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Comment by whywhywhywhy | Hacker News Reader

Remember when people kept claiming Facebook buying Instagram wasn't a bad thing because "they're not ruining it" "They're just leaving it as the same old Instagram".

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Uh that's what they've done. The article is about Instagram becoming like Facebook in the sense that this is a massive property on the scale of the core Facebook product. 700 million users vs Facebook's 2 billion.

Facebook has definitely not left it as the "same old Instagram". They've changed the home feed algorithm to basically the same as the Facebook home feed algorithm, and there's been a lot of content creators negatively impacted by it (I know this because of the industry my wife works in, which is having major issues now, where engagement has basically halved among anybody except the top maybe 5% of content creators).

So here's the thing: Facebook said they'd leave Instagram to be Instagram. But saying Facebook isn't holding that promise because things have changed isn't necessarily accurate.

The people in charge of Instagram may have used more and more of Facebook's tools, looked at better analytics, tweaked, used lessons learned from Facebook, etc.

While I agree it's unlikely that Facebook left them entirely alone I don't think it's necessarily fair to say they meddled just because things have changed. Nothing stays the same especially in the tech industry.

I agree with this. I a sure there were changes for the better and worse do to the acquisition; but Systrom said that Instagram retained a lot of autonomy. I am not a user of FB or IG but certainly over several years the platform would change; all good tech products evolve.

Contrasting this with Oculus; I think IG was given a lot less hands on MGMT.

Not to mention that Twitter is moving in the same direction

In 5 years we have the short-message Facebook (Twitter), the image Facebook (Instagram), the news Facebook (Facebook), the video Facebook (Youtube), maybe also the source code Facebook (Github [1]). That must be the market-driven diversity that my economics teachers loved to tell me all about.

[1] That one is a bit of a stretch, but you can already "follow people" and they market themselves as a social network, so...

I see all the posts of anyone I follow in the temporal order in which they post. Do you even selfie bro?

Organising content by what is relevant or interesting to you as an individual is hardly specific to Facebook or Instagram. Many companies are doing something the same thing e.g. Pinterest, Netflix, YouTube.

Even companies like banks are using individual Next Best Action models to determine what marketing decision is right specifically for you rather than something generic to your demographic.

Not at all. The article focuses on how Instagram has continually evolved itself despite the tendency of loyal users to decry change, specifically mentioning the ranked newsfeed and Snapchat-style stories.

Having said that, I don't think it's "Facebook" doing this. This has probably been Instagram's approach to product from day one.

I do. And I also recall thinking they were/are naive. I still think that.

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