18 ms·

Instagram no longer allows people without an account to view photos on computers

396 points by rpgbr 7y ago

dec0rum 7y ago
I thought this had already been happening for quite some time? In 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
- jonathanbull 7y ago
  Yep, this happened at least five months ago. https://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2019/10/28/instagram-now-forces-people-to-sign-in-to-view-public-profiles/ https://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2019/10/28/instagram-now-...
  - rpgbr 7y ago
    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.
- rpgbr 7y ago
  Author here. Previously, it only happened when I was using a VPN, even if its server was in Brazil, where I live. I also checked with friends and relatives living in another cities in Brazil. They also hit that form when trying to access photos unlogged.
- basch 7y ago
  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"
  - rpgbr 7y ago
    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.
    - basch 7y ago
      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.
      - rpgbr 7y ago
        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.
        basch 7y ago
        I would expect all those people to have a cookie or equivalent tracker saying "this person has been to instagram before"
blakesterz 7y ago
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)
- sharkmerry 7y ago
  were you able to open individual posts?
  - blakesterz 7y ago
    Nope!
- ISL 7y ago
  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.)
  - onion2k 7y ago
    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.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
sharkmerry 7y ago
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)
- danielmichaelni 7y ago
  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.
  - sharkmerry 7y ago
    actually normal tab wasnt.. i was a little surprised
gao8a 7y ago
Part of me believes that this is actually to get folks that left instagram back on the platform.
- ooobit2 7y ago
  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.
_fzslm 7y ago
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.
- uoaei 7y ago
  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.
A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
Interesting. Would it work if you pretend you are using cell phone?
- rpgbr 7y ago
  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.
Veera_Sivarajan 7y ago
Yes. Until a couple of weeks ago I would be able to view individual photos but now I can only view the profile until I hit the login restriction.
- ghastmaster 7y ago
  Right click the post and select open in new tab. This doesn't fix the problem of not being able to scroll through the history though.
ghostpepper 7y ago
I think it's actually just some javascript that prevents clicking links from a profile to the individual photos. 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.
- Guest0918231 7y ago
  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.
fao_ 7y ago
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.
- sjroot 7y ago
  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. :)
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - davidmurdoch 7y ago
    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".
  - inopinatus 7y ago
    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.
    - chillacy 7y ago
      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.
12xo 7y ago
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.
- sjroot 7y ago
  Would love to hear more about what you desire in a photo sharing experience. My email should be in my profile if you want to chat.
  - 12xo 7y ago
    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.
    - livueta 7y ago
      > As a photographer, I want security and assurances that my work remains my work and is not easily stolen nor transferable without consent. 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?
      - 12xo 7y ago
        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.
meerita 7y ago
They will save a lot of money.
petermcneeley 7y ago
I wonder if the purpose of this is legal IP control and not so much to get people to login to the platform.
rdiddly 7y ago
Title rewrite: Instagram Influencers Now Have Even Less Influence Over RDiddly
iamthepieman 7y ago
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?
- ABeeSea 7y ago
  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.
  - gravitas 7y ago
    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/ 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.
- grey-area 7y ago
  I think this is just a sign of a declining platform desperate to juice the stats. New signups falling? Just force everyone to log in to view content.
- 7y ago
sandov 7y ago
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.
- jaimehrubiks 7y ago
  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?
  - sandov 7y ago
    Because I want my profile to be viewed by anyone, including non instagram users, or at least keep the capability to do it. 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.
elorant 7y ago
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.
- criddell 7y ago
  You see whatever you follow. I know every single person I follow and have never seen provocative photos.
  - lowan12 7y ago
    This guy's following a bunch of Instagram thots and now he's complaining all he sees are Instagram thots...
nakodari 7y 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.
- basch 7y ago
  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.
  - mbreedlove 7y ago
    I don't consider anything that's pay-walled to be high quality. If I can't read it, it has no value to me.
    - ibero 7y ago
      operative word: i.
      - Wesxdz 7y ago
        A lot of search is searcher context sensitive, so I don't think automating this is unreasonable
    - basch 7y ago
      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.
      - nakodari 7y ago
        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.
jakub_g 7y ago
Note: there are some unofficial IG clients, without paywalls, using the API (however they probably try to kill them when they get too big). Example: https://igdig.com/ https://igdig.com/
- monadic2 7y ago
  Note, instagram is pretty trivial to scrape. I’m guessing that is the real target of these changes: removing unauthorized apis.
0xddd 7y ago
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.
bastard_op 7y ago
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.
dbuder 7y ago
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.
ycombi3 7y ago
Use a IG front-end just like how you use nitter for Twitter links: https://bibliogram.snopyta.org/ https://bibliogram.snopyta.org/ is one instance.
lofikrom 7y ago
They become so desperate to make you create an account.
uoaei 7y ago
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.
- FpUser 7y ago
  I am curious how you were able to confirm that "It was hacked and taken over by a Russian account"
rendall 7y ago
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.
izzydata 7y ago
What are they trying to prevent? Mass image scraping? The people doing that are going to keep doing it regardless of any hoops they make them jump through. This just makes the registration process for normal users more annoying.
- astura 7y ago
  They (almost certainly) want Instagram to be entirely a "social platform," not something to just passively consume as an outsider.
- edmundsauto 7y ago
  Mass image scraping after login is a legal distinction in terms of violating the ToS. Also, Instagram wants to make it harder for scrapers, who rely on cheap to maintain pipelines because the overall goal is to monetize massive amounts of photos, not a few thousand. (IE makes it harder for them to scrape to get teh volume necessary to make it a viable scraping endeavor)
pengaru 7y ago
And Twitter requires a phone number for "verification" shortly after creating a new account without one. Stop using this trash.
