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Comment by code_duck | Hacker News Reader

Instagram is basically Twitter where you have to post a photo.

I agree that Instagram could not have grown to this size without being part of Facebook.

I think it could have been the other way around. Media and folks could have compared the growth of Instagram, which would have been a competing product with Facebook, and it could have given good mileage to Instagram, especially after the privacy fiasco and hate towards Facebook, Instagram could have been positioned as a Facebook replacement and there by shooting up it's value further.

> Facebook replacement

Instagram has always been supplementary to Facebook, it was never a candidate to replace it.

Yeah, I think given their UI/model it is pretty difficult to have any long form discussion on Instagram. The "news" part of the newsfeed as always been FB's killer app. Or at least that and event planning, though I think it's not impossible for Instagram to develop a product around that.

The only "long form discussions" I frequently see on Facebook are bad political arguments. Most people don't really care what Uncle Billy has to say about millenials.

Agree on the event planning though. I think an Instagram Events would immediately get adopted by many young people.

I keep hearing (anecdotally, of course), that people are starting to prefer Instagram because long form discussions are more difficult there. They seem to be seeking an escape from the news.

Fair point about the event planning ... if FB were to cross-launch the sane event planning DB on instagram and whatsapp, I suspect that would be pretty much a killer app.

> They seem to be seeking an escape from the news.

I mean that's about as 2018 as it gets. I'm not entirely sure if that's a permanent trend though.

Honestly, I see this as part of an _accelerating_ trend. I don't think it's going to change, and is only going to become more pronounced.

People in my circle of glass artist related accounts post a lot less politics on IG than FB. It is harder to repost articles, as well as have discussions as you noted (I think I lived through a week where IG was experimenting with adding threaded comments, though). I find FB’s curation of political posts to be poor and the venue to be an embarrassing one in which to discuss politics. So, I use IG when I want to connect with these folks.

Interesting, I've found Facebook's event management for large groups to be terrible. Our Jeep group has largely migrated from Meetup to Facebook, and the impact on event coordination has been largely negative.

It's by far the best because everyone is on it though -- that shouldn't be understated.

The irony is that Instagram _still is_ thought of as a Facebook replacement. I saw several people in the past few months say something like "Hey fb sucks I'm deleting my profile you can hit me up by text, twitter, instagram, etc..."

This acquisition was genius on Zuckerberg's part.

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