Pinterest and Reddit are not better these days. The amount of things you can view on reddit on your phone without creating an account or installing the app is dwindling daily.

Every time my wife sends me a Pinterest link I just ask her to screenshot it as I can't see shit on the default mobile page. I don't even know why Google continues to allow them in the results when there is clear-cut policies around showing something different to the crawler than the user.

Ironically, a good workaround is setting your user agent to the Googlebot and suddenly all those modal/nag screens disappear.

> Ironically, a good workaround is setting your user agent to the Googlebot and suddenly all those modal/nag screens disappear.

This is hilarious and makes so much sense. God, the internet is broken

How are they not getting absolutely destroyed by the Google search algos, since that’s the definition of cloaking: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...

Big players like LinkedIn, Facebook, et all play by different rules. Losing LinkedIns results would damage Google.

Half the reason I use Qwant is it works better than LinkedIn's paid search results. Google does much worse.

The content is pretty much the same if you log in. Google doesn’t seem to care in instances like this, I’ve worked on multiple very large sites that do the exact same thing (further in so e instances: present a JS app to users and a faster JS—less experience to google). Many news sites do it too, for example.

Pretending to be a robot, in order to not get caught by robots. Kinds makes sense. In a sci-fi dystopian way.

This should help:

https://sumtips.com/software/browsers/set-user-agent-on-a-pe...

Those Windows 7 screenshots evoke a sense of nostalgia for the time before a Windows that broadcasts and monetizes my every action. I think an even bigger “fuck you” pattern is when an OS that I paid for tracks me and monetizes my private information.

Maybe I’m just getting old.

Nope; Windows is getting old :-P

Time to switch to another OS. Consider some newbie-friendly Linux, like Mint (linuxmint.com).

Agreed. I am a Mint user and I couldn't be happier. I switched around one year and a half ago because I was concerned about the constant data transfer (increasingly harder to deactivate) between my devices and Apple/MS. I was also sick of seeing unwanted ads and notifications both in Windows and Mac.

Personally I'm on Devuan because of my aversion to systemd, otherwise it would be mint for me.

Hm, nothing for Android - for either ff or chrome?

It's been reported[0] that Firefox Nightly has a Debug menu through which one can bless a custom collection of allowed extensions to get around the new Mozilla Nanny State™ but I haven't personally expended the energy to try it

0 = https://www.ghacks.net/2020/10/01/you-can-now-install-any-ad...

You may be looking for iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome, the chrome repo has the firefox extension as well, fyi.

Darn, it actually works! Thank you a lot for the mention.

Does Google not check for this at all? They could easily spoof their User-Agent to see if sites lie about what they show.

I dunno, folks might get salty if google's bots used misleading useragents. And it just escalates the existing cat&mouse game

Bing seems to have figured it out just fine.

My guess is nobody cares about this issue at Google for whatever reason, either because no compensation is tied to it or they are getting paid to push Pinterest.

Because reddit and google have the same political bent, and aren't competitors.

Google already explicitly discourages “cloaking”.[0] They define it as:

> Cloaking refers to the practice of presenting different content or URLs to human users and search engines. Cloaking is considered a violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines because it provides our users with different results than they expected.

You’d think they’d do something about it. Maybe it’s because Reddit doesn’t cloak necessarily, but when it straight up refuses to show without the app (sometimes), I’d call that cloaking (in spirit). News sites throwing up paywalls would fit that too.

[0]: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...

Yup. Googlebot can also traverse some paywalls

Pinterest is by the far the worst because it takes content from the rest of the world and strips away all context. It's the anti-wikipedia, an information black hole.

I hate Pinterest with a passion. If you want to find reference images for whatever topic, all you get is the medium res crap with a 'make an account' pop-up instead of the original source they stole it from. I think alphabet or whatever will acquire it in the near future (or have they already?) because there is just no other explanation for letting Pinterest poison image search that much.

Image search is practically dead and Pintrest singlehandedly killed it. I just use Wikimedia Commons now.

works fine on DuckDuckGo

Whenever I put a google search down, and see one page of Pinterest on there I immediately go back to the search box and go for; “-site:pinterest.*”. I absolutely hate that site with a passion.

Even though I have the app and an account, I still despise using it. They break things like zoom and saving images. Clicking on something interesting takes you to…a site that doesn’t actually have that.

