Live data from Hacker News

Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles

thenextweb.com

141–150 of 243 posts

Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles

#141
post #125

> “This is to help people see photos on Instagram and then understand how to get the best Instagram experience by being part of the community, connecting and interacting with the people and things they love,” the company told Adweek. Why would you say something like this? And why, as a journalist, would you report it? It's a transparent lie; nobody is going to be taken in by it. So why bother even saying it?

Reminds me a lot of the now infamous reddit EA comment: "The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes. As for cost,..."

Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles

#142
post #80
post #61

So they became the new pinterest?

I've never worked out how to use pinterest. It's one of those "successes" that I personally fail to see any value in. If I'm searching for something and I land on pinterest it's like hitting a dead end. I can get nothing useful from it and immediately go back and look elsewhere.

It works well when you're logged in and use the iPad app.

Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you have misunderstood the purpose and implementation of federating sites like these? Your question sounds like someone asking how a user of a newly opened Facebook account can follow people on Twitter. They're entirely different services. The federating, or not, is immaterial. The first part is the alternative service. Mastodon is an alternative to Twitter, presented in a Twitter-like format and flow. People…

> Perhaps you have misunderstood the purpose and implementation of federating sites like these? No, I absolutely understand how federating sites work, and don't need the condescension. It's common, in many types of federated reimplementations of non-federated sites, to create special-case bridges that allow treating a large non-federated site as if it were following the federation protocol, precisely to help people m…

> People just don't talk about them very clearly, or document them

Because I am pretty sure it violates Twitter API use. Twitter has no incentive to allow data moving off their network.

Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that Instagram has been totally Facebooked, I feel there’s a real gap in the market for what Instagram used to be. Just want something simple where I can upload some photos, do a bit of light editing, apply a nice filter and share with friends. And also see a chronological timeline of stuff they’ve posted. No likes, no engagement metrics, no personalisation, no skinner-boxing, no influencers. Well aware this make…

So VSCO?

I recently started using it, and it does somewhat fill that itch of "looking at pretty pictures" that instagram used to fill (almost a year fb/insta-clean now). But to me it seem like a niche platform attracting photographers and creative people that showcase very good photos. I'm somewhat in that niche so I like it but when I stumble on the small clicks of people using it more as a social "hey frinds (insert "vsco girls" meme), here's what I ate for lunch, sucks to be you" I immediately think "hey, this is not instagram goml!". But maybe it is/will be?

Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles

#146
post #9

They 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…

Now that Instagram has been totally Facebooked, I feel there’s a real gap in the market for what Instagram used to be. Just want something simple where I can upload some photos, do a bit of light editing, apply a nice filter and share with friends. And also see a chronological timeline of stuff they’ve posted. No likes, no engagement metrics, no personalisation, no skinner-boxing, no influencers. Well aware this make…

>No likes, no engagement metrics, no personalisation, no skinner-boxing, no influencers.

IG is the defacto "photo sharing" tool because it does all of these. What you are describing is closer to Imgur but they have comments and likes as well, simply because without there's no reason for people to come back.

Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles

#147
post #96
post #9

They 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…

And what's up with their hate of zooming images in desktop? They HAVE the full res image. There's even bookmarkets to snag the image. What twisted product goal led to the current state?

I seem to recall vaguely that this redesign was part of a response to a legal challenge for copyright infringement from one of the large photo libraries.

Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles

#148
post #128
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 This just sounds like an excuse to yourself. It’s not hard to deal with this just strip out the EXIF data and bake the rotation into your images on upload. Problem solved, though I don’t know your experience level.

Or even just detect the rotation tag, leave the image untouched, and rotate it in CSS.

Too many edge cases I’d say.

Images really shouldn’t be stored anyway with rotation data in the EXIF. By pre rotating it you normalize and make it ready to use in any context.

The EXIF should be stripped out and used for other sorts of analytics.

Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles

#149
post #9

They 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…

It takes a couple of hours to write code to handle exif rotations.

So why can't browsers handle it? Now that I think about it, browser image viewers are pretty basic...

Re: Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles

#150

Instagram also shut down their public api last year and are deprecating the graph api in a week. (5 Nov) https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-api/ The new api has no access to consumer (non-Business or non-Creator) instagram accounts.

> The new api has no access to consumer (non-Business or non-Creator) instagram accounts.

Good.

Post reply on HN