My guess is that it's to put up an obstacle against crawlers and perhaps also lower the cost of outbound traffic?
Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles
11–20 of 243 posts
Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles
#12Its odd how it seems Instagram is now the biggest part of Facebook and Tiktok seems to be more polished and Instagram lagging behind, even more so with this.
Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles
#13They also use meta robots=noimageindex,noarchive on every page without an opt-out which is so incredibly stupid and walled-gardeny for an image sharing site. I wanted to use Flickr instead but nobody else uses Flickr, then I tried making my own image gallery and I learned that browsers do not honor the JPEG rotation EXIF data and I don't want to write my own rotation/cropping code (that and Google completely ignores…
Have you tried https://youpic.com/?
Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles
#14They also use meta robots=noimageindex,noarchive on every page without an opt-out which is so incredibly stupid and walled-gardeny for an image sharing site. I wanted to use Flickr instead but nobody else uses Flickr, then I tried making my own image gallery and I learned that browsers do not honor the JPEG rotation EXIF data and I don't want to write my own rotation/cropping code (that and Google completely ignores…
How about imgur.com?
Imgur's compression is awful, and especially on mobile, has a ton of dark patterns for logged-off users or anyone not using their app.
Personally I'm using Instagram for casual "here's my life" photos where I don't care about compression or any of that, Flickr for more curated public photos, and Google Drive as a secondary private backup.
Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles
#15They also use meta robots=noimageindex,noarchive on every page without an opt-out which is so incredibly stupid and walled-gardeny for an image sharing site. I wanted to use Flickr instead but nobody else uses Flickr, then I tried making my own image gallery and I learned that browsers do not honor the JPEG rotation EXIF data and I don't want to write my own rotation/cropping code (that and Google completely ignores…
How about imgur.com?
Imgur requires you to provide a valid mobile number in order to create an account.
Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles
#16BugMeNot to the rescue.
In 2019, with IP geolocation combined with mobile or email verification, BugMeNot no longer seems that useful.
At the moment its instagram.com logins have 35% or lower success rate.
Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles
#17If it’s free you are the product. Not sure why people still don’t understand that.
It's too trite and has too many exceptions on both the free side (Linux, Wikipedia, heck, Hacker News) and the non-free (plenty of popular sites and apps that track you out the wazoo even when you do pay).
Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles
#18[deleted]
Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles
#19This is a new change? It's been like that for me ever since I knew of Instagram. You browse two or three images and plop you get a sign up screen.
Definitely a new change, just last week I could look at user profiles without having to be logged in. Right now, it shows me an overlay asking me to log in.
Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles
#20This is a new change? It's been like that for me ever since I knew of Instagram. You browse two or three images and plop you get a sign up screen.
It's new, I think since last Sunday in Switzerland.