an argument with Ben's points - his example use cases clearly don't need accounts.)
My latest project was a sunglasses/eyewear design site, where people could design their own glasses (I had a tech stack on the backend to make the glasses in my studio - the company is an experiment in mass customization).
I went to great lengths to allow people to use the software without creating an account. In the end, I probably spent two weeks trying to get it to work properly with all the edge cases - saving the anonymous design when they do finally create an account, locking out certain features that required identity, appropriate warning dialogs when work was going to be lost, etc.
And I still had edge cases. I burned two or three weeks trying to accommodate account-averse people, then had to spend another two days yanking it. That effort was based on my personal distaste at having ten billion website accounts, a distaste probably widely shared here on HN and likely nowhere else.
(This isn't an argument with Ben's points - his example use cases clearly don't need accounts.)