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Comment by 3stripe | Hacker News Reader

This has been causing me a fair bit of inconvenience at work as I quit Instagram last year (decided it was toxic) but still need to research people/trends in my design job.

Guess I'll have to create a fake profile, which in a way will have the opposite of their intended "join the community" action point.

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If this is about the login overlay on people's profiles, you can just zap that with ublock origin.

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

My instagram login made last week with a nonexistent email domain seems to work fine. Who cares if they ban it eventually!

I'm going to try this. I foolishly created an account w/ my FB login back in 2012, and although I rarely use it now compared to a couple of years ago, I would like to use it without it being tied to my personal email.

>Who cares if they ban it eventually!

They will.

wtf. that is creepy as hell.

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.

I find browsing IG on a computer to be a lot less habit-forming than pulling it up on a phone. And, if you open up the element inspector in your browser's dev tools, you should be able to view and download the full-resolution image. It's buried behind layers of nested divs, but you can still get to it.

Not surprisingly, they do everything possible to make the desktop experience god-awful.

I rarely check out IG, but one of the annoying things about the experience is when viewing videos. There is no volume control so you end up with whatever audio is playing at full blast. They also don't provide a slider for playback so you can't do things like rewind to a second ago.

I ended up writing a Chrome extension to avoid that mess.[1]

1: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ig-video-controls/...

>Guess I'll have to create a fake profile, which in a way will have the opposite of their intended "join the community" action point.

I don't think they care if it's "fake". They will still be able to uniquely identify you and correlate your activity against a number of other sources to build a more complete profile on you, including what you do on Facebook.

FYI, you can only have 5 accounts per IP, so don't lose them (or just use a proxy to make a new account)

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