- throw_m239339 7y ago
  Yeah, Twitter is never going to get my number, like ever. anybody remembers when Twitter announced in September last year that they would remove "account that didn't post enough"? WTF was that? But Instragram/Facebook,Pinterest and co simply hate the web. I mean they like it when it comes down to user acquisition but their goal is to make you download their app. If they could do away with the web they would. They are no better than Microsoft Balmer era.
  - pengaru 7y ago
    > But Instragram/Facebook,Pinterest and co simply hate the web. I mean they like it when it comes down to user acquisition but their goal is to make you download their app. If they could do away with the web they would. They are no better than Microsoft Balmer era. The web is the real casualty of mobile taking over, more so than the desktop, IMHO. There was a minute between proprietary mobile app dominance and proprietary desktop app dominance where everything new and shiny was a web service first and foremost. During that minute everyone was able participate in all the new shiny things, regardless of what operating system or type of device they used - they just needed a standards-compliant web browser, and nothing ever required your phone number to register, except financial services I guess. I wish the average person understood how liberating and important that state of affairs is for everyone. Based on the few debates I've had on this subject with less technical folks, as long as whatever the average person is carrying in their pocket is supported and they can do/consume what they want today they dgaf how much the walls are closing in on them in the process.
nestlequ1k 7y ago
What about on their smartphones?
chinathrow 7y ago
Middle click still works to open a post in a new tab.
cosmotic 7y ago
“This is to help people view photos in Instagram and understand how to have the best experience on the platform, be part of the community, connecting and interacting with people and the things they love” How does blocking access help people view things? How does blocking access help people understand how to have the best experience? Access is a better experience than access denied. Creating an account and lurking does not help anyone be part of a community. Most online communities are almost entirely lurkers. Creating an account doesn't lead to interaction. There's no way instagram isn't aware of these facts; I'm not a professional social network product manager and I know these things. There are other motives here than what instagram claims.
- chadlavi 7y ago
  If you're in a browser with adblockers and you're not signed in, there's not much they can do to monetize you effectively. I assume this is just a means of forcing people who use instagram in the browser to at least admit who they are so they can tie browsing to a known tracking id. I'm honestly surprised instagram even lets people use the app in any meaningful way on desktop at all.
  - interestica 7y ago
    They didn't for the longest while. I'm not sure what their impetus for changing was.
    - Darkphibre 7y ago
      To post images, I have to fire it up in emulation mode. It's ridiculous how high they try to make the walls on their garden.
  - angelbar 7y ago
    Instragram has ads?
    - rnotaro 7y ago
      Yes? Sponsored posts. https://business.instagram.com/advertising/ https://business.instagram.com/advertising/
sdan 7y ago
I'm fairly sure uBlock Origin removes that banner (it does for me).
ajflores1604 7y ago
I have a theory that we'll get a lot more of these walls going up, not for onboarding users, but to sidestep the legal precedent for allowing webscraping that the LinkedIn case set. I want to say that the LinkedIn ruling hinged on the data being publicly accessible to anyone. If content shifts behind an account signup if imagine that's no longer the case. Can anyone with more knowledge in the area give more insight into this theory?
hollsted-ifbit 7y ago
Instagram died when they got rid of followers activity status. I liked the interesting things that people liked.
downvoteme1 7y ago
I would say that as a free enterprise they are free to do whatever that want. Why do users think that they should have access to Instagram’s data without signing up for an account. LinkedIn does not let you do that so do hundreds of other companies.
geodel 7y ago
Seems like a good thing. I have wasted time at looking photos, now I can use that time to do something slightly more interesting.
op03 7y ago
There are so many instagram "clones". Not sure what the right term is, but basically its just a copy of the entire site with all the pics/vid links pointing back at fb servers. How they manage to keep this stuff running boggles my mind. I have moved off everything FB related so its almost become a habit now for me to use these sites to follow certain accounts. With noscript on FF and picking the right clone easy to get the simplest page (no js running) with just the pics and captions. Just google the insta username and you get the sites.
icedchai 7y ago
It actually does, but you have limited time until that pop up appears. You just right click on the photo, and have it open the link in a new tab.
helsinki 7y ago
This is a reasonable decision on their part. I don’t think people realize how much of their traffic is bots scraping the location of people from photos.
- Meai 7y ago
  well, how much is it? do you have a source?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
code_duck 7y ago
This is simply a continuation of the trend of making Instagram work like Facebook's main product. Of course there's no reasonable justification for it that favors consumers.
peterhadlaw 7y ago
You can right click, open photos/videos in new tabs... For now. Probably to satisfy their desire to get new users, if someone links directly to a post.
wackget 7y ago
Hey Instagram (i.e. Facebook)! Fuck you! Love, Me
seddin 7y ago
There is a little trick to bypass this, open your browser console, click on mobile view, and refresh the page, it should load the mobile version of Instagram.
Guest0918231 7y ago
It's unfortunate that a lot of businesses are now inside of Facebook and Instagram walls. I know a number of times in recent months I'd end up on Instagram pages for different businesses. I would be scrolling to view their products and suddenly I'd get hit with the sign-up modal that wouldn't allow me to scroll further (well, technically I could if I opened the developer tools and disabled it, but that road block usually stopped me). So, I'd close their Instagram page, move on with my life, and they'd potentially lose a sale. The same thing happened on Facebook when the page would be covered in overlays and I could barely browse the content. I'd get annoyed and leave. There's a lot of power you're giving up when you build your online presence inside of another company. The entire user experience of your customer can drastically change at any moment, and you have little recourse aside from rebuilding your online presence from scratch.
- lgvld 7y ago
  Exactly my experience. Actually I think it’s less irritating to block access to any image from the very first click/scroll, than to perversely let the user dive into an account and, suddenly, BAM!! acces denied!.. Because that’s really how it looks for someone who don’t have an Instagram account and is just passing by.
- RoyalBingBong 7y ago
  Walking through the city, when a shop piques your curiosity. As you step closer to the windows, a security guard approaches you and asks for your club membership. Annoyed you bugger off. I think nobody in their right mind would do this kind of shit IRL.
hnburnsy 7y ago
http://bugmenot.com/view/instagram.com http://bugmenot.com/view/instagram.com
alufers 7y ago
I sometimes used to browse my friend's instagram feeds just to see what they have been up to, as I don't use instagram due to privacy concerns and personalized feeds being a time-eater. The desktop experience has been degrading for the past year or so, for example you were unable to scroll past maybe 20 photos on someones profile without logging in. That's ridiculous, and I hope that Instagram and Facebook die someday.
