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Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles
- bluesign 7y agoThis looks like a result of linkedin scraping case. Although I hate walled gardens, in the age of facial recognition etc, I hate some random scraper have my photos more.
- hideoto 7y agoBugMeNot to the rescue.
- thih9 7y agoIn 2019, with IP geolocation combined with mobile or email verification, BugMeNot no longer seems that useful. At the moment its instagram.com logins have 35% or lower success rate.
- slig 7y agoBugMeNot only works for low-profile websites. Anything huge like instagram has protections against sharing accounts. (i.e: they'll block your account until you verify your phone number, friends, etc).
- SamBam 7y agoI haven't found a large site that that has worked on in years.
- lpellis 7y agoInstagram also shut down their public api last year and are deprecating the graph api in a week. (5 Nov) https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-api/ https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instagram-api/ The new api has no access to consumer (non-Business or non-Creator) instagram accounts.
- forgotmyhnacc 7y agoIf Facebook offers a public API, people will complain that Facebook hasn't learned their lesson from Cambridge analytica. If they don't, then they're accused of having a walled garden. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
- dmix 7y agoI thought Cambridge Analytica had access to far more data than was available on the public API which is what made it so controversial?
- ArtDev 7y agoYes, that was precisely the issue.
- lalos 7y agoWho started with this whole facebook = "Damned if you do, damned if you don't". Been seeing this all over the place. Is it just a catchy phrase or some higher up in the tech world said it and everyone is parroting it? Search results for comments of the last month https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=false&query=Damned%20if%20you%20do%2C%20damned%20if%20you%20don%27t&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=fa...
- munmaek 7y agoCA had access to information they never should've had. Just like phone apps having access to a Contacts API that they never should have that kind of access to. Having a tightly managed API would be just fine.
- sdan 7y agoThis happened to me recently as well... but it's not surprising(given FB's actions with their subsidiary apps) Good thing I deleted anything Facebook related a while back.
- est31 7y agoThis is a new change? It's been like that for me ever since I knew of Instagram. You browse two or three images and plop you get a sign up screen.
- jzl 7y agoWhat country are you in? Definitely never been the case in the US.
- est31 7y agoGermany.
- hdra 7y agoI don't know if theres been any recent change, but not too long ago, login is only required to view Instagram stories. Then they changed it to block location-tagged postings too. Which is a bummer, since I liked to use the webbrowser to browse location-tagged Instagram posts to discover places to eat at. I haven't used it much since, not sure if they added additional restrictions for non-signed-up users recently.
- est31 7y agoOh nvm, I confused it with pinterest lol. I can't edit the post above any more. It's sad in general if platforms require accounts to view content.
- landcoctos 7y ago> Then they changed it to block location-tagged postings too. Which is a bummer Yes this was a bummer too. I used it all the time. Now I use hashtags which aren't as effective and I'm sure they'll shut that down too. O well, nothing useful really lost.
- woutr_be 7y agoDefinitely a new change, just last week I could look at user profiles without having to be logged in. Right now, it shows me an overlay asking me to log in.
- godzillabrennus 7y agoIf it’s free you are the product. Not sure why people still don’t understand that.
- rahidz 7y agoIt's too trite and has too many exceptions on both the free side (Linux, Wikipedia, heck, Hacker News) and the non-free (plenty of popular sites and apps that track you out the wazoo even when you do pay).
- pmlnr 7y agoLinux - not a service Wikipedia - community backed Hacker News - we are the product. It's an ad space for ycombinator.
- SamBam 7y agoThis sounds like "no true Scotsman." What part of "it" in the saying "If it's not free..." implies that the saying is not applicable to software or community-backed websites? Surely the saying absolutely applies to free mobile games, free raffles at a car dealership, or free loyalty cards in stores. So it's not specific to "services."
- jzl 7y agoHmm ... very pinteresting news.
- near 7y agoThey also use meta robots=noimageindex,noarchive on every page without an opt-out which is so incredibly stupid and walled-gardeny for an image sharing site. I wanted to use Flickr instead but nobody else uses Flickr, then I tried making my own image gallery and I learned that browsers do not honor the JPEG rotation EXIF data and I don't want to write my own rotation/cropping code (that and Google completely ignores it), so now I'm trying Pinterest, but that one also wants you to log in to view full images. Kind of silly I can't find a good image sharing site in 2019.
- TheChaplain 7y agoHow about imgur.com?
