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“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 intera

“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/
  - chadlavi 7y ago
    is that a joke? it's like 20% ads
    - tripzilch 7y ago
      I didn't in the first two weeks after I registered (last year), then came the ads ..
lhorie 7y ago
Seems like a case of a metric becoming a goal
ship_it 7y ago
They are using Facebook tactics and they are doomed to fail as Facebook did. Well ... I cherish for their innovations. Good bye Instagram.
- downvoteme1 7y ago
  You can call Facebook whatever but it is not a failure. A company that has grown revenue from 2B in 2010 to 70B in 2019 cannot be considered a failure .
  - ethbro 7y ago
    We'll see. Yahoo grew revenue too.
    - downvoteme1 7y ago
      All companies from Sears to Yahoo to Favebook have peaks, troughs and then eventually fade out. Even if Facebook fades outs on the next 5-50 years, it would have done better than millions of other companies. Look at it this way - what started as an experiment in a dorm room turning into this big is the dream of every startup. Every year thousands of companies apply to YC hoping to be 1/100 to 1/1000 as successful as FAANG’s
      - ethbro 7y ago
        Nobody contests that. The negative outlook instead seems to be that since 2010, Facebook (the product, not the engineering team) has delivered little value to society. And at this point, seems to have ossified into a form that lacks the agility and will to make major shifts. Their current emphasis on purchasing other companies for their product pipelines, to drive business to their advertising, seems more akin to pharma majors or IBM than anything in the startup world.
        tln 7y ago
        Facebook delivers value every day to billions of daily active users -- the social updates. The value varies by person but presumably it's positive value for all DAU or they would cease to be DAU. Perhaps Facebook hasn't increased value delivered for each user for each day that much. Or has even decreased it. But the baseline is definitely "value to society" IMO Did you mean Facebook has delivered little marginal value?
jerf 7y ago
"How does blocking access help people view things?" Lieologists have discovered there's a hole in human cognition: If you say "We're doing X because of Y", human brains tend not to check Y very carefully at all. You can almost say "To help people view photos in Instagram, we're shutting down photo sharing in Instagram." You can't get away with a lie quite that bald. But you only need a few scraggly hair plugs on that lie to get past most people most of the time, as you observe.
- Zak 7y ago
  I'd be surprised if this is true. Instead, I read things like this as "we're not going to tell you our reasons", and I suspect most other people do too.
  - jerf 7y ago
    Well, rather than issue a lengthy explanation of why I think I'm right, I suggest this instead: Try turning the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon [1] to the forces of good, and keep an eye out for this sort of thing over the next month. Assuming that there's nothing special about what you do in the next month, the delta between the number of times you think about it in the next month vs. the amount you've thought about it in the previous month is a rough guess for the amount of times you've read a statement like this and it just passed you by with your brain not registering an objection. If you do this honestly, betcha it's more than you think. It's something I see a lot, personally. In fact I tend to be surprised when someone public says "We're doing X because of Y" and it actually makes perfect sense. Most reasons given in the public sphere are quite garbage. [1]: https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/baader-meinhof-phenomenon.htm https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human...
- m463 7y ago
  "We're doing X because of coronavirus." Yep, your argument is sound.
lmilcin 7y ago
This is typical marketing-speak. I am becoming temporarily deaf whenever I hear it. Read it the following way: We have a reason to do it but we don't want to tell you so instead we will tell you a little bit of righteously-sounding bullshit so that most of sheep base is satisfied. Yes, that's "sheep", because you are not our customers, our customers are those companies we sell your information and your focus to.
- lotyrin 7y ago
  No, this is their reason, just from within their distortion field. This is helping the user view photos, because the user should be logged in and using the app, the app provides the best experience and this web interface is a distraction that gets in the way of that. Edit: I guess it wasn't sufficiently clear, the second sentence here is not my own personal opinion.
  - asfarley 7y ago
    I've been in businesses trying to sell me this view as a developer. I can almost guarantee that the developers are saying, in their head, "this is in no way helpful to our users, but I will comply because my PM told me to." Distortion-fields aren't so powerful that they cause people with integrity to discount critical thinking. If someone can be sold on this with hand-waving, they probably lacked integrity or critical thinking from the start.
