Hi HNers,
I have observed over the course of several months a phenomenon that leaves me baffled.
aliexpress.com, the retail website for alibaba, has extremely short lived authentication on its website. They keep users logged in for a few hours at most before having to reauthenticate with username/password.<p>The alibaba group is no amateur, so I'm inclined to belive this is a deliberate practice, however I cannot figure out what is the advantage of doing this vs for example amazon.com, which keeps users authenticated basically forever.
In taking a look again at their login page, I realized that it might be an effort to nudge users towards using social logins instead of username/pwd.