The end of OpenID?

I can testify that the reason Wikipedia never implemented OpenID is basically the same as LWN. Wikipedia does no user tracking, it's just that there were never enough people asking for OpenID support to make it worth the development effort. There's even a preexisting MediaWiki extension, but still, nobody could be bothered to put in the work. I don't think cynical theories about user privacy are necessary to explain OpenID's failure -- there just was never any really good reason to use it that I saw.

Of course, if the theory of using OpenID is that it makes signup easier, you'd expect to see significantly more signups and user activity if you supported it. That would be a reason to use it, but I haven't heard anyone claiming that happens in practice. If it doesn't actually encourage user activity, I'd have to say it's well and truly useless from the site's perspective.