I love instagram. It's the best social media site. Last time I checked, I couldn't even make an account from my desktop computer. I'm not gonna even try to install their app on my G-free phone.
When a friends sends me a link to Instagram, I know that I don't need to click on it -- the thumbnail contains all the information that I'd ever see without creating an account. When news articles consist of a bunch of embedded Instagram crap, it doesn't even load on vanilla firefox. That's cool, those stories are usually celebrity gossip that I don't actually want to read but got baited into clicking on.
It's my favorite social media site, because their hooks just bounce straight off me.
Thanks, Instagram, for the consistent signalling. I never wanted to be your friend anyway.
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.
old.reddit.com is still around, for now, and does not have any of this garbage.
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.
> 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 :-(