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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: 0.206s | 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. zzo38computer ◴[18 Apr 25 05:44 UTC] No.43725349[source]▶
I agree that it is bad UX. Other methods of authentication such as TOTP and SMS are not really very good either, I think.

X.509 client certificates would be better (especially since the connection already uses TLS, and yet they do not take full advantage of it and instead require TLS for things that do not need it). It doesn't require email, doesn't require cookies, doesn't require JavaScripts, doesn't require a web browser, doesn't require Unicode (although it can be used if wanted and commonly is), protects against MITM, allows single-sign-on (even without an authentication server, or if the server is down), and the private key can be passworded (without the server needing to know your password; this is handled entirely on the client side). Furthermore, you can store whatever data you want to in the certificate.