That is a different issue. What The Next Web reported is when you scroll down a bit and Instagram shows the login/register form. Now, no matter what photo or video, even if it's the first one, it asks you to login.
Correct. This is not a new behavior. Also, did the author check for any kind of cookie or fingerprinting? I would guess Instagram is much more likely to allow some sample viewing, and by clearing all stored data, you can get another quantity of samples. I would have tried that first before the user agent.
A more accurate title would probably be (this is conjecture) "Instagram expands loginwall to other countries, eg Brazil"
Tested with different browsers, computers, connections, even cities.
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.
Im still not convinced that Instagram hasnt figured out a way to identify you and your friends, and has decided theyve used up their trial images.
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.
It's a possibility, and I shouldn't doubt Facebook's reach. Anyway, these friends and relatives I've asked for help they all have Instagram accounts and use the app regularly, always logged-in, and yet that popup showed up in their first attempt to see a picture logged off.
I don't have an instagram account and just Googled "most popular instagram accounts" and I was able to look at the top 3. Though I did scroll down far enough to hit a "you need to login to view more" wall. Maybe it's a regional thing? I'm in the US here.
And it's Katy Perry, Nike and Miley Cyrus, just in case you were curious. (at least according to the first result from Google)
Just tried with my own Instagram in incognito in desktop. I could scroll the grid for a few wheel-scrolls before being asked to log in. Clicking any image yielded a log-in prompt.
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.)
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.
I just noticed this a few days ago when checking a friend's dog feed. If you open in private window it still seems to allow. (browse normal to instagram, right-click, open in new private window tab)
Opening in a normal new tab should work as well. I think it's because clicking a photo normally uses client-side navigation (navigates with JS), while opening in a new tab will fetch the entire new page.
It reads to me more like a disincentive to avoid participating on the platform. Twitter did this recently as well. You can view a simple timeline, but clicking on anything will require you register or log in.
I'm split on this, but I'm far more erring on the side of reclassifying social media as a utility. There's simply no way for someone to protect themselves from criminal activity (bullying, identity theft, fraud, libel/slander, terrorism) on these platforms without them having to expose their PPI to and participate on each platform. The same for police and the FBI. And that concerns me because Twitter and Facebook have become breeding grounds for illegal activity, covering everything from pedophilia to terrorism. The last thing we need is a social media company going Apple a-la refusing to break the encryption on an iPhone 5C used to facilitate a serious crime.
Justine Sacco was in 2014. And it took Justine over two years to find employment after a random user spam-retweeted her post. So, we've had six more years for these platforms to fester the worst of the worst of our society. Today, you can do what Zoe Quinn did: Post a fabricated claim of sexual abuse and violence committed willfully by someone she knew, and only few publicly knew, had a serious mental disorder and history of self-harm, and then actively enlist support to limit distribution of evidence proving the fabrication and prior knowledge, and eventually evade prosecution when that person, Alec Holowka, commits suicide after being blocked through several attempts to clear his name.
I apologize for the rant. That's not the point of your comment or my reply. But I hope this at least demonstrates why I want Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, etc. to be under government thumb. Without it, we're going to see more criminal activism and behavior protected for one demographic but not another because the only metric for Twitter or Facebook or IG policy is revenue.
Yet another reason to move away from Instagram. I’m toying with using RSSHub + ttrss to get content from my favourite Instagram accounts in my RSS reader. I hope this doesn’t break that.
Smart! I will have to look into a solution like this. I want to follow all the artists and creators on Instagram but I don't want to be swamped with all the other inanity.
Yep. There's a video in the post showing that. If you change the browser's user agent to any browser in iPhone or Android, photos and videos open normally.
You're right, I noticed this recently as well. Clicking the photo brings up the sign-up modal. However, middle clicking to open in a new tab views the photo.
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.
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!
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
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 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.
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").
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.
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?
>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
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I hate these walled apps. Having to log in is maddening. Especially Facebook, especially right now...
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 photographer, I want security and assurances that my work remains my work and is not easily stolen nor transferable without consent.
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.
User agreements of these entities are onerous and impossible to challenge. They shield the companies in ways you cannot even fathom and allow many to steal your work and use as they please.
> my work remains my work and is not easily stolen nor transferable without consent
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.
Honestly, I dont know the answer. Maybe its blockchain like tracking in the image file? Maybe its something else... There are many technologies available that can fingerprint a file, and others that can ID an image. A service that includes this type of feature would be good. And of course, anyone can screenshot an image, but they cannot resell a screenshot for commercial use.
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.
my main complaint is watching videos on desktop web or the mobile app - there's no way to control play/pause/scrubbing. you just have to sit through it and if you miss any of it, watch it again from the start.
same goes for tiktok i believe.
this isn't an issue with the mobile version of the website.
I think this is a deliberate decision, although I'm not sure why.
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.
an alternative exists. If you have a significant web presence you should definitely explore the ActivityPub ecosystem. Pay attention to established web standards.
Honestly, I think I prefer not having access to something like Pinterest[1] which lets you have some access for a bit and then as soon as you try to interact with the site in any meaningful way (usually to leave it) they insist you sign in.
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.
Pinterest is awful in this regard but what makes it even worse is that so many other sites followed in their footsteps. I know why, I just dont like the process or the idea of having to offer up my info and "join a club" before I've even set foot in the door or peeked around a little.
Instagram does exactly this. You can interact with it's site via browser and open a few links until shows a popup saying you have to login (which you can't close).
Or used to be? What I reported is a change in this behavior. It doesn't allow someone browse those few photos and videos before shows a popup asking for a login.