    - im3w1l 7y ago
      Obvious lies like these aren't meant to believed. Their purpose is preventing the follow up questions that would come if the truth was acknowledged.
  - mewpmewp2 7y ago
    No, best experience is when I do not have to open my phone if someone links me something. Best experience when I don't have to waste time creating a user and logging in.
anonymousab 7y ago
I sometimes start to wonder how many of the people spewing these "we're ensuring you have the best experience by forcing you to use [some arbitrary, hated experience] exclusively" lines actually believe them.
- neltnerb 7y ago
  I might be underestimating their ability to lie, but I'd imagine they think the statement is true even if it's still a lie of omission (that it's not the main reason).
- itronitron 7y ago
  'the best experience' among what options? They probably believe it is the best experience within the set of options they considered, and where that set excludes the current user experience.
varjag 7y ago
That's how it sounds when someone's compensation depends on user conversion metric!
deminature 7y ago
If I had to guess, their account creation metrics are flattening out and some product manager had the idea of implementing this restriction to restart growth. If your performance reviews depend on growth, restrictions like this seem rational even if they're obviously anti-user to anyone outside the company.
- oroup 7y ago
  Also it makes scraping much harder.
  - noxer 7y ago
    All images are still available on the web even delivers everything as JSON. Plenty tools like JDownlaoder can scrap everything in a seconds. they sure have other measurements in place to stop people form doing that large scale.
- IlyaMoroshkin 7y ago
  With the underlying factor probably being that much fewer people are creating good new content given the global lockdowns. 'Cute women' are a significant part of Instagram content, and if they are indoors wearing a mask there's not much to excite the userbase with.
gumby 7y ago
Since this discourages me from takin gthe time to look at the photo it does indeed provide me with a better experience. Thanks, guys!
appleshore 7y ago
Another way to say this, how does lying tell the truth? I don't understand corporations that decide to lie like this. I noticed Facebook Messenger does this fun thing where you can open it, start to read a message and then it says "BAM--YOU MUST UPDATE". The fact they intentionally designed it this way makes me want to delete Messenger forever.
- yummypaint 7y ago
  You should, followed by facebook. They're doing shadier stuff than that with your personal info
paxys 7y ago
You just need to translate "help people" to "help Instagram".
72deluxe 7y ago
Based on the insane amount of telemetry that Instagram sends back even on iPhone (look at all the "engagement" domains it looks up - loads!) just to scroll up and down and look at pictures, I am guessing this is marketing speak for "we want to track you more". Run a pi-hole and you'll be surprised (or not, depending on your cynicism).
grawprog 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” Allow me to translate: This is because we realized we couldn't collect as much data as we would like from non-signed in users browsing on computers. As our income is derived mostly from aggregating and selling the data of our users to third party marketers we felt we could increase revenue for our shareholders by no longer allowing non-signed in users to view our platform, ensuring anyone browsing our service is providing the maximum amout of data possible.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
This is Doublespeak from “1984”. It’s also often used in politics like naming a tax cut for upper incomes as “Middle class tax relief”.
- FlyMoreRockets 7y ago
  Or a "tax cut for all", implying it is a flat rate cut.
ChuckMcM 7y ago
Not enough data cows to milk, can't have that! Hopefully folks are connecting the dots that all this data they are giving away is really, really, valuable to Facebook and they are not getting compensated for it.
dntbnmpls 7y ago
> How does blocking access help people view things? How does blocking access help people understand how to have the best experience? It doesn't. Instagram isn't in it business of selling you the "best experience". It's in the business of selling your information. If you have an account ( verified by a phone number/etc ) and if you post your photos/etc, they have more information on you to sell to advertisers/government/etc than if you were anonymously browsing. Maybe you just browsed instagram on your desktop, but now since they have your phone, they may "recommend" you install their app and while you are at it, why not install facebook, etc. It's also to cause a "network" effect. Facebook did this before where they made it difficult for you view content without logging in. So if your grandma, aunts, friends, etc wanted to see your wedding posts, they had to create an account whereas in the past they would just go to your page and see it without an account. Also, if you have an account, it incentivizes you to "participate" more. Whereas in the past you might just casually view photos and leave, now you can leave comments, subscribe, favorite, etc.

