Hacker News Reader

Comment by fao_ | Hacker News Reader

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 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.

View on HN

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 the bug...

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.

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.

I see what you're saying, but given how addictive FB is, and how much advertisement they use, you're kind of giving them the upper hand by playing neutral.

For instance, I never go to Walmart (but sometimes do). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=repxFQXVsHc

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_...

That reddit thread was pretty disappointing. I was expecting some analysis of the contents of the network calls. It's also around four years old.

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?

Your personal experience is not universal.

Social media platform is not an operating system. You can't just decide and switch. If you delete your account, you're missing out on updates from your friends who all are still there. Doing this you're only hurting yourself, not corporations.

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.

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").

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. :)

This can happen if you create an account with a username that has "disallowed" words. It's happened to me with usernames that end with "dotcom" or "_com".

It’s not. I’ve had a similar experience, and I walked away.

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.

I'm going to gander a wild guess and say the combination of temporary email address, proxy IP, and false UA string are likely to trip up fake account detection ML algorithms.

The UA string is real, just misleading. The other two resources aren’t public throwaways, the domain and source addresses belong to me, or a version of me (as much as IANA allocated resources can “belong”) and otherwise appear normal, but are only used for traffic to untrustworthy shitweasels.

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

There are some situations I have been able to pindown for when Instagram doesn’t like you. Two of which are not linking to a facebook account and using a personal domain (instead of gmail, outlook etc). Also instagram really hates it if the email contains insta@domain in any form or manner. Also you will have to hand over your phone number. No exceptions!

Weird, I created an extra account earlier this year and didn't need to associate a phone number or FB account with it.

Anecdotally, I was never able to complete signup for Instagram, for similar reasons.

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 a facebook linked account. 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.

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.

> 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.

I had this experience when I was working with the Facebook Ad Manager.

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.

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

I tried three different email addresses (aliases, really) and had the same problem with all of them.

same thing happened to me except I didn't bother going through support. I dug a little more a few years later and it turns out someone had put my email address in their account although they had signed up and logged in via phone number so it didn't matter that they didn't have access to the email associated with the account.

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.

That sounds like an unnecessarily aggressive way to handle that. It certainly could have been an honest mistake on the part of the user who owned that account. Why not just change the email address on the account?

This may or may not be relevant:

>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.

what is my identity id for me to decide and not for you to claim. my identity on HN is my messages here, nothing else. if you need more than that you are welcome to ask and we can establish another identity outside this platform

If you signed up for gmail or similar early, then dumbasses of the world use your email address as 'their email' dozens of times a day for random internet accounts because it's also their name, and they don't understand or don't care that it isn't their email address.

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.

People don't seem to understand just how common this problem is with any sort of initial.lastname@gmail address. It is insane to me that so many major big name companies do ZERO email verification on signups and just start spamming me with with garbage every time some idiot uses my email address and expect me to "unsubscribe" to something I never subscribed to in the first place.

I've had this happen to me, getting emails about credit score applications and u-haul rentals and whatnot. I can't even contact many of these companies to fix it except creating an account which I'm obviously not going to do.

Oh my yes! I had an early beta gmail account. From when you couldn't just sign up but had to be invited by another user.

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.

It was the second or third time someone had used my email for Instagram.

The same thing happened to me. And I was trying to sign up/log in to Instagram through Facebook. Why am I allowed to log in to and use my Facebook account but not allowed to sign up for Instagram using my Facebook account? If they thought I was a bot or fraudulent user then surely they'd have the same concern about my Facebook account? It doesn't make any sense.

Had the same problems, ultimately swayed me away from signing up at all.

anecdotal, but I tried signing up for FB (not IG) from incognito chrome on linux, then didn't set any information or add friends, and they disabled my account less than a week later

went through 'upload a drivers license' process, no luck, no explanation

The whole point of Instagram is giving away your face to a faceless corporation.

No it's not. I know hundreds of photographers who use it to share photos of landscapes, models, and other things and have never posted a picture of themselves.

I think Facebook was asking you take a picture of your state issued ID at one point to prove you are you, if you had run into account issues. I’m not sure if they do that anymore.

You are not a customer. You are a money maker. You are a product.

I think they said that

We are the subject. Product is the data extracted out of us.

I like to think we are the vendor :-)

No more than any other cattle.

My dad had the same problems trying to create an Instagram account recently, seeming to fail for various reasons and then later the account might appear to have been created and instantly disabled. He tried a number of perfectly normal email addresses, on different domains including gmail, on different IPs (home, work), different browsers including without extensions and such.

Similar situation,a bit different: I had an user agent activated on my laptop (yeah, I wanted to create an Insta account from my laptop)and after 3 failed attempt my account was blocked for shady interaction. I had to contact the customer support and send them a picture with me with a code number they gave me. Yes...

Similar story. I used a real-life name/surname (just not my real one), matched with a similar real email. I never got in. I never bothered. Now when I see (before COVID) people on the train tapping like junkies on the "stories" I smirk and think how lucky I was to avoid this mindfuck.

You being entertained on the train by judging people on their phones sounds hardly more valuable as a hobby than them being entertained by judging people in instagram stories.

> You being entertained on the train by judging people on their phones sounds hardly more valuable as a hobby than them being entertained by judging people in instagram stories.

There's a substantial difference between being on the sidelines vs. in the line of fire WRT the firehose of propaganda.

>You being entertained on the train by judging people on their phones sounds hardly more valuable as a hobby than them being entertained by judging people in instagram stories.

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.

How efficient and reliable is the verification with a face holding a card either ways. I would watermark it all over with the Instagram logo to make sure it isn't being used outside of instagram context with sophisticated digital enhancement tools.

Yep, this happens if you trigger the bot detection.

i had the same thing happen. if i remember correctly the email+label@gmail.com plus signing on the web made it throw error.

I hate when sites don’t accept + modified email addresses.

As someone working to launch an app, this isn't something that I was terribly concerned with handling before launch, but I now have a question.

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?

No. That is super hostile to your users, and besides the use of + as recipient delimiter is a convention, not a standardised behaviour.

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 should just treat them as two different email addresses. On some providers this is in fact what they are, and there is no real point in doing otherwise because anybody who wants to create multiple accounts in that way could just create multiple email addresses instead.

>so that one email address still can't create multiple accounts?

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.

I hate it even more when they try telling me that "that is not a valid email address" - welcome to RFC5322, people...

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322

With all the face filters and deep fakes these days why didn’t you just send some fake photo?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com