Live data from Hacker News

Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles

thenextweb.com

221–230 of 243 posts

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

#221
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

SOP doesn't make it right. A journalist could say "A spokesperson made an unrelated comment in leiu of answering the question."

There should be some journalism that refrains from editorializing everything

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

#222
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 the work of the Zucc, it's not enough that they can feed you ads, it's essential they know every move you make on the web with a GUID

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

#223
post #163
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?

I've been wondering about this in regards to how CA is reframing "rolling blackouts" as "de-energization areas". It seems so blatantly ridiculous, and I feel like it does more harm than good, but they must have reason to think otherwise?

Seriously? Instead of solving the problem the whole government of California is just ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . I know PG&E needs to be punished but the people of California need to stand up for their rights and see that instead of wasting loads of cash on pork projects they clean up the areas around electrical wiring instead of just "de-energizing" , it's all quite ridiculous. California is not supposed to be a 3rd world country and just shrug.

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

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...").

Google used to have a way to block sites from search results. Do they still have that option?

They did offer the Personal Blocklist extension[1] for Chrome, long ago. But it's been sunsetted, there are some alternatives.

1: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-chrome-extension...

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

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

I have a user agent switcher add-on and many times I just have it spoof my user agent to be Google bot. the internet suddenly works as it is supposed to

I've tried switching user agent with LinkedIn and LinkedIn still hides the profile. I think they may be looking at the IP addresses that Google uses.

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

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no bridge. I highly doubt the Twitter API TOS would even allow it. What you can do is get a client that supports both Mastodon as well as Twitter. I recommend Twidere on Android. https://f-droid.org/de/packages/org.mariotaku.twidere/

There sort of is although I don't know why anyone would want it. https://github.com/renatolond/mastodon-twitter-poster

It doesn't seem likely that Instagram or Twitter is going to go away tomorrow. Posting to Twitter and Mastodon means that eventually there would be content and interactions building up over time.

There seem to be two problems with replacing Instagram or Twitter. The first one is money to run servers, fight spam, handle subpoenas, etc.

The other one is having an authoritative directory. How is anyone to know that "ClearAndPresent" on Twitter is the same as "ClearAndPresent@SomeRandomInstance.mastodon"? An obvious way would be to send a DM to a Twitter account but it seems likely that Twitter would shut that down pretty quickly. We've all heard the stories of Facebook (and LinkedIn and ...) pillaging Gmail for contacts.

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

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Goodluck with that. They ask for government issued photo ID in many cases for new accounts.

How does something like this scale? Does Instagram have a real person checking each one? If not, how would a computer verify that a photo ID was valid?

A real person, so it seemed, responded when I told them they were out of their damned minds.

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

#228
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

SOP doesn't make it right. A journalist could say "A spokesperson made an unrelated comment in leiu of answering the question."

Which, in this era especially, might prompt a response from said entity arguing that the journalist is biased and corrupt.

The lack of transparency around speech in your case only works against journalists when their credibility is questioned. They gain nothing omitting frivolous statements as opposed to printing them and letting members of the public point out how stupid they are.

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

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...").

Google used to have a way to block sites from search results. Do they still have that option?

I wrote a userscript to do this if you're interested:

https://code.byuu.org/google

It blocks search and image results by pattern, and also removes the URL tracker wrapping wherever possible.

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

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I was curious too and looked into it.

Someone originally thought it would be a good idea to ignore EXIF data, and by the time someone else cared enough to address it, they were worried about breaking sites that had bad rotation EXIF data if browsers suddenly started honoring it.

Mozilla tried to add image-orientation: from-image CSS for this purpose, so sites could say "no actually the EXIF data really is good", but then no other browser vendor followed along.

So as usual, everything in computer science is just terrible for the sake of legacy compatibility with the first implementations ever made.

Post reply on HN