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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 n

• 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.
      • inopinatus 7y ago
        The UA string is real, just misleading. The other two resources aren’t public throwaways, the domain and source addresses belong to me, or a version of me (as much as IANA allocated resources can “belong”) and otherwise appear normal, but are only used for traffic to untrustworthy shitweasels. It’s not impossible, but it is unlikely that it looks like a bot. I figured it was actually the other way around, or at least a slightly different shade of things; not so much that it looked like a fake account, more than it looked like someone they couldn’t correlate to any other identity and therefore has no consumer surveillance value, ergo I can either fill in the blanks, or fuck off. Whatever the truth of it, I chose the latter
  • inapis 7y ago
    There are some situations I have been able to pindown for when Instagram doesn’t like you. Two of which are not linking to a facebook account and using a personal domain (instead of gmail, outlook etc). Also instagram really hates it if the email contains insta@domain in any form or manner. Also you will have to hand over your phone number. No exceptions!
    • spike021 7y ago
      Weird, I created an extra account earlier this year and didn't need to associate a phone number or FB account with it.
  • DanTheManPR 7y ago
    Anecdotally, I was never able to complete signup for Instagram, for similar reasons.
  • dx87 7y ago
    I had a similar experience. Tried to create an account, but it gave me an error, so I tried again, and it said the account already exists. Clicked on forgot password because I didn't know what the password was, and it said the account was banned for violating the ToS. My theory is that it's because I tried to create an account without linking it to Facebook, so it "accidentally" threw an error, hoping I would create a facebook linked account. Twitter does something similar, where they say a phone number is optional, but they'll immediately lock your new account and say that a phone number is the only way to verify you aren't a bot. I don't think it's an accident that these high-value tech companies regularly have "errors" when you try to create an account using a method that gives them less access to personal data than other signup methods.
    • bscphil 7y ago
      > Twitter does something similar, where they say a phone number is optional, but they'll immediately lock your new account and say that a phone number is the only way to verify you aren't a bot. Is this recent? I signed up for a Twitter account in late 2017, even used a twitter@mydomain.com custom email address for it, and I have never been forced to add my phone number. Twitter still doesn't have it.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  • blueblisters 7y ago
    I had this experience when I was working with the Facebook Ad Manager. They arbitrarily blocked my @domain account while my ads were running. They asked me to submit IDs and stuff but haven't heard back in 2 weeks. No other way to contact support except wait. I am not sure what flagged my account but I wouldn't be surprised if they have significantly lowered the threshold for threat detection in an election year (especially after the scandals uncovered from 2016). Definitely terrible from a customer experience PoV.
    • Taniwha 7y ago
      Oh yeah, facebook is the worst, someone signed up using my email address (they don't do verification of email addresses), I get so much spam ..... however there is no way to contact facebook without a facebook account - no email address, no contact form, nothing - their world view is terribly inward looking
      • gpm 7y ago
        Hmm - could you reset the password on the account, and then delete it? (Personally I'd only be comfortable doing this if this was still a very new account)
        • Taniwha 7y ago
          Well .... I did reset the password, created a temp gmail account, reassigned the contact email to the new email address then deleted the gmail account (I didn't want to mess with his content) ..... But facebook never forgets, even though I deleted my email address from the account I continue to get spam emails from facebook wondering why I've stopped using 'my' account and encouraging me to come back into the fold
  • fao_ 7y ago
    I tried three different email addresses (aliases, really) and had the same problem with all of them.
• nashashmi 7y ago
  You are not a customer. You are a money maker. You are a product.
  • ubercow13 7y ago
    I think they said that
  • anticensor 7y ago
    We are the subject. Product is the data extracted out of us.
    • bdcravens 7y ago
      I like to think we are the vendor :-)
      • inopinatus 7y ago
        No more than any other cattle.
• hckr_news 7y ago
  I think Facebook was asking you take a picture of your state issued ID at one point to prove you are you, if you had run into account issues. I’m not sure if they do that anymore.
• mtlynch 7y ago
  This happened to me too. I suspect the reason is that I used the email address instagram.[a few random letters]@mydomain.com. I'm guessing it triggered their bot detection.