- lowan12 7y ago
  I mean, aside from the fact that you don't like it, why is that "ridiculous"? It's their platform, can they not do what they want?
  - alufers 7y ago
    Well it is their platform, but they are using what I would consider unethical means to force people to create accounts, collecting and selling their data. Sure, you can say that I should avoid Mark's websites altogether if I want to keep my data safe, but that would probably mean that a huge portion of my social life would be sacrificed.
Paul-ish 7y ago
I have been unable to sign up for an account without a phone number. That is what keeps me off the platform.
- Jnr 7y ago
  You are not missing much.
malwarebytess 7y ago
It's been a slow closing door with access on PC without accounts. They've slowly been rolling back access for years now on the PC side. This is the door finally being closed and latched. I'm sure they believe it will up conversion and increase growth, but I don't think it will. Twitter has been closing their door for a long time, but I wonder if they ever will?
3xblah 7y ago
What if more users install the browser extension/add-on that automatically changes the user-agent string based on domain name, e.g., for Instagram it changes to a random mobile user-agent. Sorry I forgot the name of the extension.
- miles 7y ago
  Here are a couple of such add-ons / extensions: User-Agent Switcher https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/uaswitcher/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/uaswitcher/ Custom UserAgent String https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/custom-user-agent-revived/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/custom-user-a... User-Agent Switcher and Manager https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-string-switcher/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-st... and a comment by "99" pointing to an extension-free method to quickly change the user agent: https://www.ghacks.net/2019/12/23/custom-useragent-string-is-a-firefox-extension-that-lets-you-set-a-user-agent-on-a-per-site-basis/#comment-4447842 https://www.ghacks.net/2019/12/23/custom-useragent-string-is...
  - 3xblah 7y ago
    There is also a browser-free method. Localhost proxy, e.g., haproxy, that rewrites User-Agent header according to URL and/or Host header.
jbkiv 7y ago
Very simply "the experience" is much better on mobile = we track everything you do, your location, we mine your friends info...And sell that for more $$$$. And either you don't it / or you don't care or it is simply too complicated unless you are in Europe (in that part of the world it is more risky to sell your personal info without your explicit consent). Can't really do that if you use your laptop. At least it is harder and harder to get to it (trend to use Safari, Firefox, etc).
- pmlnr 7y ago
  This would be true if the site wouldn't work with merely turning on dev tools and pretending to be and iphone. No, the whole thing is plain bs.
vpEfljFL 7y ago
I absolutely adore new experience, it's facebook after all. You can't do it on facebook and now on instagram. I didn't use these products for a long time but IG was definitely moving to that direction. Can't get why some users don't like the change. You're free to decide should you use a product or not. To put it from other perspective, you choose to become a product for instagram to sell or not. If you don't have an account, it's hard to earn more from your time spent in the app. Billions doesn't ROI themselves. Old web is still there, forums/personal websites isn't banned. You still can do things the old decentralised way probably to a greater extent because internet is even bigger now.
- MrStonedOne 7y ago
  > Can't get why some users don't like the change. You're free to decide should you use a product or not. Some people aren't quitters. They don't just quit whenever something stops going their way, they try to change it, try to improve it, try to make it better, even if the only way they have to do that is express why its not best. Be more like them.
  - vpEfljFL 7y ago
    My point is you're not a customer after all. IG customers are advertisers. Why advertisers wouldn't be happy with a new change? We do try to improve products we use but in this story unfortunately you don't have a voice because if you're not an advertiser. Think about how much ads you need to sell to earn 1B back at least and sustain operating expenses especially when you're not trying to be lean with your resources.
    - MrStonedOne 7y ago
      I think you are putting too much stock in the importance of a "Customer". If I'm using a service, i'm a user of that service. As a user, I do have a right to not like the changes to usability of that service.
      - vpEfljFL 7y ago
dillutedfixer 7y ago
I begrudgingly started an insta a few days ago. I am a photographer and I have resisted for so long. But this isolation just made me want to stay connected to my classmates and other photographer friends. I have to say, as a photo sharing platform, instagram is awful. Can't upload photos from desktop, no native iPad app (WTF?), and whatever compression they use to display my photos seems to really mess with the quality (not really noticeable from a phone, but from a desktop, yikes). It's great to be able to keep up with people in a more meaningful way, and I did attend a pretty cool live IGTV session, but all in all I don't really like it. And as others have mentioned, I think, you can just middle-click on a post to open it in a new tab and it wont ask for a login.
- pmlnr 7y ago
  > Can't upload photos from desktop Yes, you can. Open dev tools, set it to mobile, and set it to android. A "+" button will pop up and work fine.
  - dillutedfixer 7y ago
    Nice! That does work. Thanks for that. I'm still a little baffled as to why they don't just allow that on the desktop site, though.
    - morphicpro 7y ago
      I would put my money on they don't want to have to support server side image processing. Since their mobile apps all scale images client side its a huge cost savings vs having to support that server side.
    - dingaling 7y ago
      Because Instagram isn't really intended for sharing your DLSR-shot, desktop-processed labour-of-love photo. The compression, rescaling and colour mismanagement they apply to uploads should tell you that. It's quite possibly the worst way on the Web to present photos-as-art yet photographers keep signing up to it.
pmlnr 7y ago
... and this is why those who'd seen the fall of geocities, the demise of myspace, the slaughter of tumblr, keep their own website under their own domain name, either as the canonical copy or as a backup along with the social media streams. Social media can be useful, but one should never have their content -at least those that are not absolutely ephemeral -, exclusively on a single one of them. You should all do the same. Start here: https://indieweb.org/Getting_Started https://indieweb.org/Getting_Started _Trouble is, it's becoming hard to maintain cross-posting or even just copying your own stuff from silos, which I find outrageous._
morphicpro 7y ago
As a photographer, I urge all other passionate photographers to get off of Instagram. It's more important now than ever to be the authority of your own content. I know it's not as fancy but just start by hosting your own simple blog. I made an effort to build my own Instagram like section on my site just to host my own images. It even has a web assembly lib that scales the images client-side so I don't have to deal with image processing and uploads directly to S3. https://morphic.pro/snaps https://morphic.pro/snaps The code is open for others to see how I did it. https://github.com/MorphicPro/morphic.pro https://github.com/MorphicPro/morphic.pro
- morphicpro 7y ago
