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Comment by neuralkoi | Hacker News Reader

I recently found this out the hard way. Instagram’s web app has a super annoying popup. To click the comments button for a post, your cursor has to pass over the username, which just happens to launch a profile preview with the “follow” button exactly where the comments button was, causing you to unintentionally follow the account.

I tried to block this popup with uBlock Origin to no avail. No matter what element I selected, it was still there. Finally fixed the problem by deleting my Instagram account.

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A counter example: I got caught out by the deprecation/sunsetting of anonymous "old.reddit.com" yesterday but it turns out uBlock can filter out the ads, boilerplate, sidebars, join/login buttons etc on the main site. It's actually faster and more usable than the old site now.

Small win.

>I got caught out by the deprecation/sunsetting of anonymous "old.reddit.com" yesterday

It appears to still be up for me. ??

Not sure there's been a hard date publicly set but they are sunsetting it

It's A/B tested across IP ranges, geolocated regions, etc. I got it super early and it sucks being locked out for the past 2-3 weeks now.

You now have to be logged in to reddit to use it.

"anonymous" is the key word. old.reddit still works (though it seems to get progressively jankier), but it's now requiring a login.

It was activated for my region yesterday and it did wonders for breaking my reddit addiction.

Then I tried the normal view and ... wow, so many auto-playing video ads disguised as regular posts.

Reading the claim that they're requiring login to old.reddit.com "for safety" made me laugh out loud.

When are they going to admit that the redesign sucks and there's a reason everyone keeps loading the old reddit interface? Who has the ego that can't handle the truth, that their UI/UX design is garbage and loathed?

The random phrases turned into links that are never helpful means I can't trust any link in comments now, there's that stupid AI box that never has useful or helpful info, conversations are a nightmare to try and read through.

I will never understand how it is that a site which exists almost entirely for conversations, made a new UI that severely fucks with "read the conversation."

It's using an algorithm to determine whether or not to allow anonymous access. It looks like it's considering origin IP, browser useragent, among other things. I've had login prompts show up once or twice, but when I'm using my regular browser in incognito mode and not connecting through a third-party VPN, it continues to allow logged-out access.

How do you filter it out? Do you select each element individually?

Yes, the Element Picker in uBlock Origin. Requires Firefox because of Web Manifest stuff in Chromium.

nah, now it loads maybe 3 posts at a time and the latency is really slow to pull up those 3

Reddit tested login walls on the new site since months.[1]

[1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/32706

Best move you could have possibly done.

> Finally fixed the problem by deleting my Instagram account.

The real fix!

> Finally fixed the problem by deleting my Instagram account.

The best solution. Highly recommended.

Never delete your account. That account has a bunch of associated signals that scream "real user". Therefore you should sell it on an account marketplace to a spammer, if you really hate the platform.

“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”

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