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Instagram no longer allows people without an account to view photos on computers

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Re: Instagram no longer allows people without an account to view photos on computers

#221

Post by Taniwha »

gpm wrote: post #137
Taniwha wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah, facebook is the worst, someone signed up using my email address (they don't do verification of email addresses), I get so much spam ..... however there is no way to contact facebook without a facebook account - no email address, no contact form, nothing - their world view is terribly inward looking

Hmm - could you reset the password on the account, and then delete it? (Personally I'd only be comfortable doing this if this was still a very new account)

Well .... I did reset the password, created a temp gmail account, reassigned the contact email to the new email address then deleted the gmail account (I didn't want to mess with his content) .....

But facebook never forgets, even though I deleted my email address from the account I continue to get spam emails from facebook wondering why I've stopped using 'my' account and encouraging me to come back into the fold

Re: Instagram no longer allows people without an account to view photos on computers

#222

Post by tln »

ethbro wrote: post #155
downvoteme1 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All companies from Sears to Yahoo to Favebook have peaks, troughs and then eventually fade out. Even if Facebook fades outs on the next 5-50 years, it would have done better than millions of other companies. Look at it this way - what started as an experiment in a dorm room turning into this big is the dream of every startup. Every year thousands of companies apply to YC hoping to be 1/100 to 1/1000 as successful as…

Nobody contests that. The negative outlook instead seems to be that since 2010, Facebook (the product, not the engineering team) has delivered little value to society. And at this point, seems to have ossified into a form that lacks the agility and will to make major shifts. Their current emphasis on purchasing other companies for their product pipelines, to drive business to their advertising, seems more akin to pha…

Facebook delivers value every day to billions of daily active users -- the social updates. The value varies by person but presumably it's positive value for all DAU or they would cease to be DAU.

Perhaps Facebook hasn't increased value delivered for each user for each day that much. Or has even decreased it. But the baseline is definitely "value to society" IMO

Did you mean Facebook has delivered little marginal value?

Re: Instagram no longer allows people without an account to view photos on computers

#223

Post by ghastmaster »

Veera_Sivarajan wrote: post #9

Yes. Until a couple of weeks ago I would be able to view individual photos but now I can only view the profile until I hit the login restriction.

Right click the post and select open in new tab. This doesn't fix the problem of not being able to scroll through the history though.

Re: Instagram no longer allows people without an account to view photos on computers

#224

Post by renewiltord »

Doesn't bother me. The purpose of Instagram for me is to look at my social circle's lives. If everything they do makes them less of a generic public social network Tik-Tok / Reddit / Facebook / Twitter style, I'd prefer that actually.

Re: Instagram no longer allows people without an account to view photos on computers

#225

Post by IlyaMoroshkin »

deminature wrote: post #160
cosmotic wrote: post #89

“This is to help people view photos in Instagram and understand how to have the best experience on the platform, be part of the community, connecting and interacting with people and the things they love” How does blocking access help people view things? How does blocking access help people understand how to have the best experience? Access is a better experience than access denied. Creating an account and lurking doe…

If I had to guess, their account creation metrics are flattening out and some product manager had the idea of implementing this restriction to restart growth. If your performance reviews depend on growth, restrictions like this seem rational even if they're obviously anti-user to anyone outside the company.

With the underlying factor probably being that much fewer people are creating good new content given the global lockdowns.

'Cute women' are a significant part of Instagram content, and if they are indoors wearing a mask there's not much to excite the userbase with.

Re: Instagram no longer allows people without an account to view photos on computers

#226

Post by miles »

3xblah wrote: post #187

What if more users install the browser extension/add-on that automatically changes the user-agent string based on domain name, e.g., for Instagram it changes to a random mobile user-agent. Sorry I forgot the name of the extension.

Here are a couple of such add-ons / extensions:

User-Agent Switcher https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/uaswitcher/

Custom UserAgent String https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/custom-user-a...

User-Agent Switcher and Manager https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-st...

and a comment by "99" pointing to an extension-free method to quickly change the user agent:

https://www.ghacks.net/2019/12/23/custom-useragent-string-is...

Re: Instagram no longer allows people without an account to view photos on computers

#227

Post by Darkphibre »

interestica wrote: post #172
chadlavi wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're in a browser with adblockers and you're not signed in, there's not much they can do to monetize you effectively. I assume this is just a means of forcing people who use instagram in the browser to at least admit who they are so they can tie browsing to a known tracking id. I'm honestly surprised instagram even lets people use the app in any meaningful way on desktop at all.

They didn't for the longest while. I'm not sure what their impetus for changing was.

To post images, I have to fire it up in emulation mode. It's ridiculous how high they try to make the walls on their garden.

Re: Instagram no longer allows people without an account to view photos on computers

#228

Post by Darkphibre »

seph-reed wrote: post #193
asdf21 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It blows my mind that people still use Facebook products. I disconnected in like... idk 2014? 2015? And never looked back.

It's unpopular amongst "hackers" to devalidate the use of FB products in this way. For better or worse, that's apparent from this.

I think the unpopular opinion here is "I don't find value, thus there is no value." When, in reality, many people do find a value. Somewhere.

Heck, I post maybe once a year on Facebook. It's how my in-laws communicate, so that's where I have to go if I want to interact with that part of my social graph. It has a value (however small), even if I wished it didn't.

Re: Instagram no longer allows people without an account to view photos on computers

#229

Post by willis936 »

asdf21 wrote: post #107
stevewodil wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing happened to me, and I tried to email them about a clear bug that occurs. They wanted the same photo verification. I was very nice in the correspondence until they requested photo verification a second time, and I was so confused why they were being so incompetent about it. It's a 0 follower account that I never had access to in the first place because it instantly got disabled, why would I care? Just fix t…

It blows my mind that people still use Facebook products. I disconnected in like... idk 2014? 2015? And never looked back.

The only facebook product I still use is oculus. I am rather curious what their software is doing. At a glance it seems innocent, but I’m not so naive to think anything facebook does is innocent.

https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/4da3r5/oculus_home_...

Re: Instagram no longer allows people without an account to view photos on computers

#230

Post by troughway »

This wall was already there in some form or another.

I think what they are trying to do is to get people off of the computer in general because ad blockers would make it impossible for them to monetize the platform.

These ad blockers do not really exist on mobile unless you jailbreak and install some shady third-party shit.

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