  • netsharc 7y ago
    If I were to do this, I'd just remove the "instagram." bit, and just map [1 set of random letters] -> "Instagram" somewhere. I wonder if companies selling their users' email addresses don't already filter out such personalized addresses anyway, so e.g. Instagram would filter out email addresses out containing "instagram", "ig" or "gram" before selling the data (or to corporate-speak it, "share it with third parties to enhance our customers' experience").
• HenryBemis 7y ago
  Similar story. I used a real-life name/surname (just not my real one), matched with a similar real email. I never got in. I never bothered. Now when I see (before COVID) people on the train tapping like junkies on the "stories" I smirk and think how lucky I was to avoid this mindfuck.
  • vasco 7y ago
    You being entertained on the train by judging people on their phones sounds hardly more valuable as a hobby than them being entertained by judging people in instagram stories.
    • pengaru 7y ago
      > You being entertained on the train by judging people on their phones sounds hardly more valuable as a hobby than them being entertained by judging people in instagram stories. There's a substantial difference between being on the sidelines vs. in the line of fire WRT the firehose of propaganda.
    • jshevek 7y ago
      >You being entertained on the train by judging people on their phones sounds hardly more valuable as a hobby than them being entertained by judging people in instagram stories. The train entertainment is likely something which happens in passing, while social media is often a behavioral addiction. Framing two activities with such disparate levels of engagement and probable frequency as both 'hobbies' masks this fact. I think the parent's condescending outlook is unhelpful, but I agree with them that they dodged a bullet. The increased value they experience lies in what they do with the time they've saved, which is unlikely to be fully consumed by judging people on the train.
• iamthepieman 7y ago
  same thing happened to me except I didn't bother going through support. I dug a little more a few years later and it turns out someone had put my email address in their account although they had signed up and logged in via phone number so it didn't matter that they didn't have access to the email associated with the account. I was able to take over the account since my email was associated with it. I wiped the pictures, deleted the account. signed up again with my own mobile number and email, setup 2-factor so it couldn't happen again and then deleted the app.
  • thatsoundsmean 7y ago
    That sounds like an unnecessarily aggressive way to handle that. It certainly could have been an honest mistake on the part of the user who owned that account. Why not just change the email address on the account?
    • jshevek 7y ago
      This may or may not be relevant: >Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
      • em-bee 7y ago
        what is my identity id for me to decide and not for you to claim. my identity on HN is my messages here, nothing else. if you need more than that you are welcome to ask and we can establish another identity outside this platform
        • deleted 7y ago
          [deleted]
    • novok 7y ago
      If you signed up for gmail or similar early, then dumbasses of the world use your email address as 'their email' dozens of times a day for random internet accounts because it's also their name, and they don't understand or don't care that it isn't their email address. It gets tiring fast and services don't deal with this usecase that well other than 'forget password'. That guy was the initial asshole to signup using an email address that wasn't theirs.
• ubercow13 7y ago
  My dad had the same problems trying to create an Instagram account recently, seeming to fail for various reasons and then later the account might appear to have been created and instantly disabled. He tried a number of perfectly normal email addresses, on different domains including gmail, on different IPs (home, work), different browsers including without extensions and such.
• AS126 7y ago
  Similar situation,a bit different: I had an user agent activated on my laptop (yeah, I wanted to create an Insta account from my laptop)and after 3 failed attempt my account was blocked for shady interaction. I had to contact the customer support and send them a picture with me with a code number they gave me. Yes...
• stevewodil 7y ago
  Same thing happened to me, and I tried to email them about a clear bug that occurs. They wanted the same photo verification. I was very nice in the correspondence until they requested photo verification a second time, and I was so confused why they were being so incompetent about it. It's a 0 follower account that I never had access to in the first place because it instantly got disabled, why would I care? Just fix the bug... Basically, if you try to change the username before completing the sign up workflow the app doesn’t continue to the next page and the account gets disabled. Judging by your experience they seemingly haven't fixed it still. I emailed them in October 2019 about it, pretty sad. Their final message to me was "We can’t give you access to this account or continue to process your request because we haven’t received an acceptable image to verify account ownership." Thanks for nothing, Facebook.
  • asdf21 7y ago
    It blows my mind that people still use Facebook products. I disconnected in like... idk 2014? 2015? And never looked back.
