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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

#251

Post by filoleg »

troughway wrote: post #230

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.

How is it preventing people with adblockers to use instagram just like they did before? The experience will be exactly the same as before, regardless of adblockers, as long as you are logged in.

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

#252

Post by m463 »

jerf wrote: post #179
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…

"How does blocking access help people view things?" Lieologists have discovered there's a hole in human cognition: If you say "We're doing X because of Y", human brains tend not to check Y very carefully at all. You can almost say "To help people view photos in Instagram, we're shutting down photo sharing in Instagram." You can't get away with a lie quite that bald. But you only need a few scraggly hair plugs on that…

"We're doing X because of coronavirus."

Yep, your argument is sound.

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

#253

Post by tln »

ethbro wrote: post #233
tln wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 valu…

I meant what I said. > since 2010, Facebook (the product, not the engineering team) has delivered little value to society That requires a different rebuttal than 'to a user.' If we rewound to ~2010, froze Facebook at its then-current feature set, and had Instagram (2012), WhatsApp (2014), Oculus (2014), and the myriad of other aquhires still in existence as independent companies, society would be a better place.

> If we rewound to ~2010, froze Facebook at its then-current feature set, and had Instagram (2012), WhatsApp (2014), Oculus (2014), and the myriad of other aquhires still in existence as independent companies, society would be a better place

Sure, I can see that.

And if Facebook the product went away, society would IMO be in a worse place (until it's replaced :), because Facebook the product is delivering value every day

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

#254

Post by renewiltord »

geddy wrote: post #238
renewiltord wrote: post #224

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.

What about when it's on another site that you don't have access to? What about when it's a type of content that is relevant to you? This is hacker news so I'll assume you're involved in technology in some capacity - what if something like Stackoverflow was purchased by Facebook or Google and you couldn't view questions without a valid Facebook account? You're seeing step 1 and not realizing that step 4 or 5 is the en…

There is no slippery slope. I'll object to step 4. StackOverflow is CC-BY-SA so I'm not that worried. If they try to change that, I'll kick up a fuss or whatever. It's not like fighting this will help with that. Wholly different audiences.

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

#256

Post by netsharc »

mtlynch wrote: post #30
fao_ wrote: post #15

Some friends roped me into signing up to Instagram, so I did. I got to the sign in process and "an error occurred". I tried to login and it said "account does not exist", but I tried to re-sign up, and it said "This account already exists". I emailed them for help but they said I had to post a photo of myself holding a pad with my username on it. Which, fair enough, but giving away my face to a faceless corporation i…

This happened to me too. I suspect the reason is that I used the email address instagram.[a few random letters]@mydomain.com. I'm guessing it triggered their bot detection.

If I were to do this, I'd just remove the "instagram." bit, and just map [1 set of random letters] -> "Instagram" somewhere.

I wonder if companies selling their users' email addresses don't already filter out such personalized addresses anyway, so e.g. Instagram would filter out email addresses out containing "instagram", "ig" or "gram" before selling the data (or to corporate-speak it, "share it with third parties to enhance our customers' experience").

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

#257

Post by 3xblah »

miles wrote: post #226
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.ghac…

There is also a browser-free method. Localhost proxy, e.g., haproxy, that rewrites User-Agent header according to URL and/or Host header.

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

#258

Post by HiroshiSan »

fao_ wrote: post #15

Some friends roped me into signing up to Instagram, so I did. I got to the sign in process and "an error occurred". I tried to login and it said "account does not exist", but I tried to re-sign up, and it said "This account already exists". I emailed them for help but they said I had to post a photo of myself holding a pad with my username on it. Which, fair enough, but giving away my face to a faceless corporation i…

Glad you shared this experience as mine is very similar. I made an account successfully, I only used my account to follow artists I enjoyed, hours later I received an email notifying me that my account was deactivated and to reactivate it I would need to send them a picture of myself holding up a piece of paper with the ID code presented in the email.

I tried emailing back for more information as to why I was deactivated (since I did nothing wrong, unless following people without posting is wrong?) and all they could regurgitate was the shpeel that I had to send them a picture of myself with the code in order for them to help me.

Long story short, I will never use Instagram.

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

#259

Post by bscphil »

dx87 wrote: post #104
sjroot wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclaimer: no affiliation with IG This sounds like a _very_ unusual experience. Clearly millions (billions?) of people create Instagram accounts with no issues. Why not just create a different account? > If this is how they treat their prospective customers... You certainly aren't a customer, which might explain the lack of priority. :)

I had a similar experience. Tried to create an account, but it gave me an error, so I tried again, and it said the account already exists. Clicked on forgot password because I didn't know what the password was, and it said the account was banned for violating the ToS. My theory is that it's because I tried to create an account without linking it to Facebook, so it "accidentally" threw an error, hoping I would create…

> Twitter does something similar, where they say a phone number is optional, but they'll immediately lock your new account and say that a phone number is the only way to verify you aren't a bot.

Is this recent? I signed up for a Twitter account in late 2017, even used a twitter@mydomain.com custom email address for it, and I have never been forced to add my phone number. Twitter still doesn't have it.

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