Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public profiles

Re:Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public pro... by nolok on Tuesday October 29, 2019 @04:49AM (#21385174)

Pinterest manages to do something horribly stupid and kind of abusive that I usually associates with adult sites ads: show you a preview of something that gets your interest, if you click to get access to it put you through a maze of forms and links all promising the result you asked for at the end, and then when you get to it they don't deliver and instead show other stuff you might like but really you don't because you did all that for this specific thing.

I don't get it. You have it. You know the user wants it. You know the user wants it very much, enough to go through all that crap. Yet you are going out of your way to not give him access, making him so frustrated that any hope of "but he will crawl around more and do more stuff" is quickly replaced by "he closes the tab in anger at having lost 5 minutes" ...

I'm sure there are metrics showing that it works, or maybe that it doesn't lose enough people to be worth changing, but it is so unnecessary.

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Re:Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public pro... by moccachino on Tuesday October 29, 2019 @05:00AM (#21385222)

They have actually had one positive influence on my life. After having dealt with exactly what you described a few times, I learned that I don't need anything that's on Pinterest. If a search results returns a pinterest link, I ignore it. If I can't find it anywhere except that link, it's as good as a dead link so I move on. This can be extended to much of the internet. So much peace now.

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Re:Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public pro... by mikestew on Tuesday October 29, 2019 @09:35AM (#21386920)

It is one of my main uses of Pi-Hole: “never, ever let anything from that domain into my network ever again.” If I accidentally click a link, it doesn’t go anywhere. I use it for quite a few domains that show up in a lot of places, but have proven to be an annoyance. I’m believe Pinterest was one of the first to be added for that reason.

The ad blocking Pi-Hole provides is a nice bonus, too.

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Re:Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public pro... by whatshisface on Tuesday October 29, 2019 @01:02PM (#21389414)

It would be cool if this could be extended to automatically clearing those junk sites off Google's results, maybe by querying for a few extra pages, deleting the garbage, and then re-assembling them into fewer pages. Google spam filters would be great, I could also put in a rule to eliminate any page title that starts with a number ("Ten great ways to...").

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Re:Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public pro... by lethologica on Tuesday October 29, 2019 @03:58PM (#21391343)

Google used to have a way to block sites from search results. Do they still have that option?

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Re:Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public pro... by blacksmith_tb on Tuesday October 29, 2019 @04:39PM (#21391731)

They did offer the Personal Blocklist extension[1] for Chrome, long ago. But it's been sunsetted, there are some alternatives.

1: https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-chrome-extension...

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Re:Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public pro... by byuu on Tuesday October 29, 2019 @07:13PM (#21393081)

I wrote a userscript to do this if you're interested:

https://code.byuu.org/google

It blocks search and image results by pattern, and also removes the URL tracker wrapping wherever possible.

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Re:Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public pro... by yibg on Tuesday October 29, 2019 @06:09AM (#21385518)

I’m the exact same. Over time I’ve been trained to ignore every link from google search results that points to Pinterest.

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Re:Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public pro... by dorgo on Tuesday October 29, 2019 @03:21PM (#21391038)

Why not use an addon? My addon removes all search results for facebook, pinterest

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Re:Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public pro... by saiya-jin on Tuesday October 29, 2019 @06:18AM (#21385558)

Sounds like my experience too. Any link on pinterest image, ie from google search is met with login/register form. Well pardon my english but screw that approach, pinterest doesn't exist for me.

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Re:Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public pro... by droithomme on Tuesday October 29, 2019 @12:22PM (#21388913)

Same here, I have their domains blocked in my hosts so if I accidentally click I don't see anything.

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Re:Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public pro... by dbatten on Tuesday October 29, 2019 @01:13PM (#21389535)

I constantly tack "-pinterest" on to the end of Google searches...

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Re:Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public pro... by dessant on Tuesday October 29, 2019 @06:25AM (#21385583)

I've added Pinterest to my reverse image search extension [1] to avoid having to sign up when there is no alternative source for the image. It returns Pinterest search results [2], and you can access the image directly from the image icon.

I plan to release the image extraction module in a separate extension, so you can just click on the page area with the image, and it opens the image in a new tab. This way you will not need to do a reverse image search to get to the image, or manually look for it in the page source.

[1] https://github.com/dessant/search-by-image

[2] https://i.imgur.com/L2wv2Wk.png

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Re:Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public pro... by kennyadam on Tuesday October 29, 2019 @07:27AM (#21385915)

Thank you for creating this, it's an excellent extension!

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Re:Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public pro... by dessant on Tuesday October 29, 2019 @07:32AM (#21385956)

Thanks! Make sure to explore the extension's options, it can be configured to fit most use cases.

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Re:Instagram now forces people to sign in to view public pro... by t34543 on Tuesday October 29, 2019 @07:05AM (#21385773)

Brilliant, I didn’t know extensions like this existed.

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