Instagram no longer allows people without an account to view photos on computers
manualdousuario.net
manualdousuario.net
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 does not help anyone be part of a community. Most online communities are almost entirely lurkers. Creating an account doesn't lead to interaction. There's no way instagram isn't aware of these facts; I'm not a professional social network product manager and I know these things. There are other motives here than what instagram claims.
I'm honestly surprised instagram even lets people use the app in any meaningful way on desktop at all.
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 pharma majors or IBM than anything in the startup world.
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?
> 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.
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
2.4 billion monthly active users is "doomed" now? Just because in the tech bubble Facebook is viewed negatively it doesn't mean they are not doing just fine.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
Mine is, does this product and/or service represent a net benefit to humanity without egregious side-effects?
the answer isn’t always so clear-cut
I should add, you're not wrong to question the necessity of including the second part. It is most certainly a factor. There's a natural justice strand in the formulation of Benthamite utilitarianism (which is, broadly speaking, where I'm coming from) that reinforces an enlightened approach to individual consequences, since in the long run the absence of individual justice poisons the greater good anyway.
However that's a bit of a mouthful, and it does need surfacing because there are other formulations of utilitarianism that lead to dystopian nightmare societies, and besides, I'm rather fond of the word egregious.
However I do regret forgetting to riff on the laws of robotics in the phrasing
In any case I've found it preferable to "does this corporate entity create shareholder value?", which I must confess I was suckered by some rather Austrian-school economists into accepting as a valid proxy for human advancement and/or happiness in my mid-thirties.
Read it the following way: We have a reason to do it but we don't want to tell you so instead we will tell you a little bit of righteously-sounding bullshit so that most of sheep base is satisfied. Yes, that's "sheep", because you are not our customers, our customers are those companies we sell your information and your focus to.
Edit: I guess it wasn't sufficiently clear, the second sentence here is not my own personal opinion.
Distortion-fields aren't so powerful that they cause people with integrity to discount critical thinking. If someone can be sold on this with hand-waving, they probably lacked integrity or critical thinking from the start.
Nonsense explanation means just that users' interests were not factored in the decision.
FWIW, here in Sweden I can still look at feeds without being logged in.
As someone who's been writing integration (not nefarious!) scrapers for years, this is crap. Email accounts are free, VPNs and captcha solvers are dirt-cheap and at the end of the day, if they screw up the web version too much, the mobile apps are even easier to turn into scrapers as they usually use some kind of JSON API.
They did this for the same reason as Reddit and Facebook: - it's harder to make ad profiles for anonymous users - new users is a metric that investors love - psychological trick (I can't remember what that specific phenomenon is called) to turn lurkers into posters
I have two reactions to this:
1. I absolutely HATE this kind of arrogance from companies.
2. I don't believe them. I think it's far more likely they are doing this to juice their metrics, rather than honestly thinking that taking away options will make everyone like them more.
Or maybe, there are people who would believe it, but they have an account already. And most simple do not care. They read, they have to create an account to get the content, so they do create an account.
I hate this idea that, as a society, companies are permitted to bullshit people and the onus is on the consumers to be able to parse the borderline lies from full truths. My wife used to work closely with people with moderate mental illness - you wouldn't believe the predatory scams, advertisements and "offers" they fell for.
They probably believe it is the best experience within the set of options they considered, and where that set excludes the current user experience.
'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.
I noticed Facebook Messenger does this fun thing where you can open it, start to read a message and then it says "BAM--YOU MUST UPDATE". The fact they intentionally designed it this way makes me want to delete Messenger forever.
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 lie to get past most people most of the time, as you observe.
If you do this honestly, betcha it's more than you think. It's something I see a lot, personally. In fact I tend to be surprised when someone public says "We're doing X because of Y" and it actually makes perfect sense. Most reasons given in the public sphere are quite garbage.
[1]: https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human...
Yep, your argument is sound.
Run a pi-hole and you'll be surprised (or not, depending on your cynicism).
Allow me to translate:
This is because we realized we couldn't collect as much data as we would like from non-signed in users browsing on computers. As our income is derived mostly from aggregating and selling the data of our users to third party marketers we felt we could increase revenue for our shareholders by no longer allowing non-signed in users to view our platform, ensuring anyone browsing our service is providing the maximum amout of data possible.
