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?