Account Required to Browse Sites

[bingus_baby]

Please, Melonlanders, excuse me while I have A Moment. (Sorry it's heated, I'm just reaching my limits these days. The world feels dystopian sometimes, so even the small stuff like this sets me off.)

Context: Safari introduced a function to rope off browsing sessions. I generally use "personal" and "school" to keep the web trackers in their containment units. (Can't have LinkedIn seeing how much anime fan art I download off ZeroChan...) Anyways. I do have a Pinterest account, but it was off in the personal tab.

For a school project I needed to make a moodboard and I decided to use Pinterest to find some aesthetic imagery to flesh out my concepts and give a lil pizzaz. I download a pretty image off Pinterest, all is well. I go to download another... and it requires an account. Whatever. I click a few more just to look at them and find the source websites, and it hard stops. I need an account to browse the site. Period. Like, what?

I get small internet communities roping off areas to keep a cozy feel. Forums and such. Sometimes other small sites wanting to keep a small, audience, but PINTEREST? Idk it set off alarm bells. This is a huge site. Instagram does the same thing, you can't view posts without an account, only scroll the profile for a few inches before getting locked out.

Normally I'd take the L. But when I need pretty pretty sparkle images for a *school project* of all things, it just makes me mad. Guess I'll find some organic, grass fed Tumblr blogs to get aesthetic images from. Yeah, I can link my Google account to Pinterest, or login on my personal account, but now I'm mad and fueled by spite (and caffeine). I want to NOT use Pinterest now. Sites that require an app or account to use are absolute scum. Worse than the roaches that crawl out of my sink's drain. I truly wish the worst upon those corporate demons.

[Cobra!]

Yeah, seems to be a common theme with social media. I think it’s a way to hook you onto the platform, with a sort of sunk cost fallacy. Like people going “Oh, I already have an account, might as well use it more.”
I think it’s very manipulative and should be regulated. There are legit reasons to lock thing behind a login screen, but never to the extent social media does it. It’s frankly disgusting.

I’m sure there are alternative sites you can go to instead of Pintrest to find what you want?

[rigel]

i completely feel you with this sentiment, and i believe you have every right to rant about this because ohhh boy. even though i often just roll with it when i have to i can't help but feel miffed whenever a site needs me to create an account just to use it if it's for something small. especially the big ones! i believe the same shit applies to twitter and tiktok (recently...? maybe i'm misremembering but i know for a fact that it wasn't always like that for either site) and like you said in regards to pinterest and instagram there's absolutely no need for them to require you to create an account. it's just a way for them to greedily increase their user count without any regard of genuine interest. i've deleted tiktok but i would send silly stuff to my friends, even if they didn't have it. why can't they see it just because they're not on the platform? i'm not going to make them sign up just to know the one goofy meme i thought they'd find funny/a clip that reminded me of them.

not only that but it's a lose-lose situation! the site barely gets any new kind of activity from me using their service (service doesn't sound like the right word, but you know what i mean), i have to face the guilt of having another account tied to my email that's only going to collect dust after i use that site for the one time i actually need it.

though, i'm not sure if these kinds of sites even care. so maybe it's really just a lose for us.

[wodaro]

This is why I used to primarily/only use tumblr for posting my art - but now it does the same thing! At least on mobile, I think blogs with their own .tumblr.com urls are fine; but tumblr doesn't give you one of those by default anymore which I'm quite mad about... I know more people use mobile than PC now but don't make the desktop version obsolete!!

But yes this is always very frustrating!! I don't have a tiktok account and my friends will try to send me videos sometimes. It kind of works but it won't let you view the post without a huge pop up telling you to make an account that blocks part of the video, and it won't let you navigate anywhere else! (and god forbid you try to rewind the video when it auto-mutes so you can't hear the first half  )

[j]

i share the sentiment.

out of interest, why do you want to use Pinterest or Tumblr specifically? could you find web revival sites that you could use for aesthetics? or, would searching something on wiby.me work to find images you could use?

[night-at-the-musian]

You are right and you should say it. It feels like major social media sites across the board are trying to kill the idea of lurking. "If you're not going to be a user of our site, then leave." This is bad for everyone across the board, but especially archivists like yours truly and some of my peers. We sometimes have to cite social media posts when talking about politicians and public figures, and we find it difficult to archive their posts now, even with some of us having accounts on certain social media. It's the next step of paywalling the internet. Journalism has been doing it for years, with articles behind paywalls; and it seems that social media is attempting to do the same. This does not bode well for academics and non-academics alike.

[bingus_baby]

why do you want to use Pinterest or Tumblr specifically?

The specific aesthetic I was looking up was princesscore. My hat is off to late Gen-Z/Gen Alpha for their hyper niche aesthetics, since it's easy to find and look up something very specific and get tons of results. That specific flavor of princess-y, frilly, ethereal aesthetic is what I was looking for and is hard to come by outside of the main social media sites. I just needed simple moodboard images, which is literally Tumblr and Pinterest's bread and butter. It's pretty much what they're designed for! It's also easy to go down the rabbit hole on those sites, which is what I wanted, rather than a search engine which can get trapped in a loop after a while. Pinterest makes it easy to dig deep and gradually refine what you're looking for and find exactly what you need. As far as social media goes, it's the most useful of the bunch as it hasn't strayed far from its core use, though it does come with the same baggage as other modern sites. (Hence this thread existing.)

[wygolvillage]

Lurking is one of the best things about the internet and the fact that it's getting "forced out" sucks. It's probably gonna be really bad for researching and media preservation too. And it just annoys me to no end.

[larvapuppy]

I agree with this topic completely! But I also want to say that on the positive side of things, now you are more likely to find the artwork and photos in their proper context and posted by the original artists.  Pinterest has a lot of stolen art on it with no source, plus it clogs up search engine results... I'm personally not a fan.