    • seph-reed 7y ago
      It's unpopular amongst "hackers" to devalidate the use of FB products in this way. For better or worse, that's apparent from this.
      • Darkphibre 7y ago
        I think the unpopular opinion here is "I don't find value, thus there is no value." When, in reality, many people do find a value. Somewhere. Heck, I post maybe once a year on Facebook. It's how my in-laws communicate, so that's where I have to go if I want to interact with that part of my social graph. It has a value (however small), even if I wished it didn't.
        • seph-reed 7y ago
          I see what you're saying, but given how addictive FB is, and how much advertisement they use, you're kind of giving them the upper hand by playing neutral. For instance, I never go to Walmart (but sometimes do). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=repxFQXVsHc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=repxFQXVsHc
• disiplus 7y ago
  i had the same thing happen. if i remember correctly the email+label@gmail.com plus signing on the web made it throw error.
  • covercash 7y ago
    I hate when sites don’t accept + modified email addresses.
    • stevewodil 7y ago
      As someone working to launch an app, this isn't something that I was terribly concerned with handling before launch, but I now have a question. Is the best way to handle this to allow the '+' symbol in email addresses, but verify that the underlying email address hasn't already been registered so that one email address still can't create multiple accounts? So if you sign up with covercash+123@gmail.com, should I check the prefix ("covercash") with the domain ("gmail.com") and make sure there aren't any matches already registered like covercash@gmail.com or covercash+111@gmail.com?
      • inopinatus 7y ago
        No. That is super hostile to your users, and besides the use of + as recipient delimiter is a convention, not a standardised behaviour. You will get false positives, and you will get irate users, often rejecting perhaps some of your most promising early adopters. See also: case sensitivity in the left-hand part of an address.
      • zrm 7y ago
        You should just treat them as two different email addresses. On some providers this is in fact what they are, and there is no real point in doing otherwise because anybody who wants to create multiple accounts in that way could just create multiple email addresses instead.
      • asdkjh345fd 7y ago
        >so that one email address still can't create multiple accounts? You can not do that. You have no way of knowing how my mail server handles username portions of the address. Maybe bob+123@ is the same account as bob@, maybe it isn't. It is entirely up to the mail server to decide what it wants to do with it. And likewise, you have no way to know any other username portions are not the same account. I can set my email server up to use "x" as a delimiter, and make bobx1 and bobx2 both go to bob if that's what I want.
• kaetemi 7y ago
  Yep, this happens if you trigger the bot detection.
• xwdv 7y ago
  With all the face filters and deep fakes these days why didn’t you just send some fake photo?
• leguminous 7y ago
  The same thing happened to me. And I was trying to sign up/log in to Instagram through Facebook. Why am I allowed to log in to and use my Facebook account but not allowed to sign up for Instagram using my Facebook account? If they thought I was a bot or fraudulent user then surely they'd have the same concern about my Facebook account? It doesn't make any sense.
• sdan 7y ago
  Had the same problems, ultimately swayed me away from signing up at all.
• omk 7y ago
  How efficient and reliable is the verification with a face holding a card either ways. I would watermark it all over with the Instagram logo to make sure it isn't being used outside of instagram context with sophisticated digital enhancement tools.
• awinter-py 7y ago
  anecdotal, but I tried signing up for FB (not IG) from incognito chrome on linux, then didn't set any information or add friends, and they disabled my account less than a week later went through 'upload a drivers license' process, no luck, no explanation
• zucker42 7y ago
  The whole point of Instagram is giving away your face to a faceless corporation.
  • thewebcount 7y ago
    No it's not. I know hundreds of photographers who use it to share photos of landscapes, models, and other things and have never posted a picture of themselves.
• HiroshiSan 7y ago
  Glad you shared this experience as mine is very similar. I made an account successfully, I only used my account to follow artists I enjoyed, hours later I received an email notifying me that my account was deactivated and to reactivate it I would need to send them a picture of myself holding up a piece of paper with the ID code presented in the email. I tried emailing back for more information as to why I was deactivated (since I did nothing wrong, unless following people without posting is wrong?) and all they could regurgitate was the shpeel that I had to send them a picture of myself with the code in order for them to help me. Long story short, I will never use Instagram.