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.

I really don't think there are sheeps around who actually believe that. Everybody knows this is just marketing speak in a way, marketing people are expected to speak.

Or maybe, there are people who would believe it, but they have an account already. And most simple do not care. They read, they have to create an account to get the content, so they do create an account.

> Everybody knows this is just marketing speak in a way

I hate this idea that, as a society, companies are permitted to bullshit people and the onus is on the consumers to be able to parse the borderline lies from full truths. My wife used to work closely with people with moderate mental illness - you wouldn't believe the predatory scams, advertisements and "offers" they fell for.

Isn't it more like "corporate" speak? The thing that makes me want to blow my brains out is when politicians or government representatives do this on TV and the "journalist" interviewing them just sits there and nods...

There are - they are called "children", and there are hundreds of millions of them among Instagram's user base.

Hm, true a bit, but also children are not so naive .. and those who are, would not read that text and just click and fill out until they get again, what they want.

You wouldn't believe what people can believe in. People who don't believe corporate messages are not target for corporate messages.

My guess is the reason is that they need to show they have an increasing user base and "active users" to Wall St.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The best experience from IG's POV.

The best experience is from a POV that doesn't intersect with IG.

So in other words Instagram claims to know how every single user wants to interact with the platform better than they themselves know, and so now users don't even get to decide for themselves.

I have two reactions to this:

1. I absolutely HATE this kind of arrogance from companies.

2. I don't believe them. I think it's far more likely they are doing this to juice their metrics, rather than honestly thinking that taking away options will make everyone like them more.

Of course it's their reason. If there was any of your interest in this they would not waste half a second to tell you this with details.

Nonsense explanation means just that users' interests were not factored in the decision.

That's not it, the web interface still works as long as you're logged in, no app needed. My guess is they are sick of scrapers and data miners. If login is needed, they can ban and the proxy hustlers will have a hard time.

FWIW, here in Sweden I can still look at feeds without being logged in.

They want people like me to register and increase the user count. I happen to get to an Instagram page once or twice a year following some link, look at a few pictures and quit. I remember it stopped me to scroll through pictures after a while or something like that, again to lure visitors to register. But I don't have a use case for Instagram so I won't. I already send pictures to people I care about via whatsapp.

> My guess is they are sick of scrapers and data miners. If login is needed, they can ban and the proxy hustlers will have a hard time.

As someone who's been writing integration (not nefarious!) scrapers for years, this is crap. Email accounts are free, VPNs and captcha solvers are dirt-cheap and at the end of the day, if they screw up the web version too much, the mobile apps are even easier to turn into scrapers as they usually use some kind of JSON API.

They did this for the same reason as Reddit and Facebook: - it's harder to make ad profiles for anonymous users - new users is a metric that investors love - psychological trick (I can't remember what that specific phenomenon is called) to turn lurkers into posters

Can you post images using the web interface?

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.

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.

Also it makes scraping much harder.

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.

"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.

"We're doing X because of coronavirus."

Yep, your argument is sound.

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.

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...

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.

They didn't for the longest while. I'm not sure what their impetus for changing was.

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.

Instragram has ads?

Yes? Sponsored posts.

https://business.instagram.com/advertising/

is that a joke? it's like 20% ads

I didn't in the first two weeks after I registered (last year), then came the ads ..

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.

'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.

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).

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

>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.

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).

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

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”.

Or a "tax cut for all", implying it is a flat rate cut.

Seems like a case of a metric becoming a goal

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

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.

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

> are doomed to fail as Facebook did

2.4 billion monthly active users is "doomed" now? Just because in the tech bubble Facebook is viewed negatively it doesn't mean they are not doing just fine.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...

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 .

We'll see. Yahoo grew revenue too.

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

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.

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?

I meant what I said.

> since 2010, Facebook (the product, not the engineering team) has delivered little value to society

That requires a different rebuttal than 'to a user.'

If we rewound to ~2010, froze Facebook at its then-current feature set, and had Instagram (2012), WhatsApp (2014), Oculus (2014), and the myriad of other aquhires still in existence as independent companies, society would be a better place.

> If we rewound to ~2010, froze Facebook at its then-current feature set, and had Instagram (2012), WhatsApp (2014), Oculus (2014), and the myriad of other aquhires still in existence as independent companies, society would be a better place

Sure, I can see that.

And if Facebook the product went away, society would IMO be in a worse place (until it's replaced :), because Facebook the product is delivering value every day

Facebook did not "fail."

Depends on ones measure of success.

Mine is, does this product and/or service represent a net benefit to humanity without egregious side-effects?

the answer isn’t always so clear-cut

That measure is so subjective I'd be surprised if it was ever clear cut. You could argue circles with coal, oil, FB, beer, various drugs, fancy rocks. All are double-edged swords (the handle is also a sword (and it's on fire))

Indeed not always, and there certainly can be an observer effect, but the answer re. Facebook is very clear cut.

In any case I've found it preferable to "does this corporate entity create shareholder value?", which I must confess I was suckered by some rather Austrian-school economists into accepting as a valid proxy for human advancement and/or happiness in my mid-thirties.

Out of curiosity, why does the condition "without egregious side effects" exist? Aren't egregious side effects already factored ibto the "net benefit" calculation?

My moral compass says, don't harm individuals for the greater good.

I should add, you're not wrong to question the necessity of including the second part. It is most certainly a factor. There's a natural justice strand in the formulation of Benthamite utilitarianism (which is, broadly speaking, where I'm coming from) that reinforces an enlightened approach to individual consequences, since in the long run the absence of individual justice poisons the greater good anyway.

However that's a bit of a mouthful, and it does need surfacing because there are other formulations of utilitarianism that lead to dystopian nightmare societies, and besides, I'm rather fond of the word egregious.

However I do regret forgetting to riff on the laws of robotics in the phrasing

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.

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

> 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.