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Comment by lotyrin | Hacker News Reader

No, this is their reason, just from within their distortion field. This is helping the user view photos, because the user should be logged in and using the app, the app provides the best experience and this web interface is a distraction that gets in the way of that.

Edit: I guess it wasn't sufficiently clear, the second sentence here is not my own personal opinion.

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I've been in businesses trying to sell me this view as a developer. I can almost guarantee that the developers are saying, in their head, "this is in no way helpful to our users, but I will comply because my PM told me to."

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.

Obvious lies like these aren't meant to believed. Their purpose is preventing the follow up questions that would come if the truth was acknowledged.

No, best experience is when I do not have to open my phone if someone links me something. Best experience when I don't have to waste time creating a user and logging in.

The best experience from IG's POV.

The best experience is from a POV that doesn't intersect with IG.

So in other words Instagram claims to know how every single user wants to interact with the platform better than they themselves know, and so now users don't even get to decide for themselves.

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.

Of course it's their reason. If there was any of your interest in this they would not waste half a second to tell you this with details.

Nonsense explanation means just that users' interests were not factored in the decision.

That's not it, the web interface still works as long as you're logged in, no app needed. My guess is they are sick of scrapers and data miners. If login is needed, they can ban and the proxy hustlers will have a hard time.

FWIW, here in Sweden I can still look at feeds without being logged in.

They want people like me to register and increase the user count. I happen to get to an Instagram page once or twice a year following some link, look at a few pictures and quit. I remember it stopped me to scroll through pictures after a while or something like that, again to lure visitors to register. But I don't have a use case for Instagram so I won't. I already send pictures to people I care about via whatsapp.

Can you post images using the web interface?

> My guess is they are sick of scrapers and data miners. If login is needed, they can ban and the proxy hustlers will have a hard time.

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

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