- rahidz 7y agoImgur's compression is awful, and especially on mobile, has a ton of dark patterns for logged-off users or anyone not using their app. Personally I'm using Instagram for casual "here's my life" photos where I don't care about compression or any of that, Flickr for more curated public photos, and Google Drive as a secondary private backup.
- bmer 7y agoImgur requires you to provide a valid mobile number in order to create an account.
- rainonmoon 7y agoChrist. It's strange to recall Imgur's genesis on Reddit as a simple, lightweight replacement for all the obstacles and mess that came with Imageshack/Photobucket/other popular image galleries at the time. Shame it eventually bloated into the thing it was meant to remedy.
- nolok 7y agoWell it happened in two easy steps: 1. They took VC money, 2. Reddit cut the middleman and offered direct photo sharing. At that point imgur became less about easy photo sharing on reddit and others, and more about creating its own community.
- TheChaplain 7y agoMy guess is that it's to put up an obstacle against crawlers and perhaps also lower the cost of outbound traffic?
- Freak_NL 7y agoMore likely it is to be able to create more complete visitor profiles and provide more value to advertisers.
- dwd 7y agoIt's one step as they gradually move Instagram to a place where they can effectively monetise everything, rather than it being open and free. I think where they're heading is to monetise reach, so for anyone posting they will have to boost the post for it to go out to N number of potential user feeds based on how much they pay, same as with Facebook.
- neximo64 7y agoIts odd how it seems Instagram is now the biggest part of Facebook and Tiktok seems to be more polished and Instagram lagging behind, even more so with this.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- 3stripe 7y agoThis has been causing me a fair bit of inconvenience at work as I quit Instagram last year (decided it was toxic) but still need to research people/trends in my design job. Guess I'll have to create a fake profile, which in a way will have the opposite of their intended "join the community" action point.
- BlueGh0st 7y agoGoodluck with that. They ask for government issued photo ID in many cases for new accounts.
- mkj 7y agoMy instagram login made last week with a nonexistent email domain seems to work fine. Who cares if they ban it eventually!
- rchaud 7y agoI'm going to try this. I foolishly created an account w/ my FB login back in 2012, and although I rarely use it now compared to a couple of years ago, I would like to use it without it being tied to my personal email.
- landcoctos 7y ago>Who cares if they ban it eventually! They will.
- 24gttghh 7y agowtf. that is creepy as hell.
- danShumway 7y agoHow does something like this scale? Does Instagram have a real person checking each one? If not, how would a computer verify that a photo ID was valid?
- 7y ago
- pjc50 7y agoI wonder if this is somehow related to the "Wagatha Christie" scandal involving Colleen Rooney finding out who was leaking her private Instagram stories to a hostile press.
- cousin_it 7y agoHow accurate is the belief that logged-in eyeballs are profitable, but logged-out ones aren't?
- rob74 7y agoNo idea, but the parent company follows the same strategy - Facebook also nags you obnoxiously to log in on public pages, but it's not a requirement (probably because it would hurt the many "we-were-too-cheap-to-build-a-proper-website-but-here's-our-Facebook-page" businesses too much).
- reportgunner 7y agoI suppose they are trying to bully non-users to create an account to view the next popular instagram page that all the cool kids started following last night.
- spyder 7y agoThat way they can reach people with their marketing even when they aren't visiting the site because they got their e-mail address at registration. That doesn't mean profit, but certainly more chance of it.
- altacc 7y agoYou can still be tracked & advertised to if you're not logged in, but once you have an account it's easier to build up your marketing profile and show "more relevant" adverts & sponsored content, which drives the larger advertising revenue.
- dmix 7y agoThis reduces the amount of total eyeballs though... potentially by a significant amount. For ex anyone sharing a picture on Twitter or FB will only be able to show it to their followers with Instagram accounts.
- sebow 7y agoInstead of complaining about scrapers, how about not uploading things you don't want scraped?Though i'm not a scraper, I can mildly understand the "annoyance", but it's absurd to assume something you post on your own to not be downloaded by somebody.Is it that different between a person simply downloading one picture and someone scraping all your photos?(for whatever purpose) This "hurts" instagram only in the traffic they receive.However i'm assuming they're also saving some money since they're cutting some costs. The actual bad problem for instagram is that they're turning into facebook and it shows.One more reason to ditch big shitty corporations like facebook that make the world a pile of trash.
- annadane 7y agoAnd so yet another thing Facebook touches turns into garbage. This is from the same company that promises transparency... yet buys up their competition and does this (and shares data between Whatsapp and FB). They really have no moral compass, do they? Name the engineer or product manager who did this. Name and shame.