Hopefully folks are connecting the dots that all this data they are giving away is really, really, valuable to Facebook and they are not getting compensated for it.
It doesn't. Instagram isn't in it business of selling you the "best experience". It's in the business of selling your information. If you have an account ( verified by a phone number/etc ) and if you post your photos/etc, they have more information on you to sell to advertisers/government/etc than if you were anonymously browsing. Maybe you just browsed instagram on your desktop, but now since they have your phone, they may "recommend" you install their app and while you are at it, why not install facebook, etc.
It's also to cause a "network" effect. Facebook did this before where they made it difficult for you view content without logging in. So if your grandma, aunts, friends, etc wanted to see your wedding posts, they had to create an account whereas in the past they would just go to your page and see it without an account. Also, if you have an account, it incentivizes you to "participate" more. Whereas in the past you might just casually view photos and leave, now you can leave comments, subscribe, favorite, etc.
I know a number of times in recent months I'd end up on Instagram pages for different businesses. I would be scrolling to view their products and suddenly I'd get hit with the sign-up modal that wouldn't allow me to scroll further (well, technically I could if I opened the developer tools and disabled it, but that road block usually stopped me). So, I'd close their Instagram page, move on with my life, and they'd potentially lose a sale.
The same thing happened on Facebook when the page would be covered in overlays and I could barely browse the content. I'd get annoyed and leave.
There's a lot of power you're giving up when you build your online presence inside of another company. The entire user experience of your customer can drastically change at any moment, and you have little recourse aside from rebuilding your online presence from scratch.
I think nobody in their right mind would do this kind of shit IRL.
Which, fair enough, but giving away my face to a faceless corporation isn't my jam. If this is how they treat their prospective customers (or rather their income -- people they make money selling data from) I'm not really interested in signing up.
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. :)
Instagram is everything poisonous about Facebook’s values and platform and practices, distilled. They get nothing from me except a temporary email address, a proxy IP, and a false user-agent string.
It’s not impossible, but it is unlikely that it looks like a bot.
I figured it was actually the other way around, or at least a slightly different shade of things; not so much that it looked like a fake account, more than it looked like someone they couldn’t correlate to any other identity and therefore has no consumer surveillance value, ergo I can either fill in the blanks, or fuck off. Whatever the truth of it, I chose the latter
I don't think it's an accident that these high-value tech companies regularly have "errors" when you try to create an account using a method that gives them less access to personal data than other signup methods.
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.
They arbitrarily blocked my @domain account while my ads were running. They asked me to submit IDs and stuff but haven't heard back in 2 weeks. No other way to contact support except wait.
I am not sure what flagged my account but I wouldn't be surprised if they have significantly lowered the threshold for threat detection in an election year (especially after the scandals uncovered from 2016).
Definitely terrible from a customer experience PoV.
(Personally I'd only be comfortable doing this if this was still a very new account)
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
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").
There's a substantial difference between being on the sidelines vs. in the line of fire WRT the firehose of propaganda.
The train entertainment is likely something which happens in passing, while social media is often a behavioral addiction. Framing two activities with such disparate levels of engagement and probable frequency as both 'hobbies' masks this fact.
I think the parent's condescending outlook is unhelpful, but I agree with them that they dodged a bullet. The increased value they experience lies in what they do with the time they've saved, which is unlikely to be fully consumed by judging people on the train.
I was able to take over the account since my email was associated with it. I wiped the pictures, deleted the account. signed up again with my own mobile number and email, setup 2-factor so it couldn't happen again and then deleted the app.
>Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
It gets tiring fast and services don't deal with this usecase that well other than 'forget password'. That guy was the initial asshole to signup using an email address that wasn't theirs.
so my email address is very simple. I have someone from almost every English speaking country who regularly uses my email address for all things mundane, profane, inane and urbane.
I used to respond to each and every one if possible, politely asking them to remove me from the list, stop putting my email down on whatever forms they were filling out or to tell the person they got the email address from to use their own or be more careful when filling it out. It's been going on so long and gotten so bad that I just can't anymore.
examples of things I have received mistakenly in my email that were clearly the result of someone entering them in a form or writing the down to be used by someone else.
