Update: InstaCrawlR still crawling
Done and gone? Many things have happened since I’ve shared my InstaCrawlR code with the internet. I wrote my Master thesis on influencer fraud (more on that soon), finished university, and started my career at the world’s beauty company #1.
The world does not stand still. Things change. And so does Instagram and its codebase. Close to a hundred people visited my GitHub repository and tried InstaCrawlR just to find that it stopped working.
Last week, an aspiring PhD student from Spain contacted me via mail. He pointed my nose to an error message.
> extractInfo(index) [1] “extractInfo function called” Error in as.POSIXct.default(posts[i, 6], origin = “1970–01–01”) : do not know how to convert ‘posts[i, 6]’ to class “POSIXct”
Was it his fault? It sure did work on my machine. Does it still?
Curiously, I opened the code in R Studio and tried my luck. Same thing. Instagram must have changed the way their server responds to a json request.
Fortunately, it was just a matter of changing the structure of their response. For example, the number of Likes are now in column 11 instead of 10.
And the reason my program threw the error above is simply that instead of the timestamp in column 6 is now the number of comments or something like that. So the function must fail.
Five minutes later, all errors were fixed and a new version of jsonReader.R is ready to run on the soon-to-be-PhD’s computer. I’ve updated the code on GitHub as well. For now, InstaCrawlR works again, at least until the next changes on Instagram.
I’ve missed something? Anything else not working? Please keep contacting me on LinkedIn or by other means.
Best,
Jonas
PS: If you’re not a programmer but still want to use the script, feel free to write me on LinkedIn to talk about a scalable server solution, custom scripts, and general consultancy.
This article is related to:
Social Network Analysis of Related Hashtags on Instagram (using InstaCrawlR)