My disdain for Pinterest is at unrecoverable levels because of this and the fact they display interesting photos without any details or source listed even if logged in. I often wonder the difference between people that become antagonistic for being forced to signup vs people that are persuaded.
Pinterest is the worst thing on the web. I do not understand why google puts pinterest links as the top search results constantly, even though it is a completely shallow and pointless page that merely obfuscates the content I would actually want to see from some other site. Why would i want to see what is effectively a notice of someone saying they like a webpage, rather than the webpage? And considering google claimed they would penalize sites for giving one set of content to googlebot and something else completely to users, pinterest shouldn't be in search results at all.
I wonder why rights holders don’t issue takedowns to Pinterest for their google results. Usually the image only supports Pinterest as a way to try to get someone to sign up. There are no links through to the creator
Edit: takedowns to google for Pinterest google results.
I stopped using Quora when I kept getting interrupted to sign in/up when not logged in. I did the same for Pinterest. I had deleted and wiped my LinkedIn account for a long time but recently re-activated it for a job search. I'll delete it again when I land a job.
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?
I keep a txt file with a list of the subreddits I’m interest in it. I delete all my posts and my account every few months and create a new one and join the subreddits in the file. If reddit required an email like discord, I would absolutely stop using it.
Reddit provides a way to streamline this for you - I use old.reddit.com so it might not be the same in the new UI so YMMV on the specifics.
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.
YouTube is pretty annoying when not logged it too. It constantly pops up a "you're signed out of YouTube" box that obscures part of the video until I close it. On every single video.
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.
Oh yeah. I really liked Quora in the beginning. There were some good answers to the questions there. Then it got worse, and when it started prompting me to login, I bailed and I've never gone to Quora ever again.
I would like to use Instagram because all my friends are on it, but I have a low bullshit tolerance and stuff like this reminds me why I shouldn't sign up.
Instagram is also very liked for people who use it to only follow or be followed by friends, so in that sense it feels like a very private network and does not affect at all. Why would you care if they only allow public profiles to be viewed by people within the platform?
Instagram is riffled with semi-nude photos of women that I seriously doubt it has any real value whatsoever. And it's kind of surprising considering that FB has a very strict policy when it comes to showing nude pics. They should have brought down the hammer long ago.
I believe any website that is behind the walled garden should be deindexed by Google and other search engines. Whether it's a newspaper, Q/A websites, social media, or anything else. It's only fair. When users search for something, they should only get results of web pages whose content is accessible to all without having to sign up for an account.
Google should be returning the highest quality results. If thats a paywalled newspaper, it should not be excluded.
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.
If I continue to run into the same paywall, I would consider buying into it. If I bought content, I would want it to show up in search. I wouldnt know I want to buy it, if I dont run into it first.
Then Google should work on a way to connect your purchase with their system or give you ability to inform them you’ve purchased a subscription so that only you get to see search results from that paywalled website, and not others.
I've wondered recently if this simple (but powerful) feature would be enough of a differentiator for a search engine challenger to gain serious market share.
I wonder if this will reduce their traffic in any way. At least personally I know I'll never make an account, so I kind of like that this keeps me from procrastinating and browsing the site. The UI is so clunky anyways that I would love to see a better app take over.
I always set anything twitter to untrust in noscript, and just ignore/close anything that comes up linking to them like most common vermin ad/tracking services. Not sure why anyone would link to them as "news", pictures or other.
They did this for a while before, I actually mentioned it to a friend that worked there and two days later I followed an IG link and it showed me the content. My hunch was that it was blocking Firefox users, my friend never said anything about it...but he wouldn't. I've stayed off IG, probably a mistake socially but I felt so pressured to join yet another social network.
I have not been able to recover my account in about 3 years.
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.
I'm quite confused by this article. Instagram has never allowed me to see photos. I have never had an Instagram account and refuse to get one. They'll let me maybe scroll a "teaser" but that pop-up will always happen and always has.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 290 ms ] threadIn 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.
I'm split on this, but I'm far more erring on the side of reclassifying social media as a utility. There's simply no way for someone to protect themselves from criminal activity (bullying, identity theft, fraud, libel/slander, terrorism) on these platforms without them having to expose their PPI to and participate on each platform. The same for police and the FBI. And that concerns me because Twitter and Facebook have become breeding grounds for illegal activity, covering everything from pedophilia to terrorism. The last thing we need is a social media company going Apple a-la refusing to break the encryption on an iPhone 5C used to facilitate a serious crime.
Justine Sacco was in 2014. And it took Justine over two years to find employment after a random user spam-retweeted her post. So, we've had six more years for these platforms to fester the worst of the worst of our society. Today, you can do what Zoe Quinn did: Post a fabricated claim of sexual abuse and violence committed willfully by someone she knew, and only few publicly knew, had a serious mental disorder and history of self-harm, and then actively enlist support to limit distribution of evidence proving the fabrication and prior knowledge, and eventually evade prosecution when that person, Alec Holowka, commits suicide after being blocked through several attempts to clear his name.
I apologize for the rant. That's not the point of your comment or my reply. But I hope this at least demonstrates why I want Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, etc. to be under government thumb. Without it, we're going to see more criminal activism and behavior protected for one demographic but not another because the only metric for Twitter or Facebook or IG policy is revenue.
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.
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.
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5322
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.
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.
Instagram Influencers Now Have Even Less Influence Over RDiddly
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.
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.
I know every single person I follow and have never seen provocative photos.
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.
Example: https://igdig.com/
https://bibliogram.snopyta.org/ is one instance.
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.