- asquabventured 7y agouBlock Origin `uBlock Filters - Annoyances` filter list (Not subscribed in a default setting) has a filter[1] already to override this dark pattern. [1] https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/commit/05a3fea080d06d4f06d1dae729f2f4aa3d0af0c7 https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/commit/05a3fea080d06...
- 24gttghh 7y agoIs that in the "anti-facebook list"?
- asquabventured 7y ago> Is that in the "anti-facebook list"? I have no idea if it is in that filter list or not as I don't use it but if you want to add the 'uBlock filters - Annoyances' list to your uBO setup follow steps below. 1. Open 'uBO Settings' 2. From within the uBlock Origin Dashboard, Navigate to 'Filter lists' tab (should be second tab) 3. Expand the 'Built-in' filter list options by clicking the '+' button next to 'Built-in' 4. Check the option for 'uBlock filters - Annoyances' 5. Hit 'Apply changes' button in top right corner
- alexghooper 7y agoLegally google will refuse to index these public pages then as it violates their TOS.
- RocketSyntax 7y agoIt doesn't force anyone to do anything.
- tantalor 7y agoI don't think people are confused by this word choice, but to your point requires or mandates might be better.
- twic 7y ago> “This is to help people see photos on Instagram and then understand how to get the best Instagram experience by being part of the community, connecting and interacting with the people and things they love,” the company told Adweek. Why would you say something like this? And why, as a journalist, would you report it? It's a transparent lie; nobody is going to be taken in by it. So why bother even saying it?
- gnrlst 7y agoReminds me a lot of the now infamous reddit EA comment: "The intent is to provide players with a sense of pride and accomplishment for unlocking different heroes. As for cost,..."
- deminature 7y agoPerhaps I'm voluntarily jumping in front a bus here, but I'm not sure there's anything inherently wrong with requiring players to play for a certain number of hours to unlock multiplayer features. Call of Duty has been doing this since 2007, and is the most popular multiplayer game on the planet.
- robrtsql 7y agoA certain number of hours for some features is reasonable. But if I recall correctly, the controversy was that you had to play for 40 hours in order to unlock just one of these characters. The community got mad when they tried to say this was to cultivate "a sense of accomplishment" when the goal was really to encourage players to buy lootboxes in order to skip the grind.
- save_ferris 7y agoIt’s usually SOP for outlets to publish statements from the subjects of their reporting, however banal or ridiculous they may be. > nobody is going to be taken in by it. Unfortunately, you don’t know that to be true. Relatives I’ve spoken with who own FB stock love to read statements like this to justify their position.
- cs702 7y agoSo now those profiles are not really public anymore. They are available only to members now. Walled-off. This action works directly against the best interests of Instagram users seeking to maximize their audience and reach. Let's call this what it is: an anti-feature.
- lifestyleguru 7y agoExactly, these profiles are not public anymore (in the common sense meaning of "public profile"). BTW LinkedIn and others are doing the same, and what anyone is going to do about it?
- yourduskquibble 7y ago> BTW LinkedIn and others are doing the same, and what anyone is going to do about it? Stop using their user-hostile service? They need my eyeballs in order to sell me to advertisers. If they are creating features that turn users away, their bottom line may be impacted enough that they reevaluate their user-hostile business practices.
- rchaud 7y agoThe LinkedIn change really sucked. Just a couple of years ago, you could see everyone's details in full, without being signed in. Then, they changed it to third-and second-degree connections only, so you had to be signed in. And now, it's completely unusable without an account.
- postalrat 7y agoThe fun part is they are still public if you are the google bot. Open an incognito window and try going to a linkedin profile. Then try it with google translate: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=af&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.linkedin.com%2Fin%2Fchristopher-conklin-42772938 https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=af&tl=en&u=htt... Odds are good you can still view the profile through translate because linkedin thinks you are google. LinkedIn, Pinterest and others want to be indexed by google, but don't want the content that's indexed to be public. Google is ruining their own service by allowing this to continue.
- mikestew 7y agoI don’t use Instagram. I’m sure I’ve seen Instagram pages, but I’ve never had a reason to create an account. But if they let me see pages, maybe someday I’ll see the need for myself. A hair stylist I went to recently has an Instagram page. She did a great job, I’ll go bookmark her page in case I forget who she is. And that’s when I am met with a login page. Well, guess who now stands no chance of ever having an Instagram account? They might wear me down if enough friends send links that I click. “Hey, ya know, this looks kinda handy.” Now it’s all over a wall I don’t feel like climbing. Which is fine. I’m not mad, or much of anything, frankly. It’s another “service” I don’t have to waste time on. But, boy, it strikes me as a strange way to pursue growth.
