Products · Pattern or everyday thing
Security questions
Raised as a usability problem by 6 people on Hacker News over 15 years (2012–2026), in 6 threads.
People raised many different problems with Security questions, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 6 complaints
- Random hex answers are nearly impossible to dictate to a support agent2026-10-15
- Secret questions are hard to answer consistently, so users get frustrated trying to use them2019-01-31
- Setting up and answering secret questions is tedious, and some sites ask them on every login2017-07-26
- Security questions are time-consuming and hard to recall, forcing customers to call during business hours2017-04-29
- Some services force multiple-choice security questions, making answers more guessable and awkward to set2014-01-30
- Transforming security question answers into memorable passwords is a pain, so people give up and use gibberish2012-07-19