Job interview confirmations for fields I am not and have never been involved with
letters from grandma
plane ticket, concert ticket, train ticket, parking ticket and other types of ticket confirmation and notifications.
boating licenses
requests to accept changes to architectural plans for a house
lease and housing agreements
notices to appear in court
electronic receipts of every sort
prescription drug receipts
confidential internal company information
and more.
Basically, if you try to change the username before completing the sign up workflow the app doesn’t continue to the next page and the account gets disabled. Judging by your experience they seemingly haven't fixed it still. I emailed them in October 2019 about it, pretty sad.
Their final message to me was "We can’t give you access to this account or continue to process your request because we haven’t received an acceptable image to verify account ownership." Thanks for nothing, Facebook.
For better or worse, that's apparent from this.
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.
For instance, I never go to Walmart (but sometimes do). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=repxFQXVsHc
https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/4da3r5/oculus_home_...
Since I have trouble believing Facebook isn't gathering telemetry from Oculus users, do you know of any more recent attempts to see what they're doing?
Is the best way to handle this to allow the '+' symbol in email addresses, but verify that the underlying email address hasn't already been registered so that one email address still can't create multiple accounts?
So if you sign up with covercash+123@gmail.com, should I check the prefix ("covercash") with the domain ("gmail.com") and make sure there aren't any matches already registered like covercash@gmail.com or covercash+111@gmail.com?
You will get false positives, and you will get irate users, often rejecting perhaps some of your most promising early adopters.
See also: case sensitivity in the left-hand part of an address.
You can not do that. You have no way of knowing how my mail server handles username portions of the address. Maybe bob+123@ is the same account as bob@, maybe it isn't. It is entirely up to the mail server to decide what it wants to do with it. And likewise, you have no way to know any other username portions are not the same account. I can set my email server up to use "x" as a delimiter, and make bobx1 and bobx2 both go to bob if that's what I want.
went through 'upload a drivers license' process, no luck, no explanation
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.
However, I do think some kind of tag, similar to [AD] could appear next to the result, warning you not to click it, [PW] or [LW] for paywall and loginwall.
The vast majority of the time, someone searching something on the internet isn't willing to pay to see it.
Imagine if Duck Duck Go offered that by default?
- exclude walled gardens
- exclude sites with ads and/or ecommerce
- exclude sites with tracking
- exclude sites with fixed headers
- allow users to have personal blocklists
As a bonus, if you make a new search engine offering such options, existing search engines will be afraid to copy them.
Reddit is getting there but not so annoying that I will stop using it. I get the most value out of Reddit but there are so many ways to get information and/or waste time that something else, digital or otherwise, will replace it.
I imagine people like me are a vanishingly small portion of users or potential users or the increased data/tracking from forcing accounts and logins is worth the lost users but it makes me sad.
But then I see counter examples like Youtube. You can browse all day long without logging in, click through to a video without getting prompted to login etc. Is it just different philosophies (hard to imagine given how much Google is reliant on data and ads) or is it different business practices?
While logged in, click the subreddits dropdown and click the "Edit Subscriptions" link, it takes you to https://www.reddit.com/subreddits/ - on the right side is "multireddit of your subscriptions" -- this is a URL string of all your subreddits, just save the URL. When you make a new account, click the URL again and subscribe to them on your new account.
Maybe if viewing a single video of Anthony Hopkins (for example) didn't replace half of my feed with Anthony Hopkins videos, I might be more inclined to not open it in a private tab (logged out), but alas.
But hey, at least you can watch the video. That's more than I say for half the news and image sites out there anymore.
I know it's not as fancy but just start by hosting your own simple blog.
I made an effort to build my own Instagram like section on my site just to host my own images. It even has a web assembly lib that scales the images client-side so I don't have to deal with image processing and uploads directly to S3.
The code is open for others to see how I did it. https://github.com/MorphicPro/morphic.pro
Are there other examples of turnkey self-deployed sites like this?
For example, I could host all my images directly on my Linode, but the cheapest Linode has only 1 TB of outbound transfer a month (for $5), and over quota you're actually charged more than that, $10 / TB. That comes with only 25 GB of storage. They'd also probably be pretty slow for most of my visitors, since they're hosted on a single server somewhere in California.
If you want faster distribution around the country and globe, you might consider S3... that same 1 TB of data out is going to cost you $90 / month.
