so we're at the point where the steps to prove you're human are so arduous only a bot will have the patience to create a new account

someone should try using "photograph of yourself, where you hold a piece of paper with the following, handwritten code on it: **" as a prompt on DALL-E/imagen

Dall-E and its relatives are still pretty awful at text, at least for now. They have a decent idea of how individual letters are shaped, but trying to produce a specific word or phrase is generally pretty hopeless. Dall-E can sometimes correctly reproduce words that appear frequently in its training data, like "PIZZA", but its success rate on less common words is dismally low, especially when they're appearing out of context.

Some pretty convincing examples of this behavior can be seen at: https://twitter.com/JanelleCShane/status/1531624303770279937

Because they haven't been trained on that.

Yet.

Modern captchas have gotten really annoying, too. You used to be able to just effortlessly type characters from a distorted image in 5 seconds, but now proving that you're an actual real human is so much work I'm tempted to automate it.

My personal worst experience with captchas is Vultr: every time I go to their page from my Linux desktop, I need to solve a recaptcha. And if I don't do it within ~3 seconds, the page reloads and I need to start over again. I bet there are more robots than humans who can solve it in such a short time. You need to read the instructions, pattern match 9 photos... twice... in 3 seconds. It doesn't happen when I visit the Vultr's page from my iPhone though. When I get a spare moment, I will move my VPS to another, less obnoxious provider (maybe even Amazon).

Why on earth would someone go through with this?

Instagram can have useful business purposes. Some personal trainers/consultants/very small businesses only have an Instagram account, and seem to be doing well. Canada's public broadcaster published an article about this a while back, and the consequences when such business owners were locked out of their account due to an outage: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/facebook-instagram-outage-b...

Otherwise, in certain social groups (especially young adults), Instagram is the main way to stay to stay in touch with friends, even just for the messaging app. So, not having an account means missing out on significant social connection for some (e.g. if it's the platform where the group chats are hosted).

It really depends on your friend group, though; for many people, their social groups just aren't on Instagram or social media very much or at all, so it's easier to quit because there's nothing to miss out on (so for these people, the verification would hardly be worth it).

Almost everyone I communicate with is on Instagram and no other platform collectively.

It's a primary communication tool.

I also do a lot of photography and it's the place to show my work (at least if I remotely want and real reach).

Many people use Instagram for their business too, as it's the best way to reach their audience.

For the newer generation it's a mandatory tool for social validation. Not defending that it's good. But it is what it is.

Instagram is important to me for keeping up with family because all my cousins post stories of their kids on there, so it's how I keep up with them and what their kids are up to. Same with a bunch of my friends. It's replaced Facebook which replaced family mailing lists and newsletters. It's also how they keep up with what I'm doing.

Also a bunch of my younger ex-coworkers and I are only connected on Instagram, and even some of my business contacts. I literally just got an investment lead via Instagram.

Why do you need to keep up with what other people are willing to announce to the world they are doing though?

I always found this a tad odd. Most people would only share flattering or happy pieces on social media so you cannot account for hardships or problems they are facing in real life which I assume would be one objective reason to keep up with family.

Well first off they use private accounts so it's not announcing to the world, just people that they know. And many of them post the bad stuff too, especially when they are soliciting advice.

I got it. I never thought of people using Instagram or any other social media for soliciting advice on sensitive personal topics which ought to be ephemeral and private (encrypted instead of available to thousands of employees at Facebook and elsewhere).

I have a hard time believing every friend of yours is a security engineer. And if they are, maybe you need to pop out of that friend bubble a bit and see how the other 99.9999% interact with social media.

Because Facebook and their various properties have a monopoly on humanity's social fabric in a lot of places. Not participating can put you at a severe disadvantage.

reach, audience, dopamine hits

Did she have to upload her full ID or was she allowed to redact some info like the number or such? I'd be really careful handing out my PI like that.

One of those stupid dating apps has decided that I am not myself and I cannot upload pictures of myself because it's not me.