[zbentley]

You'd be surprised. I've worked on a municipal/local-area webapp that launched with auth and a create-account form. Userbase in the low 100ks, a few interactions a year. It was an ordinary create-account form: name, address, email/phone, no payment info or government ID. The only alternative to this service--and I do mean only--was to go into a city office and wait in line/fill out forms. Failure to do either resulted in a fine (I forget how much; in USD it would have been less than $50 I'm pretty sure).

Before we added SSO, huge numbers of users would enter but never complete the signup flow. We assumed they were making the (baffling) choice to take time to go to an office and wait inline over filling out a web form. A year later, we added Google and Facebook login. Failures to finish signup dropped to almost zero (a lot of folks were still bailing out of the manual create-account form without finishing, but they were then falling back to Google/Facebook).

More surprising, that year the net number of signups (across web and brick and mortar) more than tripled.

People weren't choosing in-person over a filling out the create-account form. They were choosing to pay a fine instead of filling out the create-account form.

So ... I don't know about "less valuable than TikTok", but a lot of folks' decisionmaking sure is wild.

[palata]

This is a wild story! Thanks for sharing.