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Comment by malingo | Hacker News Reader

I'm in the ultra minority, but I use https://instagram.com on my phone and I've never seen an ad.

I have never seen an Instagram ad on my phone using both the Android and iOS apps. I don't know why, but there are certain accounts that have ads disabled (I'm not the only one [0]). I guess I just got lucky. My alternate accounts all get ads like normal. I don't think I would use Instagram if I got ads like my friends do.

[0] https://www.fastcompany.com/90166955/i-have-a-secret-ad-free...

huh, how odd. I've never seen ads on Instagram either, and assumed that was the default experience. I guess the A/B control group gods smiled on us.

That's incredible; I'll consider myself lucky and keep enjoying it for now.

Edit: I had assumed the trick was using the mobile website, since I used to see ads when I used the Android app.

Are you able to block the unlabeled sponsored content the article is referring to?

How?

Adblocker in their browser, maybe?

Instagram ads appear in feeds as normal posts. I would assume that they are not blockable.

At least on Twitter, it's fairly easy to build a filter for µBlock (or similar blockers) that will trigger on having "promoted" within a Tweet <div> and hide it. At least in the Instagram app, the ads have the same "promoted" text in their heading, so similar filtering can probably be applied to the web version.

It's harder than that: https://twitter.com/aaronkbr/status/1071214578980261888

"Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 css classes to every single post in the timeline to make it more difficult to identify and block 'Sponsored' posts, oh my."

Damn. I'm kinda happy it's easier with Twitter. This is some bullshit...

AFAIK there aren't any ads when visiting via the website. Only in the app.

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