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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.