- rchaud 7y agoIG is only a growth platform if you are selling something that's not restricted to your local area, like a hair salon is. Otherwise it is a brand-building platform. Got a lot of followers? Start messaging companies offering to hawk their products in your feed.
- jkoberg 7y ago> Are you used to browsing Instagram without signing in to check out what your favorite brands are sharing? LOL, no.
- raverbashing 7y agoAs much as I find this revolting, I just tried with a page in a browser I'm not logged in to anything fb and it still worked. So maybe it's still being rolled out or limited to some profiles?
- SyneRyder 7y agoWhen it happened to me, it was only after I scrolled down a couple of screens after clicking on a few images. The first screen or two of images were still publicly viewable.
- ekianjo 7y agoSo they became the new pinterest?
- altacc 7y agoI've never worked out how to use pinterest. It's one of those "successes" that I personally fail to see any value in. If I'm searching for something and I land on pinterest it's like hitting a dead end. I can get nothing useful from it and immediately go back and look elsewhere.
- Tepix 7y agoIt works well when you're logged in and use the iPad app.
- sschueller 7y agoSupport the federated alternative that is being built based on the same technology (ActivityPub) as Mastodon and Peertube. [1] https://pixelfed.org/ https://pixelfed.org/ [2] https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed
- newscracker 7y agoHow mature and functional is it now? I recall looking at it in the past and seeing that it wasn’t ready (I’m perhaps not recalling things right). In the list of instances, the one with the highest number of users, pixelfed.social, seems to have less than 10 posts per user (in total), on average. Sounds like adoption is not even as good as Mastodon yet.
- sarasasa28 7y agoKay man, surely all my friends will be there
- intpx 7y agosups easy to get my 90 year old grandmother to switch over to see pictures of my kids
- pmlnr 7y ago> Fan: Why don't you follow anyone on twitter? > Eminem: Always be a leader not a follower. https://twitter.com/emin3mquotez/status/415206423342366720 https://twitter.com/emin3mquotez/status/415206423342366720 That aside, if not now, when? If not us, who? Someone has to start it. None of my friend were on FB when I joined it.
- manthedudeguy 7y agoIf nobody was a follower, could there be any leaders?
- munmaek 7y agoThe sad reality is nobody wants to use a platform that their friends mostly aren't on. Nobody really uses facebook because it's just so amazing, but because almost all of their friends and family are using it. (and facebook groups, many, many people use facebook for organizing meetups because it's free and... everyone's on it). It's familiar and easy, no complex things like federated servers to choose from. Just one central site. In real life I told some friends I left facebook/twitter, and they were like "ok". ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Few people are just going to stop communication with their social group over principles or whatever. I stopped using facebook because I was fed up, but it sucked not being in the group chats for the communities that I was involved in. I had to work harder to keep abreast of what was going on, and it still wasn't the same. If I had kept on organizing and hosting events it would've been impossible. Things like meetups are possible on meetup.com, etc, for sure, but now I'm not privy to anything on facebook, and I have to pay to have my own group. Very few people are going to make that decision. I know people who still have fake accounts just to access fb groups, but not deal with the rest of facebook. Bridges are likely the only feasible way forward, but even though mastodon has one for twitter adoption hasn't really happened.
- sschueller 7y agoOfftopic question. All Instagram images and videos appear to be hosted a publicly accessible storage even those of private profiles. You just need to know the URL. Is this security by obscurity really enough?
- filleokus 7y agoI would say so, the URLs are pretty darn long: https://scontent-arn2-2.cdninstagram.com/vp/5932ec6f480e416adb482afdbfebe189/5E47AF82/t51.2885-15/e35/74665255_2283263248631663_6646495081169154079_n.jpg?_nc_ht=scontent-arn2-2.cdninstagram.com&_nc_cat=111 https://scontent-arn2-2.cdninstagram.com/vp/5932ec6f480e416a... It's not obvious how likely it is to guess a valid URL, but even if it's just the first path, its still 128 bits (assuming a hexadecimal alphabet). According to [0] there are 50+ billion photos uploaded to Instagram. Even if we assume 10 000 billion posts (200x margin), 10^13 is a very small number in comparison to 2^128≈3.4*10^38, [0]: https://www.omnicoreagency.com/instagram-statistics/ https://www.omnicoreagency.com/instagram-statistics/ (In the the URL above I've changed one character, yielding it invalid, leaving it as an exercise for the reader to figure the missing one out.)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- hombre_fatal 7y agoWell, you can log into any website by just guessing an unguessable token and setting a cookie. That's not what people refer to as obscurity, else all cryptography is just security through obscurity which makes it a useless distinction. You can make off with millions of dollars in bitcoin by guessing numbers correctly. It's public and yours for the taking.
