It implies that because it’s literally true. Not a complete loss of care, but it makes sense to hide the sign in button because users who are already signed up are already invested, and less likely to abandon the service. The front pages main job is to grow the company by attracting new users, and a sign in button for users who aren’t going anywhere anyways gets in the way of that.
Inconveniencing either current or prospective customers never ‘makes sense’. It’s not like you have a fixed amount of inconvenience you have to distribute.
You have a fixed amount of screen real estate on the landing page. Distributing it to your most important users for that page (prospective users) does make sense to me.
Is the solution presented in the blog to utilize a cookie to determine if someone is a prospective user versus already a user not an acceptable compromise?
It seems rather straightforward to me, from their example, to de-emphasize the "Sign Up" button and prioritize the "Sign In" button for someone who already has an account.
While that may be the case (I'd also argue that the front page should be a welcoming place for existing users), showing me that you value your existing users is a great marketing move.
It's otherwise very hard to convey that you care about existing customers so this seems like a no-brainer.