I truly don’t understand how Pinterest is so popular when it’s also so awful. Tumblr was so much better until Verizon destroyed it with management incompetence.

Unpinterested is an extension do do this automatically

Is there a Google option to perma-ban a domain?

Maybe a place I can upload a HOSTS file?

Or an extension that adds this to every search?

There is: uBlacklist[1]. I've been searching for the exact same thing to get rid of Indian tutorial scamsites, bad GitHub and StackOverflow clones and, of course, Pinterest results :) Can recommend.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ublacklist/pncfbmi...

You can try this extension. It was forked from a project once maintained and abandoned by Google themselves.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/personal-bloc...

I couldn't put my vague dislike for Pinterest into words until this: you have it exactly.

I fully agree, but do they count as social media? I kinda categorize them as crowdsourced SEO spam

> Ironically, a good workaround is setting your user agent to the Googlebot and suddenly all those modal/nag screens disappear.

Hmmmm. Now that I think of it I'm fairly sure that serving different content to Googlebot compared to what you served ordinary users used to be a good way to call down the wrath of the SEO master upon your (or your clients) website.

Then again, that was before. Back when Google was a nice company and acted in the best interest of its users.

In fact it's still forbidden by Google ... Except if you are very large like Pinterest

It might not be forbidden if it works. Google is famous for undocumented workarounds.

Only the most expensive SEO-experts know the occult methods of success on Google's search results

Filed under the "okay for me not for thee" google policy.

Reddit (the service) is tons better than Pinterest, facebook, instagram... I think it's totally out of line to group Reddit in with them. The new reddit website is total trash but you can use like 99% of reddit without ever visiting the website. I use Apollo for example, and there are many other apps you can use or develop your own. You can also use old.reddit.com. Access to reddit is much more open than any of these other networks that require you to use their app only.

Reddit on desktop is still okay. The mobile version of Reddit is deliberately broken in order to force you to use the app. Many subreddits can't be viewed, you can only view the first couple of comments in each thread, the front page is hidden behind a huge nag screen,...

> The mobile version of Reddit is deliberately broken in order to force you to use the app.

fyi - if you use old reddit, the mobile site is fine - I've never seen a subreddit blocked or threads truncated.

new reddit is a pile of steaming dogsh

old.reddit isn't deliberately broken, but not really suitable for small screens like phones.

i.reddit is better for that, but it doesn't support many content types inline and has issues showing comments in some cases.

teddit.net doesn't support loading more comments inline and the icon to unfold post content is tiny.

Yes, but again, you can use their official app, or literally any other app developed. Those third party apps can view anything. Contrast that with Instagram where if you don't want to use their app, sucks for you.

I disagree it's out of line to group Reddit with the likes of Pinterest, fb, etc. The fact that they're slightly more user-friendly doesn't make up for using dark patterns and dirty tricks.

I think it's unethical to intentionally design features that confuse users and force them to take roads they don't really want to take. Reddit crossed a line with the annoying pop-up that constantly asks you to download their app, for example. I don't care that the pop-up is less persistent than let's say Instagram. It's ill-intentioned design and it shouldn't exist.

That's a good point, but I think Reddit is more than "slightly more user-friendly." It's developer friendly - way more so than other big networks - and that makes a big difference.

Look, I don't work for reddit or have any skin in the game, other than I use it every day (it being the service - I RARELY use the official app or website). And granted, I'm not a typical Internet enjoyer, but it's easier for me to enjoy reddit than it is to enjoy facebook, instagram, linkedin, pinterest, tiktok, because of decisions reddit made to not do what all these other ones did.

Again I say - that's a very low bar. Reddit app and reddit website still suck. But reddit the service and the company is 10x better than the other networks (note I'm not commenting on the CONTENT here, that's for another day)

My main issue with Reddit is when I'm doing mobile research about something, I usually Google about something, probably something and put site:reddit.com to read people opinions. When going straight from Google without having an app, the experience will be obviously horrible. Now I use an app called "Relay", but this also has some issues, it will open the Google link, but it will usually open the content and there doesn't seem to be a good way to get back to comments unless I'm missing something. Maybe I should try some other app, where I can either choose whether I want to see the link, or the comments. Usually comments are more interesting to me.

There's also an issue with going back to search once I am finally in the all context.

Ps: using android.