- gt2 7y agoI've wondered about that on several sites. So it's true that it still requires: a) a user who should have the URL give it to them or b) person 1 guessed the URL, like a password since it's usually a long url with a GUID of some type. But is that acceptable for some reason? Easier development? Because otherwise you need to: a) issue one time/short lived token for accessing an image on S3 for instance, for all the images that will be shown on a page when a page loads for an authenticated user. or b) proxy the image requests by making an api endpoint for image names, authenticate those requests, fetch the image from a place only the server has access to and stream the image data back.
- kpennell 7y agoOdd, private firefox search and opened https://www.instagram.com/kimkardashian/ https://www.instagram.com/kimkardashian/ just fine. I know, dumb example.
- reportgunner 7y agoYes, same here. Try scrolling down a fair bit and you will see it. (happened to me on second "loading" of the next "page" of pictures)
- HenryBemis 7y agoYes, after scrolling 2-3 pages down the message appears. It won't go away. The only way to bypass (on a PC) it is stop scrolling right before the message pops-up, click on an image and then click on the right-arrow to move to the next/older photo. You can see all photos like this (and vids etc.) just fine, as long as you don't scroll down any more. You game the system by moving "horizontally".
- whamlastxmas 7y agoI saw a login prompt flash then immediately gone. I wonder if my adblock shut it down
- Recursing 7y agoDepends on your IP address, even in the same country :/
- hugh4life 7y ago"The photo-sharing social network has begun locking down its platform by preventing signed-out users from having unlimited access to public profiles.As a result, you’ll now be prompted to either sign up or login after viewing a handful of photos and posts via mobile or desktop web. Worse, there’s no getting around it." I don't like the change, but it's about 36 photos which is quite reasonable.
- lifestyleguru 7y agoPinterest did this as well. I also noticed they started to aggressively stick ads in the main feed of their mobile app around two weeks ago - like each third post. Instant uninstall.
- nefasti 7y agoGood luck. I temporarily disabled my Instagram account and can’t recover it. The process is supposed to be just login again, but it hangs because I had two factor Authentication enabled. My account is now in a limbo. There is no proper support channel for this problem. And the form they provid for help on the app just give an “invalid parameters” when trying to submit, but the funny part is it’s hidden behind the iPhone X notch, only found the error because I took a screenshot. Instagram always been like this? or is this sign of Facebook tighter grip on it?
- Grue3 7y agoHopefully everyone moves back to Tumblr. Instagram is just terrible experience all around.
- pmlnr 7y agoTumblr, that still has the full page interstitial of "we value your privacy" EVEN ON RSS FEEDS, despite Automattic bought it from Oath? Yeah, right.
- landcoctos 7y agoThey started locking down other areas a few months ago. I used to browse public pictures using "locations" which was one of the first items to require a login. Frustrating but I just use the service less. And no, I will not create a login.
- icedchai 7y agoYou can just use a fake account.
- 908087 7y ago"Fake" accounts still allow behavior tracking.
- Mc_Big_G 7y agoEasy solution. Don't use Instagram or any other Facebook product for that matter, assuming you care about privacy, truth in advertising, election interference, etc...
- kotrunga 7y agoThis shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. Instagram is owned by Facebook... why would they do anything for the sole benefit of users?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 7y agoJust deleted my Instagram.
- lprd 7y agoTheir new 'facebook' API is almost an impossible option now for personal use. Their previous API was much more pleasant to work with. IMO a 'personal use only' account type with a limited data scope would be a great option to have. Thus far, I can't get my 'app' authorized for personal use despite it being only for a page on my blog. I've given up trying to use their API. I'd like to just scrape my photos now but I'm not sure if even that's a possibility. https://twitter.com/jonlprd/status/1184547466244448257 https://twitter.com/jonlprd/status/1184547466244448257
- cartercole 7y agothen their user bases blooms as all the bots are registered to keep crawling