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Ask HN: Magic links are bad UX and make people's lives worse. Change my mind

51 points figassis | 1 comments | 14 Apr 25 12:32 UTC | HN request time: 0.2s | source

Click login, get sent an email link that you have to first wait to be delivered (sometimes takes a full minute, sometimes you have to resend the link).

Sometimes the link goes to spam, sometimes you have to search for it like a needle in a haystack of other notifications.

Sometimes you are not logged into your email on that device, or it's a small screen that makes it a pain.

Maybe it's my mother, and she now has to go find where she wrote down her email password because she still can't figure out that 1Password thing I setup for her. Also, she does not have 1Password on this computer (maybe it's a public library).

All this pain because a developer did not want to bother with authentication.

Many, many products are like this nowadays, but the worst offenders are developer tools and OSS projects, and looks like the justification is just that, they just wanted to scratch their itch of a specific feature, why bother with auth when there is google.

Am I crazy?

1. rkagerer ◴[15 Apr 25 05:46 UTC] No.43689353[source]▶
Personally I'm frustrated how most companies followed the lead of the likes of Google, and effectively tied security of your account on their website to that of your email.

If you control the email address signed up with, you have "god" access to the account (can perform password resets, etc). They essentially outsourced security to your email provider.

But some of us would prefer to keep more separation between their email accounts and other services. Eg. If my email's hacked, I don't want that to pwn my other stuff.

2FA helps but often there are ways around it if you control the email account.