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/
- chadlavi 7y ago
  is that a joke? it's like 20% ads
  - tripzilch 7y ago
    I didn't in the first two weeks after I registered (last year), then came the ads ..

lhorie 7y ago

Seems like a case of a metric becoming a goal

ship_it 7y ago

They are using Facebook tactics and they are doomed to fail as Facebook did. Well ... I cherish for their innovations. Good bye Instagram.

downvoteme1 7y ago
You can call Facebook whatever but it is not a failure. A company that has grown revenue from 2B in 2010 to 70B in 2019 cannot be considered a failure .
- ethbro 7y ago
  We'll see. Yahoo grew revenue too.
  - downvoteme1 7y ago
    All companies from Sears to Yahoo to Favebook have peaks, troughs and then eventually fade out. Even if Facebook fades outs on the next 5-50 years, it would have done better than millions of other companies. Look at it this way - what started as an experiment in a dorm room turning into this big is the dream of every startup. Every year thousands of companies apply to YC hoping to be 1/100 to 1/1000 as successful as FAANG’s
    - ethbro 7y ago
      Nobody contests that. The negative outlook instead seems to be that since 2010, Facebook (the product, not the engineering team) has delivered little value to society. And at this point, seems to have ossified into a form that lacks the agility and will to make major shifts. Their current emphasis on purchasing other companies for their product pipelines, to drive business to their advertising, seems more akin to pharma majors or IBM than anything in the startup world.
      - tln 7y ago
        Facebook delivers value every day to billions of daily active users -- the social updates. The value varies by person but presumably it's positive value for all DAU or they would cease to be DAU. Perhaps Facebook hasn't increased value delivered for each user for each day that much. Or has even decreased it. But the baseline is definitely "value to society" IMO Did you mean Facebook has delivered little marginal value?

jerf 7y ago

"How does blocking access help people view things?" Lieologists have discovered there's a hole in human cognition: If you say "We're doing X because of Y", human brains tend not to check Y very carefully at all. You can almost say "To help people view photos in Instagram, we're shutting down photo sharing in Instagram." You can't get away with a lie quite that bald. But you only need a few scraggly hair plugs on that lie to get past most people most of the time, as you observe.

Zak 7y ago
I'd be surprised if this is true. Instead, I read things like this as "we're not going to tell you our reasons", and I suspect most other people do too.
- jerf 7y ago
  Well, rather than issue a lengthy explanation of why I think I'm right, I suggest this instead: Try turning the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon [1] to the forces of good, and keep an eye out for this sort of thing over the next month. Assuming that there's nothing special about what you do in the next month, the delta between the number of times you think about it in the next month vs. the amount you've thought about it in the previous month is a rough guess for the amount of times you've read a statement like this and it just passed you by with your brain not registering an objection. If you do this honestly, betcha it's more than you think. It's something I see a lot, personally. In fact I tend to be surprised when someone public says "We're doing X because of Y" and it actually makes perfect sense. Most reasons given in the public sphere are quite garbage. [1]: https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/baader-meinhof-phenomenon.htm https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human...
m463 7y ago
"We're doing X because of coronavirus." Yep, your argument is sound.

lmilcin 7y ago

This is typical marketing-speak. I am becoming temporarily deaf whenever I hear it. Read it the following way: We have a reason to do it but we don't want to tell you so instead we will tell you a little bit of righteously-sounding bullshit so that most of sheep base is satisfied. Yes, that's "sheep", because you are not our customers, our customers are those companies we sell your information and your focus to.

lotyrin 7y ago
No, this is their reason, just from within their distortion field. This is helping the user view photos, because the user should be logged in and using the app, the app provides the best experience and this web interface is a distraction that gets in the way of that. Edit: I guess it wasn't sufficiently clear, the second sentence here is not my own personal opinion.
- asfarley 7y ago
  I've been in businesses trying to sell me this view as a developer. I can almost guarantee that the developers are saying, in their head, "this is in no way helpful to our users, but I will comply because my PM told me to." Distortion-fields aren't so powerful that they cause people with integrity to discount critical thinking. If someone can be sold on this with hand-waving, they probably lacked integrity or critical thinking from the start.
  - im3w1l 7y ago
    Obvious lies like these aren't meant to believed. Their purpose is preventing the follow up questions that would come if the truth was acknowledged.
- mewpmewp2 7y ago
  No, best experience is when I do not have to open my phone if someone links me something. Best experience when I don't have to waste time creating a user and logging in.