I use Apollo on iOS and I have to long press on a link to do "open with Apollo", which is fine but pretty annoying. Would love to be able to set the default handler so that I can just regular press. Of course would be nicer if Reddit's mobile website just worked and I didn't have to rely on an app to consume the content in a civilized manner. Nonetheless I still maintain that reddit is more user-respecting than the other social networks mentioned. Low bar, granted...

In Relay if you swipe up on the action bar on the bottom you'll see the comments.

I prefer Sync for Reddit cause it provides a very HN-like UX if you set the view mode to smaller cards or compact.

> Ironically, a good workaround is setting your user agent to the Googlebot and suddenly all those modal/nag screens disappear.

All those robots sharing data among themselves with no humans needed or, apparently, wanted.

old.reddit.com is still around, for now, and does not have any of this garbage.

old.reddit.com is clearly beginning to rot:

1. The new Reddit seems to have a different markdown parser which allows surrounding unindented code with ``` lines. This doesn't render on old Reddit.

2. New Reddit seems to be saving links with escaped underscores and correcting for it at render time? I've started to see people posting broken links like https://example.com/some\_path\_with\_underscores when it should be https://example.com/some_path_with_underscores

3. Posts with multiple images sometimes don't work? I haven't been inconvenienced enough by this yet to investigate.

I've started having weird redirects on any v.reddit.com posts too - they redirect back to main page instead of taking me to the video.

I haven't fully tested what combinations don't work, but it feels like the beginning of the end of old.reddit.com.

The report dialogue has also been broken for awhile now, and the new support for image+text posts was backported in a pretty ugly way too.

It doesn't... but the nature of Reddit has been clearly driven by the "new" interface. There's a lot less text-based technical content, and a lot more image/gif meme-based content because that's what the new interface is optimized for - and it goes out of its way to make it very, very hard to see the deep text nested comments that are the dominant feature of the old interface (and HN).

So, while you can browse the place with the old interface, the nature and trends of Reddit are mostly driven by the new interface.

Which is fine, if they want to go that way, it's just a shame that what used to make it any good is dead or dying.

And you just KNOW it's going to disappear. Not immediately of course, some slight visual breakages here and there. Then some hotshot manager is going to point out how it doesn't bring any "value" to the company and how in fact it actually hurts reddit's image. Then it will be gone.

And then somebody makes a substitute UI that calls the api, then reddit tries to take it down, then someone builds an open source version, then github gets a C&D letter and the creator makes blog post about it that reaches the front page of HN. I'm looking forward to the journey.

The first part happened: https://teddit.net ;-)

> then someone builds an open source version

Damn, I went to dig up the URL for reddit's source and it seems it is no longer open :-(

https://github.com/reddit-archive/reddit

Saidit is an old reddit fork with small changes (the biggest one is no downvotes):

https://github.com/libertysoft3/saidit

From my time at Reddit I can say the reason it has lasted this long is there are no hotshot managers.

Chris Slowe is the hand guiding the ship day to day, with a bunch of really passionate hackers underneath him. They are maintaining like 4 different code bases and keeping feature parity as best they can with a team that could still comfortably go on a ski trip together (compare that to the 60k+ at Facebook). The users hate change while also demanding new features. The business makes no sense. Steve is off doing... something, to ads or something and make investors happy so they keep the ship afloat. UI is going to hell to drive DAU metrics for investors. Banning shitweasels brings down the wrath of the conservatives. Yet they are still working their assess off to keep a mound of spaghetti from bursting into flames with 1/10th the staff they need to do so.

Good to know that a major social media platform is built on the same shit and bailing wire that most of us have to deal with every day. Sort of makes me feel like the SV companies really aren't any different than anyone else, they just (typically) have a lot more money.

It'll eventually be removed with the reasoning that its hardly used and most traffic uses the new Reddit and now they can focus on improvements without having to support this legacy code.

Yeah, it's really infuriating.. Reddit consumed most of the cool niche forums on the internet, and now it's slowly mashing them all up into a bland Facebook clone

Embrace, extand, extinguish.

Never, ever trust an incorporated company.

Does that include the Mozilla Corporation, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation?

A lot of those niche forums were already being killed by VerticalScope and InternetBrands.

It’s a lot of what lead to Reddit’s popularity in the first place.

I don't think I've hear of heard of VerticalScope but I aware of Internet Brands. What niche forums did they kill?