[TheNothingMonster]

I was thinking about this topic yesterday! I was searching for some tutorials and one article that looked promising required an account to view it whole. Despite managing to find a workaround to access the entire text, embeds of the article which were required to understand it were missing. I later realised the article not only needed an account, but some short of membership too.

I couldn't disagree with most views here. Such systems are incredibly annoying and to be fair, in my perspective of the matter, they encourage more to reject rather than embrace the idea of making an account on their site. I just get immediately repelled whenever I come across this sort of thing and try to find unconventional options instead. This is why I find alternative front-ends so useful. I don't have to break down the contents of the page just to view a locked post. Unfortunately, such alternatives are quite limited. I would honestly be interested to see a new front-end of Pinterest.

From an artist's perspective, since social media websites more than often lock uploads from lurkers, most artists have to make so many more accounts on such a large variety of popular media sites to additionally ensure that their works can be accessed by most types of audiences. If I only had a Deviantart account for instance, the content I had marked as mature would not be visible to lurkers and I personally dislike that! This is why I have basically moved the majority of my works onto my site. Everyone can see them without losing track of anything and I also make sure that the external hosts I use for larger files (such as videos and music) are equally accessible to everyone. Can't find something I made? Just look at my website! No accounts required.

[Gans]

Options:
Was about to mention Deviantart. Still plenty of great images there.
And then there are those free licensed GPL image sites... if there is a topic they cover well, it's "background images".
Maybe even Wikipedia has some good photos to offer?

Requiring an account for one of these "walled gardens" is a no-go for me as well.

[Snow]

I've never liked this idea that it's mandatory you need an account in order to see or do anything on a website. It feels very excluding, like you are unwelcome by default. You're not welcome in the "club" unless you have a membership, and I just don't think big platforms should be like that. Twitter (I refuse to call it by the name it is currently rebranding to) sucks and always has, but it's ludicrous that now they've made it that you need an account to even see anything on the site. Is there any genuinely good reason to limit normal access to the site like this? The only reason I can think of (and it's not even a good reason) for that decision would be as a means of forcing the creation of more accounts to make the service more "popular", I guess.

I'm going on a tangent here but I really wish giant corporations would stop implementing the most asinine changes imaginable to their sites. If it ain't broken, don't fix it, you know? It's still unbelievable to me that YouTube flat-out removed the number of Dislikes on a video - a decision that nobody liked, let alone asked for, yet they refuse to undo this. Also, YouTube Shorts has some of the most poorly thought-out design I've ever seen. Why can't you scroll through/seek on a YouTube Short when watching from a PC? Shouldn't that be one of the most basic functionalities of a video on the Internet? The overall layout of YouTube gets worse by the year too. I'm gonna stop here otherwise I'll end up spiraling into a massive rant over it.

Case in point, it's gross how much control these giant corporations have when it comes to making big decisions and drastic changes to their sites. The millions of people who use these services don't even have a say in the matter. Don't like our outlandish changes and ridiculous implementations nobody asked for? Too bad so sad.

Really wish it didn't have to be this way.

[luci/sirius]

I notice that this tends to be more pushed on phones because it'd encourage using their app more. Its more frustrating than anything considering I'd only wanted to read one post or look at one image. Sometimes you can bypass it if the page is archived on the wayback machine.

[sokil]

I notice that this tends to be more pushed on phones because it'd encourage using their app more. Its more frustrating than anything considering I'd only wanted to read one post or look at one image. Sometimes you can bypass it if the page is archived on the wayback machine.

ugh, reddit did this and it's immensely frustrating! any time i've tried searching for an answer/solution to something on reddit (because reddit has basically become the only way to get genuine answers anymore...separate topic, though), it would force me to use the app because so many subs were marked as 18+ or the mobile browser version was just so broken. whenever i find myself having to use reddit for something, i try to stick to the old site on desktop as much as possible because of this. not to mention the obvious of their official app is hot garbage, and we can't use any third party clients anymore (that functioned far better) because spez got greedy :\ such is life. but again, i digress. urgh.

I was thinking about this topic yesterday! I was searching for some tutorials and one article that looked promising required an account to view it whole. Despite managing to find a workaround to access the entire text, embeds of the article which were required to understand it were missing. I later realised the article not only needed an account, but some short of membership too.

i hadn't even thought about the additional required membership part of it until now - the amount of times i've run into that problem is probably equal to the number of grey hairs on my head!  in my case, this has typically been an issue when attempting to find books or papers, etc. which i suppose is a bit different (while still very annoying!).

though, if i'm honest, i expect social media to follow this trend soon. actually, i'm a little surprised twitter hasn't already, given its aggressive promotion of paying to be verified and the subscription tiers. i despise the "reliance" that's been created where social media is the go-to for news most of the time rather than actual outlets/networks/journalists/etc. themselves, and closing it off even further in this way would do more damage than i can put into words. as others have already pointed out, it's already bad enough that they require you to sign up to view anything beyond an initial post that someone might link you.

Lurking is one of the best things about the internet and the fact that it's getting "forced out" sucks. It's probably gonna be really bad for researching and media preservation too. And it just annoys me to no end.

this 10000%. i couldn't even begin to express my frustrations about the whole topic in this context. i help archive things in my spare time, and the amount of stuff that has been/will be lost because of this just makes me really sad.

[xero333]

It is honestly infuriating. What i've noticed recently too is the lack of truly free stock image websites. It seems like all the ones I used to use now require you to either register or pay a subscription to get access to ANY images.

Another example is news articles where they hook you with the first paragraph of an article, then you scroll a bit further and a pop-up appears saying you need to pay to read the rest. Piss off lmao.