  Also this is one of the big reasons I really hope activity pub takes off and people start to incorp it directly into their own sites.
- sixstringtheory 7y ago
  I've been slowly piecing something like this together for myself using jekyll. I'm not familiar with the tools you're using, but the demo site looks very nice. Good job! Are there other examples of turnkey self-deployed sites like this?
  - morphicpro 7y ago
    I'm actively developing my personal site which is built with elixir and phoenix. That said if you are looking for an out of the box solution I would stick with simple and go with a static site generator like you mentioned or possibly Wordpress.
- bscphil 7y ago
  How do you handle the bandwidth costs? These are probably a negligible proportion of the costs at the scale of an Instagram, but hosting providers still have a big profit cut at smaller scales. For example, I could host all my images directly on my Linode, but the cheapest Linode has only 1 TB of outbound transfer a month (for $5), and over quota you're actually charged more than that, $10 / TB. That comes with only 25 GB of storage. They'd also probably be pretty slow for most of my visitors, since they're hosted on a single server somewhere in California. If you want faster distribution around the country and globe, you might consider S3... that same 1 TB of data out is going to cost you $90 / month. Meanwhile, it's clear the REAL costs are not that high. Flickr Pro is a mere $5 a month, with the same high quality (uncompressed) photos, and a global CDN. You can store an unlimited number of pictures with Flickr Pro. This is already way cheaper and faster than anything I can set up on my own, as far as I know, and SmugMug is still making money off of this, presumably, enough to cover their free tier.
ggmartins 7y ago
looks like this trick isn't working anymore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IYZ8mktk7k&t=40s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IYZ8mktk7k&t=40s
maallooc 7y ago
Fk you instagram, I'm blocklisting your site and I'll never visit it again.
neuralRiot 7y ago
So they’re going the Pinterest way now.
Havoc 7y ago
They've been pretty anal about it for a while now. Yeah you can see photos but scroll down like half a page? Login window in your face with no back button. Pretty hostile UX
renewiltord 7y ago
Doesn't bother me. The purpose of Instagram for me is to look at my social circle's lives. If everything they do makes them less of a generic public social network Tik-Tok / Reddit / Facebook / Twitter style, I'd prefer that actually.
- geddy 7y ago
  What about when it's on another site that you don't have access to? What about when it's a type of content that is relevant to you? This is hacker news so I'll assume you're involved in technology in some capacity - what if something like Stackoverflow was purchased by Facebook or Google and you couldn't view questions without a valid Facebook account? You're seeing step 1 and not realizing that step 4 or 5 is the entire web gated behind walls.
  - renewiltord 7y ago
    There is no slippery slope. I'll object to step 4. StackOverflow is CC-BY-SA so I'm not that worried. If they try to change that, I'll kick up a fuss or whatever. It's not like fighting this will help with that. Wholly different audiences.
    - geddy 7y ago
      If there's no "slippery slope", then why do 3-4 companies control the entire internet today, when a decade or more ago there were 15-20 players? Go even further back and you had a myriad of choices; now Amazon, Facebook and Google have sucked up and shut down just about all competitors. If you don't care, then you don't care. But saying there's no slippery slope? It's capitalism. It's happened with internet providers, it's happened with search engines, it's happened with social media, online stores, it's been funneling into a handful of companies for over a decade now. People want things for free and companies are willing to sell your data to finance their payroll. Saying it won't happen anymore is just naive.
      - renewiltord 7y ago
troughway 7y ago
This wall was already there in some form or another. I think what they are trying to do is to get people off of the computer in general because ad blockers would make it impossible for them to monetize the platform. These ad blockers do not really exist on mobile unless you jailbreak and install some shady third-party shit.
- filoleg 7y ago
  How is it preventing people with adblockers to use instagram just like they did before? The experience will be exactly the same as before, regardless of adblockers, as long as you are logged in.
geddy 7y ago
This is how it begins. Then as three or four companies gradually consume all smaller services (which is happening and has been happening for years), you need to sell your soul to them to view anything. My advice is to just say "no thanks" and move on.
batirch 7y ago
Reddit did the same thing. Don't use as much as i use before.
getpost 7y ago
There is a way to avoid the login requirement, if you want to enlarge a photo or video, or read its accompanying text. I'm not an Instagram user, and I never will be. But, sometimes I want to read a post by a friend or a business. While viewing the gallery page for an Instagram user, right click on the post you want to access and select "Copy link location," or whatever your browser calls it, then paste the link into a new tab.
caconym_ 7y ago
Guess I'm not going to be looking at any more Instagram content. ️
calibas 7y ago
This story seems to be dropping off the front page a little faster than it should "naturally".
ASVVVAD 7y ago
One way to use Instagram on desktop is to change your browser's User-Agent to a mobile one I made a blog post[1] about it a while ago which is elementaryOS oriented but can be used in any system or browser [1] https://asvvvad.eu.org/?page=blog&id=use-epiphany-as-mobile-browser https://asvvvad.eu.org/?page=blog&id=use-epiphany-as-mobile-...
rdxm 7y ago
is this where I type "who gives a shit?"???????
throw_m239339 7y ago
Instagram is stupid. On desktop, you cannot upload photos unless you fake being an iPhone with developer tools, I kid you not, go ahead and try. Just change the user agent and the screen size with Chrome dev tools and the upload photos menus will show up. I don't understand this, why in the world would they prevent their users from uploading photos from the their laptops? These weird UX choices never made sense to me. If you don't want users to do anything in a browser, then just remove your website, and force them to download your app, problem solved.
- RandomBacon 7y ago
  Your laptop probably doesn't have gps location data they can exfiltrate.
Fudgel 7y ago
FWIW ublock origin blocks the signup overlay and you can continue browsing like normal.
graynk 7y ago
It's been that way for a couple of months at least. This login screen can be blocked with adblockers, but the fact that it's making rounds only now kind of shows that no one was using it anyway
tushar-r 7y ago
I kinda think this is a decent idea, given the whole ClearviewAI scraping thing. Not that it puts up a massive gate, but definitely a solution.
captn3m0 7y ago
Another issue that Instagram has refused to acknowledge has been no-sound-in-stories on Mobile web. It has been this way for more than 6 months[0] and I'm fairly certain it is not a bug - they are intentionally breaking UX to force people to use the app. [0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Instagram/comments/dezf9g/no_sound_with_instagram_stories_on_windows_chrome/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Instagram/comments/dezf9g/no_sound_...
rambojazz 7y ago
At least now, hopefully, search engines will remove Instagram pages from their results entirely. This can only be a good thing.
RoyalBingBong 7y ago
Also very annoying: When you login, they want to have your phone number. I tried a couple online services for receiving SMS, but none of them worked...
0max 7y ago
Its kinda ironic that their offices lead out to Salesforce Park