VS bought out a lot of the automotive forums. Also now owners of RedFlagDeals if you're a Canadian.

Surprisingly difficult to find a complete list.

There's 100% an opportunity for someone to bring on a bunch of subreddit admins into starting a new automotive forum network. Reddit and Facebook don't work well for car stuff.

https://old.reddit.com/r/4x4/comments/hw1p3a/vertical_scope_...

Also a bunch of tech and gun forums. Supposedly over 1000 properties, but it's not like I'm going to recognize that they own "mothering.com"

And then something else will replace it. They'll digg themselves their own grave.

"digg themselves their own grave" ;)

Ha, thanks for picking up on that! I was hoping that someone would notice. :-)

Maybe Ycombinator will incubate a rival that uses the HN model.

I thought they already did, this little company called Reddit that went on to benefit from the banality of digg.

I wonder what their relative market share is. Lots of the people that have been on Reddit for years may user old.reddit. I certainly do.

I really can't stand their hostility to no using their app on mobile though. The UX seems purposely difficult to drive users towards the app, for the obvious reason of greater access to user data most likely.

One of their biggest hurdles to overcome is, I gather, that a lot of the super large subreddits' moderator teams are exclusively on old.reddit.com for moderation. If they break old.reddit.com completely right now, a lot of the biggest subs would implode with bots, spam, and angry human word-vomit.

If they fix the moderation story for new reddit, I'd imagine they have a pretty quick path towards obsoleting old reddit by just not caring about anyone else still on old reddit.

They've already 'fixed' modmail for new reddit. So I think they're actively working on that problem.

> They've already 'fixed' modmail for new reddit. So I think they're actively working on that problem.

Though that has had some funny issues. One thing I noticed was the enrollment for the new modmail. It is on the settings page on old reddit for a sub, but I couldn't find it anywhere for the new reddit UI. Wacky.

For sure, it's not a perfect solution. Hence 'fixed' instead of fixed haha.

For Android at least, there are multiple free-as-in-freedom reddit client apps available. Two I know of are Infinity and Slide. Both are way better than the mobile website, and I'm sure better than the official app.

And then I will stop using Reddit for the most part (although it's still the best resource for finding authentic reviews of things / services.. I Google "<thoughts on something> reddit" more often than not these days). Which is probably for the best for my productivity / sanity tbh

The redesign is still a slower, worse experience, especially on mobile.

If they do (and it wouldn't surprise me), people will start making third party desktop clients (or rather, they'll start getting popular).

If they ban those, then we'll see some major migrations methinks.

I'm starting to find that title links to posts with multiple images just link back to the page you're on. It feels like it's just going to slowly disintegrate. Which I think on balance I'd be happy about because I spend too much time on there anyway.

old.reddit is ok, but it's rarely used for links. I know there's a plugin, but I can't stand the idea of adding plugins for things like that. The only reason I have a reddit account is because you can change preferences to be even better than old.reddit (e.g. turn off custom themes, disable outbound click tracking, no thumbnails, compact list, etc.). It basically looks like HN after what I do to it. I know it's all arranging deck chairs on a sinking ship but I hope a decent rescue ship gets here before it's all gone.

Just go to https://teddit.net/

> Ironically, a good workaround is setting your user agent to the Googlebot and suddenly all those modal/nag screens disappear.

Cloudflare slaps you for this, though.

I'll take a Capcha over a fuck-you paywall.

Regarding reddit, you can replace "www" with "old" i.e. https://old.reddit.com and it is still functional. There is also a firefox (perhaps chrome too) extension that replaces it automatically.

I don't know how long it will last, but if it's gone I think I'll be off reddit. I tried to use regular UI few times, and the experience is absolutely off putting. It reminds me of digg right before people flew to reddit.

> Ironically, a good workaround is setting your user agent to the Googlebot and suddenly all those modal/nag screens disappear.

I'm surprised sites this big are even relying on the user agent for determining Googlebot, given how easy (and common) it is to forge, when they could be checking the Googlebot IP ranges instead.

I have not been able to to get this to work. what is the exact ua string that works for you guys

The day they drop old.reddit.com is the day I stop using Reddit.

