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Accounts

What an account unlocks, and what it deliberately never binds.

Decision: ⚪ idea

Context

An account exists so people can build and own things. It does not exist so we can know who answered what - the separation in privacy and legal is the rule this whole doc sits inside.

What an account unlocks:

  • Authoring - the editor, a creator's drafts, and the review state of everything they have submitted.
  • Ownership - the quizzes someone made, and the exports of the data those quizzes collected.
  • Convenience - demographics given once and reused, so a returning taker is not asked on every quiz.
  • Administration - moderation and the admin-only controls, such as the boost in quality score.

What an account never does:

  • It does not gate taking a quiz - the questionnaire, the result, the card and comparison all work with no account at all. The funnel never asks for one before the payoff.
  • It does not attach views to a person - a registered taker's answers are stored exactly as anonymously as anyone else's, and nothing joins the two.
  • It does not become a social graph - comparison runs on exchanged identifiers, not on finding people by name - see comparison modes.
  • It does not replace the results link - a saved result arrives by e-mail, which is how a taker returns to it without registering.

That leaves accounts as a creator and administration feature that a taker may never need, and the asymmetry is deliberate: the people who build carry an identity, the people who answer do not.

Opportunity

  • It keeps the funnel open - the highest-drop-off moment in any product is a sign-up wall, and this product does not have one.
  • Creators need identity anyway - authorship, review state, ownership of data and the right to publish all require a durable account, so the cost lands only on the people getting something back for it.
  • The privacy claim stays simple - "an account does not connect you to your answers" is a sentence we can hold to, and a sentence a bolted-on login would have ruined.
  • One place for permissions - creator, admin and reviewer roles all hang off the same object rather than being invented per feature.
  • It scales with the platform - the more the community authors, the more the account is worth, without ever touching takers.

Risk

  • Every feature will ask to cross the line - result history, cross-device resume, personalised recommendations and creator analytics are all reasonable requests that end with views attached to an identity.
  • Two half-features - an account that does very little for takers may look broken to people who expect a normal profile.
  • Password and recovery obligations - the moment accounts exist we own credentials, resets and the support that comes with them, on a volunteer team.
  • Creator identity is exposure - a public quiz has an author, and in political content an author is a person who can be targeted.
  • An admin account is the highest-value target we have - moderation, boost and exports sit behind it.