Live data from Hacker News

Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles

thenextweb.com

191–200 of 243 posts

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

#191
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?

It’s usually SOP for outlets to publish statements from the subjects of their reporting, however banal or ridiculous they may be. > nobody is going to be taken in by it. Unfortunately, you don’t know that to be true. Relatives I’ve spoken with who own FB stock love to read statements like this to justify their position.

The percentage of average people reading this who are shareholders are minuscule.

All this says to people is that Instagram is getting more annoying.

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

#192

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.

If Facebook offers a public API, people will complain that Facebook hasn't learned their lesson from Cambridge analytica. If they don't, then they're accused of having a walled garden. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

I thought Cambridge Analytica had access to far more data than was available on the public API which is what made it so controversial?

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

#193
post #81

How accurate is the belief that logged-in eyeballs are profitable, but logged-out ones aren't?

You can still be tracked & advertised to if you're not logged in, but once you have an account it's easier to build up your marketing profile and show "more relevant" adverts & sponsored content, which drives the larger advertising revenue.

This reduces the amount of total eyeballs though... potentially by a significant amount. For ex anyone sharing a picture on Twitter or FB will only be able to show it to their followers with Instagram accounts.

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

#194
post #40
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…

I still use Flickr. The only place out there which doesn't want to immediately steal photo rights.

I was surprised that I can't share a HD image on flickr with someone on mobile and have them be able to see the full image. If I remember correctly, it shows them a bulky UI with a scaled down version of the image.

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

#195
post #129

So now those profiles are not really public anymore. They are available only to members now. Walled-off. This action works directly against the best interests of Instagram users seeking to maximize their audience and reach. Let's call this what it is: an anti-feature.

Exactly, these profiles are not public anymore (in the common sense meaning of "public profile"). BTW LinkedIn and others are doing the same, and what anyone is going to do about it?

The fun part is they are still public if you are the google bot.

Open an incognito window and try going to a linkedin profile. Then try it with google translate: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=af&tl=en&u=htt...

Odds are good you can still view the profile through translate because linkedin thinks you are google.

LinkedIn, Pinterest and others want to be indexed by google, but don't want the content that's indexed to be public. Google is ruining their own service by allowing this to continue.

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

#196
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it the reasoning behind the blackouts? I thought rolling blackouts were typically due to not having enough power generation. What's happening now is related to preventing fires isn't it?

"de-energization" doesn't say anything about the reason either. Using overly-formal worlds is PR spin tactic to suppress the connotation of the common term, and psedo-justify the action by connoting scientific credibility. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_blackout

PG&E has been pretty clear about the fact that their unlimited financial exposure to fire damage is the core cause of these blackouts. Rolling blackouts implies some sort of issue with power generation, which isn’t the actual cause.

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

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 The non-federated site has to play along with the federation standard for this to work. Just like Compuserve or AOL, which provided both proprietary "walled gardens" and (increasingly over time) interoperabilit…

It doesn't have to play along; it just has to have enough of an API to extract the necessary information. The idea of the bridge is to translate between the standard everyone else speaks and the API of the big non-federated site most people use.

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

#198
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Facebook offers a public API, people will complain that Facebook hasn't learned their lesson from Cambridge analytica. If they don't, then they're accused of having a walled garden. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

I thought Cambridge Analytica had access to far more data than was available on the public API which is what made it so controversial?

Yes, that was precisely the issue.

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

#199

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.

Where does it say they’re deprecating the graph API on Nov 5?

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

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have actually had one positive influence on my life. After having dealt with exactly what you described a few times, I learned that I don't need anything that's on Pinterest. If a search results returns a pinterest link, I ignore it. If I can't find it anywhere except that link, it's as good as a dead link so I move on. This can be extended to much of the internet. So much peace now.

It is one of my main uses of Pi-Hole: “never, ever let anything from that domain into my network ever again.” If I accidentally click a link, it doesn’t go anywhere. I use it for quite a few domains that show up in a lot of places, but have proven to be an annoyance. I’m believe Pinterest was one of the first to be added for that reason. The ad blocking Pi-Hole provides is a nice bonus, too.

It would be cool if this could be extended to automatically clearing those junk sites off Google's results, maybe by querying for a few extra pages, deleting the garbage, and then re-assembling them into fewer pages. Google spam filters would be great, I could also put in a rule to eliminate any page title that starts with a number ("Ten great ways to...").
Post reply on HN