I appreciate (and encourage) using real life problems as a pretext for researching new topics and developing new skills, but

1. I'm really curious as to what's the desired outcome here? A spambot to flood people's notifications?

2. I'll admit that I have absolutely no idea how Instagram's API layer (and protection) works but wouldn't capturing the HTTP calls a more appropriate and easier approach to take?

I tried all sorts of automation in the past and always get banned at the end. Not worth it. Use AI or whatever to generate your social media content but always post it manually for best engagement and not getting banned

As someone that has recently built out a once-daily crawler for a not so ban-happy site, thanks for the article.

I haven’t had to go the CV route yet, but I know it’s a matter of time once they “improve” the site and it starts breaking regularly.

>A full screenshot is huge. Over 7 million pixels on a typical screen.

Hmmm i don't think that's true? 1080p is 2M, 2K is 4M, 4K is 8M. Are we really in an era where full 4K is "typical"? For reading Instagram? I've got 4 screens i use on a daily basis that are all 2K or less. I mean my TV was only 1080p until a few months ago lol. Maybe I'm just slow.

Also: you're automating the browser, just make the window smaller then!

what if i were purely interested in archiving local community posts? does anyone have experience on scraping without getting banned?

i have no interest in juicing engagement, purely from a "20 years from now it'll be cool to know this existed at all" aspect.

Thank you. Thanks to you, I was able to break free from my Instagram addiction

This is also why creating a regular account is so difficult on all the social networks. You sign up and it is instantly banned and you have to go through a whole review and approval process just to use it. Incredibly user and company hostile.

This is not related to the article. But I would like to see people generated feeds rather than automated feeds.

e.g. contradictory feeds.

1. motivational post followed immediately be demotivational post iteratively. this will allow people not be stuck in one basin of attraction.

2. wealth flaunting posts followed by poverty posts to elicit a strong contrast and inequality.

3. science posts followed by pseudo-science posts

4. feeds that are generated like DJ sets. instead of playing with music, the feed would play with emotions.

Other such combinations.

A spam post here about how to spam Instagram. This is what the internet is now.

Every product zuckerberg has is cancerous except WhatsApp