396 points by rpgbr 7y ago

I thought this had already been happening for quite some time? In 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

jonathanbull 7y ago
Yep, this happened at least five months ago. https://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2019/10/28/instagram-now-forces-people-to-sign-in-to-view-public-profiles/ https://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2019/10/28/instagram-now-...
- rpgbr 7y ago
  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.
rpgbr 7y ago
Author here. Previously, it only happened when I was using a VPN, even if its server was in Brazil, where I live. I also checked with friends and relatives living in another cities in Brazil. They also hit that form when trying to access photos unlogged.
basch 7y ago
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"
- rpgbr 7y ago
  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.
  - basch 7y ago
    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.
    - rpgbr 7y ago
      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.
      - basch 7y ago
        I would expect all those people to have a cookie or equivalent tracker saying "this person has been to instagram before"

blakesterz 7y ago

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)

sharkmerry 7y ago
were you able to open individual posts?
- blakesterz 7y ago
  Nope!
ISL 7y ago
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.)
- onion2k 7y ago
  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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

sharkmerry 7y ago

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)

danielmichaelni 7y ago
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.
- sharkmerry 7y ago
  actually normal tab wasnt.. i was a little surprised

gao8a 7y ago

Part of me believes that this is actually to get folks that left instagram back on the platform.

ooobit2 7y ago
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.

_fzslm 7y ago

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.

uoaei 7y ago
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.

A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago

Interesting. Would it work if you pretend you are using cell phone?

rpgbr 7y ago
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.

Veera_Sivarajan 7y ago

Yes. Until a couple of weeks ago I would be able to view individual photos but now I can only view the profile until I hit the login restriction.

ghastmaster 7y ago
Right click the post and select open in new tab. This doesn't fix the problem of not being able to scroll through the history though.

ghostpepper 7y ago

I think it's actually just some javascript that prevents clicking links from a profile to the individual photos. 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.

Guest0918231 7y ago
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.

fao_ 7y ago

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.

sjroot 7y ago
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. :)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- davidmurdoch 7y ago
  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".
- inopinatus 7y ago
  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.
  - chillacy 7y ago
    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.

12xo 7y ago

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.

sjroot 7y ago
Would love to hear more about what you desire in a photo sharing experience. My email should be in my profile if you want to chat.
- 12xo 7y ago
  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.
  - livueta 7y ago
    > As a photographer, I want security and assurances that my work remains my work and is not easily stolen nor transferable without consent. 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?
    - 12xo 7y ago
      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.

meerita 7y ago

They will save a lot of money.

petermcneeley 7y ago

I wonder if the purpose of this is legal IP control and not so much to get people to login to the platform.

rdiddly 7y ago

Title rewrite: Instagram Influencers Now Have Even Less Influence Over RDiddly

iamthepieman 7y ago

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?

ABeeSea 7y ago
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.
- gravitas 7y ago
  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/ 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.
grey-area 7y ago
I think this is just a sign of a declining platform desperate to juice the stats. New signups falling? Just force everyone to log in to view content.
7y ago

sandov 7y ago

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.

jaimehrubiks 7y ago
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?
- sandov 7y ago
  Because I want my profile to be viewed by anyone, including non instagram users, or at least keep the capability to do it. 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.

elorant 7y ago

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.

criddell 7y ago
You see whatever you follow. I know every single person I follow and have never seen provocative photos.
- lowan12 7y ago
  This guy's following a bunch of Instagram thots and now he's complaining all he sees are Instagram thots...

nakodari 7y 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.

basch 7y ago
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.
- mbreedlove 7y ago
  I don't consider anything that's pay-walled to be high quality. If I can't read it, it has no value to me.
  - ibero 7y ago
    operative word: i.
    - Wesxdz 7y ago
      A lot of search is searcher context sensitive, so I don't think automating this is unreasonable
  - basch 7y ago
    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.
    - nakodari 7y ago
      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.

jakub_g 7y ago

Note: there are some unofficial IG clients, without paywalls, using the API (however they probably try to kill them when they get too big). Example: https://igdig.com/ https://igdig.com/

monadic2 7y ago
Note, instagram is pretty trivial to scrape. I’m guessing that is the real target of these changes: removing unauthorized apis.

0xddd 7y ago

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.

bastard_op 7y ago

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.

dbuder 7y ago

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.

ycombi3 7y ago

Use a IG front-end just like how you use nitter for Twitter links: https://bibliogram.snopyta.org/ https://bibliogram.snopyta.org/ is one instance.

lofikrom 7y ago

They become so desperate to make you create an account.

uoaei 7y ago

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.

FpUser 7y ago
I am curious how you were able to confirm that "It was hacked and taken over by a Russian account"

rendall 7y ago

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.

izzydata 7y ago

What are they trying to prevent? Mass image scraping? The people doing that are going to keep doing it regardless of any hoops they make them jump through. This just makes the registration process for normal users more annoying.

astura 7y ago
They (almost certainly) want Instagram to be entirely a "social platform," not something to just passively consume as an outsider.
edmundsauto 7y ago
Mass image scraping after login is a legal distinction in terms of violating the ToS. Also, Instagram wants to make it harder for scrapers, who rely on cheap to maintain pipelines because the overall goal is to monetize massive amounts of photos, not a few thousand. (IE makes it harder for them to scrape to get teh volume necessary to make it a viable scraping endeavor)

pengaru 7y ago

And Twitter requires a phone number for "verification" shortly after creating a new account without one. Stop using this trash.

throw_m239339 7y ago
Yeah, Twitter is never going to get my number, like ever. anybody remembers when Twitter announced in September last year that they would remove "account that didn't post enough"? WTF was that? But Instragram/Facebook,Pinterest and co simply hate the web. I mean they like it when it comes down to user acquisition but their goal is to make you download their app. If they could do away with the web they would. They are no better than Microsoft Balmer era.
- pengaru 7y ago
  > But Instragram/Facebook,Pinterest and co simply hate the web. I mean they like it when it comes down to user acquisition but their goal is to make you download their app. If they could do away with the web they would. They are no better than Microsoft Balmer era. The web is the real casualty of mobile taking over, more so than the desktop, IMHO. There was a minute between proprietary mobile app dominance and proprietary desktop app dominance where everything new and shiny was a web service first and foremost. During that minute everyone was able participate in all the new shiny things, regardless of what operating system or type of device they used - they just needed a standards-compliant web browser, and nothing ever required your phone number to register, except financial services I guess. I wish the average person understood how liberating and important that state of affairs is for everyone. Based on the few debates I've had on this subject with less technical folks, as long as whatever the average person is carrying in their pocket is supported and they can do/consume what they want today they dgaf how much the walls are closing in on them in the process.

