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Comment by nmeofthestate | Hacker News Reader

I simply do not understand the attraction of Instagram. My brother posts photos on it, and the quality of the pictures is rubbish. They're small, with compression artifacts. The app itself doesn't even let you pinch to zoom without snapping back when you let go (fair enough given how low resolution the pictures are).

Obviously I'm looking at this wrong - it's clearly not an app for posting photos, because it sucks at that.

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Clearly you missed the whole point of the app, which is not about posting pictures with perfect quality.

To expand, the fact that the pictures are imperfect quality pretty much is the whole point. The inability to really zoom in, all of the filters that adjust the hue/sharpness, etc are all things that help you hide away imperfections in your photo and draw attention to the broader gist of "look at what I'm eating/where I'm traveling/what I'm doing/how pretty I am!"

The point of Instagram isn't to be able to see the wrinkles in that model's face. The point of Instagram is that you can't see the wrinkles in that model's face.

Ah, that explains why they won't allow you to post photos from their website.

I do some serious-amateur and (when I'm lucky) semi-pro quality photography using a "real camera". I was going to post some of them on Instagram, but discovered that I can't do it except maybe via the phone app. But there's no way I'm shuttling photos from my desktop to my phone so that I can upload them to Instagram.

There is an Instagram app available on the Windows store for some reason. You'd think it would make sense to build a better web client instead, but there you go.

Apparently you can post from the browser if you change your user agent and pretend to be using a mobile browser, so it's specifically desktop browsers that they don't want you to use.

Use Developer Tools to emulate mobile and you can upload photos.

Instagram is by far the best big social network for "good photography"; I don't see how you can miss that. It might be due to just following / seeing pictures from your brother or IRL friends. Go follow some random accounts that post great photos related to your interests and you'll quickly discover the joy.

I use instagram almost entirely to showcase my photography:https://www.instagram.com/imjustjk/. It's certainly not a perfect platform but it's good enough (and better than most). It's a mobile first platform that's simple, intuitive, and has huge adoption. It also has great loading speed for the amount of content and even the quality of images. I'm not sure what you expect on a mobile app? Do you want to be able to load full 42 megapixels images of mine on your phone?

Well the photos my brother takes are studio based - he's getting into product photography, so the shrunken, low quality pictures served by Instagram are just frustrating - I want to see something where I can zoom in to enjoy looking at the details, rather than something that's a quarter of my phone screen at native resolution.

It's an app for lifestyle porn as far as I can tell.

the frustration is the attraction

its like why cosmopolitan gives bad and ridiculous relationship advice

but yes, you are looking at it wrong

Instagram gets away from all scrutiny by looking like a toy. Like when you are hacking someone's wifi with a Nintendo 3DS while they are wondering the appeal of this cute device for children. Instagram is likely the most technologically sophisticated social network out there and has been for a while.

The UI merely escaped feature creep for most of the decade.

It's not an app for posting photos exactly (even though it is), it's an app for showing people things. Here's my food, here's my outfit, here's what I was doing today, here's what the sunset looked like on my vacation. It's an interesting take on communications between people. It has its dark side (people going out of their way to "get the gram" so they can be envied by their friends instead of just trying to enjoy things organically; people, especially young women, who become overly pressured by their peer group to look and act a certain way) but when used well it can be a nice way to keep up with what your friends are doing. Think about it like a modern take on post cards.

I used to agree. But when I tried it myself, I got it. It provides pretty much the right level of intuitive control over how you present your own content. It's a really elegant platform for sharing and consuming visual content.

Instagram is more open than FB for example. As others said, you can also find people who post high quality pictures from camera on it, but that defeats the initial mission of Instagram (capturing the moment). Looking at images is somehow more easy when you are on the go than watching at a page full of text (ala Reddit). Mobility, messaging are some of the success factor of Instagram in my opinion.

I don't use Instagram so I don't have the app installed, but sometimes I land on some page on instagram.com. That site is awful, and considering how much resources they have I have to assume that every annoyance is there on purpose. Middle clicking an image to open it in a new tab doesn't work in Firefox, and comments are really frustrating. If the image isn't very tall the area for comments isn't tall either, so you have to scroll through a tiny box to read comments. I can't find a way to search tags on their website without searching for it on Google first.

Like you said, it's not an app to post photos. It's all about the feed of pictures, not the pictures themselves. It's visual communication, not art.

Like all social media it's what you make it.

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