We also have an additional reason to prefer social login, and which was the reason for why I implemented this feature now, which is the prevention of sockpuppet, troll and spam accounts.
But how does social login prevent that? I have three Google Accounts, two Facebook accounts and two Githubs. It’s not any more work to create these additional accounts than it is to create a new LessWrong account.
While it is possible to have two to three FB accounts, and similar for Google and Github, all of those platforms are quite good at preventing you from getting 100 accounts or more. And if you do create them, it’s fairly easy to check whether something is wrong with them (i.e. whether they were just created, or had no activity on them, etc.) Yesterday we had someone generate around 100 spam accounts on here, which would have been much harder to do on any of these platforms (not impossible, but much harder). They use a variety of stuff, from IP-tracking to requiring somewhat hard-to-get-by information such as phone numbers, real-life addresses, etc.
But how does social login prevent that? I have three Google Accounts, two Facebook accounts and two Githubs. It’s not any more work to create these additional accounts than it is to create a new LessWrong account.
While it is possible to have two to three FB accounts, and similar for Google and Github, all of those platforms are quite good at preventing you from getting 100 accounts or more. And if you do create them, it’s fairly easy to check whether something is wrong with them (i.e. whether they were just created, or had no activity on them, etc.) Yesterday we had someone generate around 100 spam accounts on here, which would have been much harder to do on any of these platforms (not impossible, but much harder). They use a variety of stuff, from IP-tracking to requiring somewhat hard-to-get-by information such as phone numbers, real-life addresses, etc.