nestlequ1k 7y ago

What about on their smartphones?

chinathrow 7y ago

Middle click still works to open a post in a new tab.

cosmotic 7y ago

“This is to help people view photos in Instagram and understand how to have the best experience on the platform, be part of the community, connecting and interacting with people and the things they love” How does blocking access help people view things? How does blocking access help people understand how to have the best experience? Access is a better experience than access denied. Creating an account and lurking does not help anyone be part of a community. Most online communities are almost entirely lurkers. Creating an account doesn't lead to interaction. There's no way instagram isn't aware of these facts; I'm not a professional social network product manager and I know these things. There are other motives here than what instagram claims.

chadlavi 7y ago
If you're in a browser with adblockers and you're not signed in, there's not much they can do to monetize you effectively. I assume this is just a means of forcing people who use instagram in the browser to at least admit who they are so they can tie browsing to a known tracking id. I'm honestly surprised instagram even lets people use the app in any meaningful way on desktop at all.
- interestica 7y ago
  They didn't for the longest while. I'm not sure what their impetus for changing was.
  - Darkphibre 7y ago
    To post images, I have to fire it up in emulation mode. It's ridiculous how high they try to make the walls on their garden.
- angelbar 7y ago
  Instragram has ads?
  - rnotaro 7y ago
    Yes? Sponsored posts. https://business.instagram.com/advertising/ https://business.instagram.com/advertising/

sdan 7y ago

I'm fairly sure uBlock Origin removes that banner (it does for me).

ajflores1604 7y ago

I have a theory that we'll get a lot more of these walls going up, not for onboarding users, but to sidestep the legal precedent for allowing webscraping that the LinkedIn case set. I want to say that the LinkedIn ruling hinged on the data being publicly accessible to anyone. If content shifts behind an account signup if imagine that's no longer the case. Can anyone with more knowledge in the area give more insight into this theory?

hollsted-ifbit 7y ago

Instagram died when they got rid of followers activity status. I liked the interesting things that people liked.

downvoteme1 7y ago

I would say that as a free enterprise they are free to do whatever that want. Why do users think that they should have access to Instagram’s data without signing up for an account. LinkedIn does not let you do that so do hundreds of other companies.

geodel 7y ago

Seems like a good thing. I have wasted time at looking photos, now I can use that time to do something slightly more interesting.

op03 7y ago

There are so many instagram "clones". Not sure what the right term is, but basically its just a copy of the entire site with all the pics/vid links pointing back at fb servers. How they manage to keep this stuff running boggles my mind. I have moved off everything FB related so its almost become a habit now for me to use these sites to follow certain accounts. With noscript on FF and picking the right clone easy to get the simplest page (no js running) with just the pics and captions. Just google the insta username and you get the sites.

icedchai 7y ago

It actually does, but you have limited time until that pop up appears. You just right click on the photo, and have it open the link in a new tab.

helsinki 7y ago

This is a reasonable decision on their part. I don’t think people realize how much of their traffic is bots scraping the location of people from photos.

Meai 7y ago
well, how much is it? do you have a source?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

code_duck 7y ago

This is simply a continuation of the trend of making Instagram work like Facebook's main product. Of course there's no reasonable justification for it that favors consumers.

peterhadlaw 7y ago

You can right click, open photos/videos in new tabs... For now. Probably to satisfy their desire to get new users, if someone links directly to a post.

wackget 7y ago

Hey Instagram (i.e. Facebook)! Fuck you! Love, Me

seddin 7y ago

There is a little trick to bypass this, open your browser console, click on mobile view, and refresh the page, it should load the mobile version of Instagram.

Guest0918231 7y ago

It's unfortunate that a lot of businesses are now inside of Facebook and Instagram walls. I know a number of times in recent months I'd end up on Instagram pages for different businesses. I would be scrolling to view their products and suddenly I'd get hit with the sign-up modal that wouldn't allow me to scroll further (well, technically I could if I opened the developer tools and disabled it, but that road block usually stopped me). So, I'd close their Instagram page, move on with my life, and they'd potentially lose a sale. The same thing happened on Facebook when the page would be covered in overlays and I could barely browse the content. I'd get annoyed and leave. There's a lot of power you're giving up when you build your online presence inside of another company. The entire user experience of your customer can drastically change at any moment, and you have little recourse aside from rebuilding your online presence from scratch.

lgvld 7y ago
Exactly my experience. Actually I think it’s less irritating to block access to any image from the very first click/scroll, than to perversely let the user dive into an account and, suddenly, BAM!! acces denied!.. Because that’s really how it looks for someone who don’t have an Instagram account and is just passing by.
RoyalBingBong 7y ago
Walking through the city, when a shop piques your curiosity. As you step closer to the windows, a security guard approaches you and asks for your club membership. Annoyed you bugger off. I think nobody in their right mind would do this kind of shit IRL.

hnburnsy 7y ago

http://bugmenot.com/view/instagram.com http://bugmenot.com/view/instagram.com

alufers 7y ago

I sometimes used to browse my friend's instagram feeds just to see what they have been up to, as I don't use instagram due to privacy concerns and personalized feeds being a time-eater. The desktop experience has been degrading for the past year or so, for example you were unable to scroll past maybe 20 photos on someones profile without logging in. That's ridiculous, and I hope that Instagram and Facebook die someday.

lowan12 7y ago
I mean, aside from the fact that you don't like it, why is that "ridiculous"? It's their platform, can they not do what they want?
- alufers 7y ago
  Well it is their platform, but they are using what I would consider unethical means to force people to create accounts, collecting and selling their data. Sure, you can say that I should avoid Mark's websites altogether if I want to keep my data safe, but that would probably mean that a huge portion of my social life would be sacrificed.