> a good workaround is setting your user agent to the Googlebot

Be sure to follow the site's robots.txt rules, though. Otherwise, you could end up getting googlebot banned! /s

for Reddit, you can "sign up" with a bogus email address and still interact (browse, join, comment, vote, message) freely. the only possible downside is it asks you to verify your email address every launch, but I don't see this as a downside since I am using Reddit anonymously, and it is easily dismissed. been doing this for over a year now

You can actually just click "Next" on the sign-up screen without having entered any email address at all. It works fine, for now at least.

that's cool. I get the impression they're not really interested in monetising or data mining if all these loopholes exist, and that their platform is supported by those who wish to engage in microtransactions, which do not hinder functionality in any way e.g. pay for privileges. good on them

What's valuable is your interests so that they know what ads to put in your face. Whether or not your email is linked to you is irrelevant -- you can click on ads all the same. This solution doesn't save you from the data mining they do on your usage.

I use an ad blocker so have never seen an ad on Reddit

Still allows them to identify you over the course of several sessions, which allows them to de-anonymize you.

not if your email address and browser sessions contain no personally identifiable information

>>> when there is clear-cut policies around showing something different to the crawler than the user.

yes ....

>a good workaround is setting your user agent to the Googlebot

Can't believe I've never thought of this.

> The amount of things you can view on reddit on your phone without creating an account or installing the app is dwindling daily.

Like what? The phone browser works just great. IIRC there's a nag dialog that prompts you once to install the app, then it caches the answer and shuts up.

> The phone browser works just great.

No, it is not. I can not access any subreddit without installing an app (which I am not going to do).

Sorry... I literally do this every day of my life, across several devices. I'm just on Firefox on Android, it's not like it's a weird setup or anything. What are you running that reddit won't let you into a subreddit?

I have the same experience as OP which is that many subreddits or individual posts are inaccessible without creating an account. If you're looking at cat gifs you will probably get by with the occasional nag screen but some will outright force you out of the page.

Really? I still occasionally visit a handful of subs, almost exclusively through android chrome. I'll certainly never download an app to do it though.

This was a dark pattern they launched almost a year ago, as a non user of mostly every social media site, instagram is probably the worst in terms of forcing users to login to view public content.

I wouldn't normally have a problem with this but public content should be just that, viewable by the general public and not being forced to install a tracke.. err, their app on my phone.

Where I have a huge problem with this is public health or other official announcements from community leaders or essential information and its being put out on facebook. So now I can't access a public message by a publicly elected entity for general consumption. It seems extremely slimy and it feels illegal on some level as I don't want to be forced to login to facebook to view local updates.

Is the way that Twitter links often fail to load on the first several tries (then finally, mysteriously, work as if nothing happened) one of these "force you to log in and use the app" dark patterns? It's been that way for years now, so I have to think it's not accidental.

It always takes exactly 3 reloads for me.

I organize a puppy meetup. Right now via a group SMS. Sub-optimal. Sharing event pics is flakey (mix of android and ios). The responses (LOL, hearts, etc) become their own text messages (?!). Etc.

Since some of us have Instagram, I thought to try it, if only to share pics. Sign up was brutal. I can't figure out how to use my phone account on my desktop. Sharing existing pics sucks. Taking pics with Instagram sucks.

I can't even figure out how to simply browse a friend's feed.

I legit can't imagine why anyone uses Instagram, for any purpose.

Cute babes. It's like the point of contact now for them because none of them want to be on facebook with their mom commenting dumb shit on their page.

if it wasn't for them i would so delete this shit

Is this way I always get text messages from one of my friends that say > Liked "{$ENTIRE_CONTENTS_OF_PREVIOUS_MESSAGE}"

It's iMessage garbage spewing into SMS. On iOS you'll get a little heart or some other animation, to "support" this with SMS they give the reaction and the whole quote.

Most people don’t really use Instagram, it’s more like Instagram uses them.

I'll stick my head above the parapet and say that as a content consumer I really like Instagram and it genuinely is my favourite social media platform. I'm probably an atypical user but now that I'm well out of my 20's the friends I still connect with online I have real connections with so it's a joy to see what they're up to. My interests (food, 70's sci-fi, cats, modern art) are well catered to and I've done a good job of curating the accounts I follow to get a good mix of interesting content. Even my promoted posts are mostly local restaurants and businessess so I've never really felt aggrieved that I'm getting controlled by big corporates. I've also found my experience mostly apolitical with the advantage that because commenting is so tacked on I don't feel the urge to interact with anything beyond liking images or sharing the ocasional post with my friends and family

I understand it's mindless, but I dont want it to be anything else. It's a toy platform for looking at device sized images and short videos on my mobile and that's all I want it to be.