Meanwhile, it's clear the REAL costs are not that high. Flickr Pro is a mere $5 a month, with the same high quality (uncompressed) photos, and a global CDN. You can store an unlimited number of pictures with Flickr Pro. This is already way cheaper and faster than anything I can set up on my own, as far as I know, and SmugMug is still making money off of this, presumably, enough to cover their free tier.
Deep-linking still works without an account, so you can just right click a photo, copy the url and paste it into the URL bar.
I have to say, as a photo sharing platform, instagram is awful. Can't upload photos from desktop, no native iPad app (WTF?), and whatever compression they use to display my photos seems to really mess with the quality (not really noticeable from a phone, but from a desktop, yikes).
It's great to be able to keep up with people in a more meaningful way, and I did attend a pretty cool live IGTV session, but all in all I don't really like it.
And as others have mentioned, I think, you can just middle-click on a post to open it in a new tab and it wont ask for a login.
Yes, you can. Open dev tools, set it to mobile, and set it to android. A "+" button will pop up and work fine.
I'm still a little baffled as to why they don't just allow that on the desktop site, though.
It's quite possibly the worst way on the Web to present photos-as-art yet photographers keep signing up to it.
I was actually pretty impressed by this change from a non-photo site.
Social media can be useful, but one should never have their content -at least those that are not absolutely ephemeral -, exclusively on a single one of them.
You should all do the same. Start here: https://indieweb.org/Getting_Started
_Trouble is, it's becoming hard to maintain cross-posting or even just copying your own stuff from silos, which I find outrageous._
Stop using this trash.
But Instragram/Facebook,Pinterest and co simply hate the web. I mean they like it when it comes down to user acquisition but their goal is to make you download their app. If they could do away with the web they would. They are no better than Microsoft Balmer era.
The web is the real casualty of mobile taking over, more so than the desktop, IMHO.
There was a minute between proprietary mobile app dominance and proprietary desktop app dominance where everything new and shiny was a web service first and foremost.
During that minute everyone was able participate in all the new shiny things, regardless of what operating system or type of device they used - they just needed a standards-compliant web browser, and nothing ever required your phone number to register, except financial services I guess.
I wish the average person understood how liberating and important that state of affairs is for everyone. Based on the few debates I've had on this subject with less technical folks, as long as whatever the average person is carrying in their pocket is supported and they can do/consume what they want today they dgaf how much the walls are closing in on them in the process.
I don't understand this, why in the world would they prevent their users from uploading photos from the their laptops?
These weird UX choices never made sense to me. If you don't want users to do anything in a browser, then just remove your website, and force them to download your app, problem solved.
In my experience, I was no longer able to browse without an account on either my laptop or my mobile device for a few months now
https://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2019/10/28/instagram-now-...
I also checked with friends and relatives living in another cities in Brazil. They also hit that form when trying to access photos unlogged.
A more accurate title would probably be (this is conjecture) "Instagram expands loginwall to other countries, eg Brazil"
Another user here thought the post was about that scrolling limit that's in place for a few months now. That's different. I wasn't able, previous to publication, to confirm if this is happening in other countries, but here in hacker news there are more users reporting the same issue.
But maybe you are right, maybe you are part of some kind of A/B test to see if an immediate loginwall, with no trial or sample, increases or decreases sign ups.
And it's Katy Perry, Nike and Miley Cyrus, just in case you were curious. (at least according to the first result from Google)
This isn't how the open web is supposed to work. (nor is IG's suppression of hyperlinks to a single link within the bio.)
Instagram is owned by Facebook. No one associated with those organisations is interested in an open web, whether they're shareholders, employees, or users.
Example: https://igdig.com/
You're seeing step 1 and not realizing that step 4 or 5 is the entire web gated behind walls.
If you don't care, then you don't care. But saying there's no slippery slope? It's capitalism. It's happened with internet providers, it's happened with search engines, it's happened with social media, online stores, it's been funneling into a handful of companies for over a decade now. People want things for free and companies are willing to sell your data to finance their payroll. Saying it won't happen anymore is just naive.
The structure of the Internet precludes universal locking away. I am confident in my ability and that of my fellow engineers to always have alternatives.
I have moved off everything FB related so its almost become a habit now for me to use these sites to follow certain accounts. With noscript on FF and picking the right clone easy to get the simplest page (no js running) with just the pics and captions.
Just google the insta username and you get the sites.
[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Instagram/comments/dezf9g/no_sound_...
