Instagram's been a pita to use without a login for years, they've recently got even worse though.

This is my recollection as well when they all realized they were feeding the bots that the free use became broken

My recollection is that this happened pretty much immediately after Twitter became X.

No, it was a test by some misguided PM who was looking at her signups metric and not much else. It rolled out, everyone hated it, it got rolled back after some senior people complained. When Elon took over they turned the feature back on and then evidently rewrote it to be even more annoying and we have what is in place today. Source: my comments against it are probably in Slack somewhere if Elon is still paying for that

That’s roughly when I stopped opening Twitter links, I still sometimes see posts from that platform, but mostly just as screenshots and with the discussions elsewhere. I don’t care for their dark patterns.

People already knew the value of data long before LLMs were popularised and web scraping has been a thing since the very beginnings of the web.

Why you’re describing isn’t a recent phenomenon. Not even remotely.

Facebook has never allowed people read only views to their platform. And Expert Stack Overflow like Quora used the same dark patterns you described too.

Instagram has always redirected me to a login page. Twitter only did after Elon and his friends went batshit ruining the website.

Best comment.