Honestly, this genuinely upsets me. This is one of the few ways to make mobile publishing an ad-free experience and Apple mindlessly injects itself into the process. They did the same thing to kill Readability's monetization model awhile back.
I find the competence of government employees quite acceptable and even at times commendable given my quality of life. But then I also understand how the rest of the world has to get by which makes me appreciate what I'm fortunate enough to have.
The weird thing I've noticed is that some people in my country will express your sentiment, but then turn around and tell you they live in the best country in the world and would be offended were anyone to say otherwise.
I guess they don't see the connection between the government workers and that quality of life.
As someone who has worked in government I take offence to this. There are plenty of very qualified people in government who do want to help make the country a better place.
They are often just dealing with out of date processes that are mandated by law and which limit their ability to be innovative.
It is - it's really based on trust. The truth is anytime you give any credentials to anyone, they can abuse it (to the extent the credentials allow.)
For services that don't have something like OAuth to give a token-based credential that is limited in scope/time, the only option is to give full access via username/password. The biggest risk here would be if the other site were to not only spam using the user's account, but hijack it completely changing the password or even the email account. With a token-based authorization, you can always revoke the token and never expose the authentication of the account.
But since the value of a hijacked hackernews account is relatively low, it seems to me people might be more likely to trust such a process (assuming it added value.) If it was malicious, it would be discovered relatively quickly and the ruse would be over, with little to nothing gained for the effort.