Can't really do that if you use your laptop. At least it is harder and harder to get to it (trend to use Safari, Firefox, etc).
No, the whole thing is plain bs.
Also, if they do this, it's highly probable that they do other user-hostile things. AFAIK, you can't upload photos from the desktop web version.
Can't get why some users don't like the change. You're free to decide should you use a product or not. To put it from other perspective, you choose to become a product for instagram to sell or not. If you don't have an account, it's hard to earn more from your time spent in the app. Billions doesn't ROI themselves.
Old web is still there, forums/personal websites isn't banned. You still can do things the old decentralised way probably to a greater extent because internet is even bigger now.
Some people aren't quitters. They don't just quit whenever something stops going their way, they try to change it, try to improve it, try to make it better, even if the only way they have to do that is express why its not best.
Be more like them.
We do try to improve products we use but in this story unfortunately you don't have a voice because if you're not an advertiser. Think about how much ads you need to sell to earn 1B back at least and sustain operating expenses especially when you're not trying to be lean with your resources.
As IG user you have only one right, to say "yes" to any changes they want and to obey to the algorithm of banning and censoring. You don't have any right if you can't enforce it. They can ban end censor your opinion and can enforce this right, you can't do anything about it. You are the product they're selling after all and they care about you in terms of as much revenue you can generate on this particular platform (macro picture of user retention).
Every time I follow the steps to report the issue, I am linked back to the main troubleshooting start page where the process restarts a la Groundhog Day.
It was hacked and taken over by a Russian account who subsequently realized I have no friends of consequence and so abandoned it. But every single time I try to go through the official channels to recover the account I cannot!
Instagram doesn't care about account recovery because it boosts internal metrics when people make new accounts. I wish concerns like mine were prioritized rather than influencers who need a new way to ask for money from their followers.
Sure, you can say that I should avoid Mark's websites altogether if I want to keep my data safe, but that would probably mean that a huge portion of my social life would be sacrificed.
Pretty hostile UX
While viewing the gallery page for an Instagram user, right click on the post you want to access and select "Copy link location," or whatever your browser calls it, then paste the link into a new tab.
I made a blog post[1] about it a while ago which is elementaryOS oriented but can be used in any system or browser
[1] https://asvvvad.eu.org/?page=blog&id=use-epiphany-as-mobile-...
Twitter has been closing their door for a long time, but I wonder if they ever will?
My advice is to just say "no thanks" and move on.
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...
https://bibliogram.snopyta.org/ is one instance.
Fuck you!
Love,
Me
Instagram Influencers Now Have Even Less Influence Over RDiddly
As a photographer, I have to have some sort of IG presence but I absolutely hate the app, the UX and the whole enchilada. Its the worst viewing experience possible for good photos and yet is the medium of choice for so many... I miss the old web.
As a user, I want simplicity and way to view work based on a number of options that I choose. Not based on an algorithm or AI. My choices, my mood, my desires.
Instagram is no longer a photo-sharing app. Its a platform for self promotion. Not much different than Twitter, LinkedIn or FB in that regard. I guess all social media dissolves into a self promotion circle jerk... Avoid their fate if at all possible.
I'm curious how you reconcile this with your previous desire for the "old web": paywall? js to interfere with the ability to copy/hotlink images?
Makes sense, thanks.
I think in general, this is a "hard" problem for an Internet-based service. You would have to include a watermark of some kind, which arguably hinders viewer experience. And regardless, it is still very easy for viewers to capture an image by downloading or taking a screenshot.
I do agree with your sentiment about IG though.
But in the end the EULA of these apps are designed to shield the entities from liabilities while offering them many options for re-distribution of others work. That's the biggest problem.
same goes for tiktok i believe.
this isn't an issue with the mobile version of the website.
anyway, rant over - i hate mobile apps.
You can download the videos if you're savvy enough to open the dev tools, delete the transparent div, and find the element with the video (which may not be a URL but one of those weird blob: ones). Simples.
At least with this I know the expectation up front, rather than having it sprung on me by surprise.
[1] I've avoided Pinterest for awhile that this may not be the way they attempt to capture accounts any more.
Edit: takedowns to google for Pinterest google results.
Just a reminder, HN viewpoints do not matter at all.
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.
I know every single person I follow and have never seen provocative photos.