Paul-ish 7y ago

I have been unable to sign up for an account without a phone number. That is what keeps me off the platform.

Jnr 7y ago
You are not missing much.

malwarebytess 7y ago

It's been a slow closing door with access on PC without accounts. They've slowly been rolling back access for years now on the PC side. This is the door finally being closed and latched. I'm sure they believe it will up conversion and increase growth, but I don't think it will. Twitter has been closing their door for a long time, but I wonder if they ever will?

3xblah 7y ago

What if more users install the browser extension/add-on that automatically changes the user-agent string based on domain name, e.g., for Instagram it changes to a random mobile user-agent. Sorry I forgot the name of the extension.

miles 7y ago
Here are a couple of such add-ons / extensions: User-Agent Switcher https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/uaswitcher/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/uaswitcher/ Custom UserAgent String https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/custom-user-agent-revived/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/custom-user-a... User-Agent Switcher and Manager https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-string-switcher/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-st... and a comment by "99" pointing to an extension-free method to quickly change the user agent: https://www.ghacks.net/2019/12/23/custom-useragent-string-is-a-firefox-extension-that-lets-you-set-a-user-agent-on-a-per-site-basis/#comment-4447842 https://www.ghacks.net/2019/12/23/custom-useragent-string-is...
- 3xblah 7y ago
  There is also a browser-free method. Localhost proxy, e.g., haproxy, that rewrites User-Agent header according to URL and/or Host header.

jbkiv 7y ago

Very simply "the experience" is much better on mobile = we track everything you do, your location, we mine your friends info...And sell that for more $$$$. And either you don't it / or you don't care or it is simply too complicated unless you are in Europe (in that part of the world it is more risky to sell your personal info without your explicit consent). Can't really do that if you use your laptop. At least it is harder and harder to get to it (trend to use Safari, Firefox, etc).

pmlnr 7y ago
This would be true if the site wouldn't work with merely turning on dev tools and pretending to be and iphone. No, the whole thing is plain bs.

vpEfljFL 7y ago

I absolutely adore new experience, it's facebook after all. You can't do it on facebook and now on instagram. I didn't use these products for a long time but IG was definitely moving to that direction. Can't get why some users don't like the change. You're free to decide should you use a product or not. To put it from other perspective, you choose to become a product for instagram to sell or not. If you don't have an account, it's hard to earn more from your time spent in the app. Billions doesn't ROI themselves. Old web is still there, forums/personal websites isn't banned. You still can do things the old decentralised way probably to a greater extent because internet is even bigger now.

MrStonedOne 7y ago
> Can't get why some users don't like the change. You're free to decide should you use a product or not. Some people aren't quitters. They don't just quit whenever something stops going their way, they try to change it, try to improve it, try to make it better, even if the only way they have to do that is express why its not best. Be more like them.
- vpEfljFL 7y ago
  My point is you're not a customer after all. IG customers are advertisers. Why advertisers wouldn't be happy with a new change? We do try to improve products we use but in this story unfortunately you don't have a voice because if you're not an advertiser. Think about how much ads you need to sell to earn 1B back at least and sustain operating expenses especially when you're not trying to be lean with your resources.
  - MrStonedOne 7y ago
    I think you are putting too much stock in the importance of a "Customer". If I'm using a service, i'm a user of that service. As a user, I do have a right to not like the changes to usability of that service.
    - vpEfljFL 7y ago

dillutedfixer 7y ago

I begrudgingly started an insta a few days ago. I am a photographer and I have resisted for so long. But this isolation just made me want to stay connected to my classmates and other photographer friends. I have to say, as a photo sharing platform, instagram is awful. Can't upload photos from desktop, no native iPad app (WTF?), and whatever compression they use to display my photos seems to really mess with the quality (not really noticeable from a phone, but from a desktop, yikes). It's great to be able to keep up with people in a more meaningful way, and I did attend a pretty cool live IGTV session, but all in all I don't really like it. And as others have mentioned, I think, you can just middle-click on a post to open it in a new tab and it wont ask for a login.

pmlnr 7y ago
> Can't upload photos from desktop Yes, you can. Open dev tools, set it to mobile, and set it to android. A "+" button will pop up and work fine.
- dillutedfixer 7y ago
  Nice! That does work. Thanks for that. I'm still a little baffled as to why they don't just allow that on the desktop site, though.
  - morphicpro 7y ago
    I would put my money on they don't want to have to support server side image processing. Since their mobile apps all scale images client side its a huge cost savings vs having to support that server side.
  - dingaling 7y ago
    Because Instagram isn't really intended for sharing your DLSR-shot, desktop-processed labour-of-love photo. The compression, rescaling and colour mismanagement they apply to uploads should tell you that. It's quite possibly the worst way on the Web to present photos-as-art yet photographers keep signing up to it.

pmlnr 7y ago

... and this is why those who'd seen the fall of geocities, the demise of myspace, the slaughter of tumblr, keep their own website under their own domain name, either as the canonical copy or as a backup along with the social media streams. Social media can be useful, but one should never have their content -at least those that are not absolutely ephemeral -, exclusively on a single one of them. You should all do the same. Start here: https://indieweb.org/Getting_Started https://indieweb.org/Getting_Started _Trouble is, it's becoming hard to maintain cross-posting or even just copying your own stuff from silos, which I find outrageous._

morphicpro 7y ago

As a photographer, I urge all other passionate photographers to get off of Instagram. It's more important now than ever to be the authority of your own content. I know it's not as fancy but just start by hosting your own simple blog. I made an effort to build my own Instagram like section on my site just to host my own images. It even has a web assembly lib that scales the images client-side so I don't have to deal with image processing and uploads directly to S3. https://morphic.pro/snaps https://morphic.pro/snaps The code is open for others to see how I did it. https://github.com/MorphicPro/morphic.pro https://github.com/MorphicPro/morphic.pro