Thanks for this comment. I've been annoyed by the fact that click-baity articles don't load Instagram content in the past, but re-framing the issue as a bullet dodged and time saved is a surprisingly powerful shift of perspective.

Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok. Just... No. Funny enough, I was a big Imgur user until one day I somehow realized I'm wasting my life on the dumbest shit in the dumbest format possible.

Reddit on the other hand, is trying hard to push me away and I thank them for it, but a lot of info you can only find there. Like real measurements of graphics cards and just real information from real people.

Kind of sad, but Reddit has attracted all the people who used to frequent niche forms in one place.

Best part, it is all conveniently grouped on a single site unmarred by useful content so you can easily just ignore it all without anxiety you are going to miss out on something important.

> From TFA: "Since I’m a technical person, I tried to simply remove the modal in the browser Inspector. It sort of worked, but I wasn’t able to scroll any further on the page."

You need to not only remove the modal, but remove the "overflow:hidden;" in the <body> tag. After that you should be able to scroll.

I have CSS/JS injectors that do this for me already, I really fucking hate popups and scrolling impediments of any sort.

This!

edit: Sometime they add "pointer-events: none;" to the <body>, should check that too.

I had the same experience. I wanted to watch someone's podcast Livestream that was being broadcasted on Instagram (I don't know why they didn't just use YouTube). But I couldn't even create an account. I tried with my desktop and phone on different networks. It wouldn't work.

Perhaps I'm "old" for this.

I don't "get" Instagram. I'm not on it, I don't use it, all that "I just don't just because".

I have a room mate // romantic partner who does use Instagram. OK, that's great, that's fine. They're younger than I am so perhaps they get something I don't; times change, I get that; I still don't get "The Insta".

Maybe some social media will ding on me the next time around. I'll wait.

I tried to create an Instagram account to be able to see some photos.

The first attempt stopped at "unexpected error" just after selecting a login name.

The second attempt with different email address in a different browser ended the same way.

Third attempt I tried from the third browser, via cellular data and gmail email. That one finished ok but still returned back to Sign up right after the last signup atep. Entering the same data in Sign up resulted in "there is account using this email". So I tried to log in and it was successful but it immediately showed "suspicious activity dialog" FORCING me to enter phone number and do SMS verification. After I did that, my shiny new Instagram account started working.

But I expect it will be blocked or deleted for inactivity soon unless I start submitting photos or generate enough ad impressions or ad clicks. I use adblock though..

My favorite feature is how when someone shares an Instagram post of Whatsapp it's blurred out. I realized this today and it just hit me that they don't care about making the apps actually good. All they care about is that you go back to the main app where they can advertise to you.

Also, it’s 2021 and their iPad app is just the non-iPad app where it’s just a scaled portrait-only version of the iOS app. Do they not have the resources to do a proper iPad app?

i don't do social media anymore, but I used to use instagram to browse favorite artists. I found chrome developer tools would let you change to mobile view and then you could browse instagram/upload photos/etc like normal.

Haven't tried it in a long time so maybe doesn't work anymore.

Instagram is terrible but I can defend forcing account creation via app only. It seems likely that such a route would draw a disproportionately large interest from scammers and disproportionately small interest from real customers.

I don't know if it's just me or what, but I can no longer view Instagram posts while logged out.

Other people report being able to, but it just sends me straight to a login page.

Same. I've never had an account, and for as long as I can remember everytime I end up on their page I'm greeted with a login screen.

In fact, I've always found it perplexing how little information or incentive there is on their landing page that would encourage me to make an account. I only even barely know what that site is for because of osmosis and image previews from sites that link to it. Makes me wonder how they got critical mass to even get started.

Instagram allows you to create an account in the browser.

https://www.instagram.com/accounts/emailsignup/

I don't understand this post and the blog author's comments about using desktop. I get the appeal of not having apps installed on your phone, but wasn't Instagram phone-first? I remember not having a smartphone in the early 10's and not being able to use Instagram because you couldn't use their site. I would argue the phone-based experience is far superior to the browser...

I run the web app on my google free phone quite easily. Just add to Home Screen.

you can make an account from desktop no problem