anonymousab 7y ago

I sometimes start to wonder how many of the people spewing these "we're ensuring you have the best experience by forcing you to use [some arbitrary, hated experience] exclusively" lines actually believe them.

neltnerb 7y ago
I might be underestimating their ability to lie, but I'd imagine they think the statement is true even if it's still a lie of omission (that it's not the main reason).
itronitron 7y ago
'the best experience' among what options? They probably believe it is the best experience within the set of options they considered, and where that set excludes the current user experience.

varjag 7y ago

That's how it sounds when someone's compensation depends on user conversion metric!

deminature 7y ago

If I had to guess, their account creation metrics are flattening out and some product manager had the idea of implementing this restriction to restart growth. If your performance reviews depend on growth, restrictions like this seem rational even if they're obviously anti-user to anyone outside the company.

oroup 7y ago
Also it makes scraping much harder.
- noxer 7y ago
  All images are still available on the web even delivers everything as JSON. Plenty tools like JDownlaoder can scrap everything in a seconds. they sure have other measurements in place to stop people form doing that large scale.
IlyaMoroshkin 7y ago
With the underlying factor probably being that much fewer people are creating good new content given the global lockdowns. 'Cute women' are a significant part of Instagram content, and if they are indoors wearing a mask there's not much to excite the userbase with.

gumby 7y ago

Since this discourages me from takin gthe time to look at the photo it does indeed provide me with a better experience. Thanks, guys!

appleshore 7y ago

Another way to say this, how does lying tell the truth? I don't understand corporations that decide to lie like this. I noticed Facebook Messenger does this fun thing where you can open it, start to read a message and then it says "BAM--YOU MUST UPDATE". The fact they intentionally designed it this way makes me want to delete Messenger forever.

yummypaint 7y ago
You should, followed by facebook. They're doing shadier stuff than that with your personal info

paxys 7y ago

You just need to translate "help people" to "help Instagram".

72deluxe 7y ago

Based on the insane amount of telemetry that Instagram sends back even on iPhone (look at all the "engagement" domains it looks up - loads!) just to scroll up and down and look at pictures, I am guessing this is marketing speak for "we want to track you more". Run a pi-hole and you'll be surprised (or not, depending on your cynicism).

grawprog 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” Allow me to translate: This is because we realized we couldn't collect as much data as we would like from non-signed in users browsing on computers. As our income is derived mostly from aggregating and selling the data of our users to third party marketers we felt we could increase revenue for our shareholders by no longer allowing non-signed in users to view our platform, ensuring anyone browsing our service is providing the maximum amout of data possible.

Ididntdothis 7y ago

This is Doublespeak from “1984”. It’s also often used in politics like naming a tax cut for upper incomes as “Middle class tax relief”.

FlyMoreRockets 7y ago
Or a "tax cut for all", implying it is a flat rate cut.

ChuckMcM 7y ago

Not enough data cows to milk, can't have that! Hopefully folks are connecting the dots that all this data they are giving away is really, really, valuable to Facebook and they are not getting compensated for it.

dntbnmpls 7y ago

> How does blocking access help people view things? How does blocking access help people understand how to have the best experience? It doesn't. Instagram isn't in it business of selling you the "best experience". It's in the business of selling your information. If you have an account ( verified by a phone number/etc ) and if you post your photos/etc, they have more information on you to sell to advertisers/government/etc than if you were anonymously browsing. Maybe you just browsed instagram on your desktop, but now since they have your phone, they may "recommend" you install their app and while you are at it, why not install facebook, etc. It's also to cause a "network" effect. Facebook did this before where they made it difficult for you view content without logging in. So if your grandma, aunts, friends, etc wanted to see your wedding posts, they had to create an account whereas in the past they would just go to your page and see it without an account. Also, if you have an account, it incentivizes you to "participate" more. Whereas in the past you might just casually view photos and leave, now you can leave comments, subscribe, favorite, etc.