morphicpro 7y ago
Also this is one of the big reasons I really hope activity pub takes off and people start to incorp it directly into their own sites.
sixstringtheory 7y ago
I've been slowly piecing something like this together for myself using jekyll. I'm not familiar with the tools you're using, but the demo site looks very nice. Good job! Are there other examples of turnkey self-deployed sites like this?
- morphicpro 7y ago
  I'm actively developing my personal site which is built with elixir and phoenix. That said if you are looking for an out of the box solution I would stick with simple and go with a static site generator like you mentioned or possibly Wordpress.
bscphil 7y ago
How do you handle the bandwidth costs? These are probably a negligible proportion of the costs at the scale of an Instagram, but hosting providers still have a big profit cut at smaller scales. For example, I could host all my images directly on my Linode, but the cheapest Linode has only 1 TB of outbound transfer a month (for $5), and over quota you're actually charged more than that, $10 / TB. That comes with only 25 GB of storage. They'd also probably be pretty slow for most of my visitors, since they're hosted on a single server somewhere in California. If you want faster distribution around the country and globe, you might consider S3... that same 1 TB of data out is going to cost you $90 / month. Meanwhile, it's clear the REAL costs are not that high. Flickr Pro is a mere $5 a month, with the same high quality (uncompressed) photos, and a global CDN. You can store an unlimited number of pictures with Flickr Pro. This is already way cheaper and faster than anything I can set up on my own, as far as I know, and SmugMug is still making money off of this, presumably, enough to cover their free tier.

ggmartins 7y ago

looks like this trick isn't working anymore: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IYZ8mktk7k&t=40s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IYZ8mktk7k&t=40s

maallooc 7y ago

Fk you instagram, I'm blocklisting your site and I'll never visit it again.

neuralRiot 7y ago

So they’re going the Pinterest way now.

Havoc 7y ago

They've been pretty anal about it for a while now. Yeah you can see photos but scroll down like half a page? Login window in your face with no back button. Pretty hostile UX

renewiltord 7y ago

Doesn't bother me. The purpose of Instagram for me is to look at my social circle's lives. If everything they do makes them less of a generic public social network Tik-Tok / Reddit / Facebook / Twitter style, I'd prefer that actually.

geddy 7y ago
What about when it's on another site that you don't have access to? What about when it's a type of content that is relevant to you? This is hacker news so I'll assume you're involved in technology in some capacity - what if something like Stackoverflow was purchased by Facebook or Google and you couldn't view questions without a valid Facebook account? You're seeing step 1 and not realizing that step 4 or 5 is the entire web gated behind walls.
- renewiltord 7y ago
  There is no slippery slope. I'll object to step 4. StackOverflow is CC-BY-SA so I'm not that worried. If they try to change that, I'll kick up a fuss or whatever. It's not like fighting this will help with that. Wholly different audiences.
  - geddy 7y ago
    If there's no "slippery slope", then why do 3-4 companies control the entire internet today, when a decade or more ago there were 15-20 players? Go even further back and you had a myriad of choices; now Amazon, Facebook and Google have sucked up and shut down just about all competitors. If you don't care, then you don't care. But saying there's no slippery slope? It's capitalism. It's happened with internet providers, it's happened with search engines, it's happened with social media, online stores, it's been funneling into a handful of companies for over a decade now. People want things for free and companies are willing to sell your data to finance their payroll. Saying it won't happen anymore is just naive.
    - renewiltord 7y ago

troughway 7y ago

This wall was already there in some form or another. I think what they are trying to do is to get people off of the computer in general because ad blockers would make it impossible for them to monetize the platform. These ad blockers do not really exist on mobile unless you jailbreak and install some shady third-party shit.

filoleg 7y ago
How is it preventing people with adblockers to use instagram just like they did before? The experience will be exactly the same as before, regardless of adblockers, as long as you are logged in.

geddy 7y ago

This is how it begins. Then as three or four companies gradually consume all smaller services (which is happening and has been happening for years), you need to sell your soul to them to view anything. My advice is to just say "no thanks" and move on.

batirch 7y ago

Reddit did the same thing. Don't use as much as i use before.

getpost 7y ago

There is a way to avoid the login requirement, if you want to enlarge a photo or video, or read its accompanying text. I'm not an Instagram user, and I never will be. But, sometimes I want to read a post by a friend or a business. While viewing the gallery page for an Instagram user, right click on the post you want to access and select "Copy link location," or whatever your browser calls it, then paste the link into a new tab.

caconym_ 7y ago

Guess I'm not going to be looking at any more Instagram content. ️

calibas 7y ago

This story seems to be dropping off the front page a little faster than it should "naturally".

ASVVVAD 7y ago

One way to use Instagram on desktop is to change your browser's User-Agent to a mobile one I made a blog post[1] about it a while ago which is elementaryOS oriented but can be used in any system or browser [1] https://asvvvad.eu.org/?page=blog&id=use-epiphany-as-mobile-browser https://asvvvad.eu.org/?page=blog&id=use-epiphany-as-mobile-...

rdxm 7y ago

is this where I type "who gives a shit?"???????

throw_m239339 7y ago

Instagram is stupid. On desktop, you cannot upload photos unless you fake being an iPhone with developer tools, I kid you not, go ahead and try. Just change the user agent and the screen size with Chrome dev tools and the upload photos menus will show up. I don't understand this, why in the world would they prevent their users from uploading photos from the their laptops? These weird UX choices never made sense to me. If you don't want users to do anything in a browser, then just remove your website, and force them to download your app, problem solved.

RandomBacon 7y ago
Your laptop probably doesn't have gps location data they can exfiltrate.

Fudgel 7y ago

FWIW ublock origin blocks the signup overlay and you can continue browsing like normal.

graynk 7y ago

It's been that way for a couple of months at least. This login screen can be blocked with adblockers, but the fact that it's making rounds only now kind of shows that no one was using it anyway

tushar-r 7y ago

I kinda think this is a decent idea, given the whole ClearviewAI scraping thing. Not that it puts up a massive gate, but definitely a solution.

captn3m0 7y ago

Another issue that Instagram has refused to acknowledge has been no-sound-in-stories on Mobile web. It has been this way for more than 6 months[0] and I'm fairly certain it is not a bug - they are intentionally breaking UX to force people to use the app. [0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Instagram/comments/dezf9g/no_sound_with_instagram_stories_on_windows_chrome/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Instagram/comments/dezf9g/no_sound_...

rambojazz 7y ago

At least now, hopefully, search engines will remove Instagram pages from their results entirely. This can only be a good thing.

RoyalBingBong 7y ago

Also very annoying: When you login, they want to have your phone number. I tried a couple online services for receiving SMS, but none of them worked...

0max 7y ago

Its kinda ironic that their offices lead out to Salesforce Park