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Comment by stinkytaco | Hacker News Reader

I'm genuinely curious what I'm supposed to take away from that. Is or is not Instagram one of the best tech acquisitions of the last 10 years?

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The takeaway was that the user made an incorrect guess based off the information they had available.

Instagram has turned into one of the best acquisitions made in the last ten years, keeping the Facebook brand relevant to a younger audience than the main website.

But at the time it didn’t seem like all that special of an application given the nascent market in which it sat.

The comparison to YouTube still seems apt. It's very hard to avoid YouTube if you interact with the Internet at all, no matter your age or interests. On the other hand, I suspect most people over 30 can go weeks without ever interacting with Instagram.

I don't have an Instagram account. When someone sends me an Instagram link, my gut feeling is that I won't be able to access the contents, so I don't even bother. Instagram, much like facebook, feels to me like an alien portion of the web.

I can open most YouTube links that my location allows, regardless of being signed in or not. YouTube still feels like it's part of the web.

I'm also unfamiliar with how the comparison shakes out, because I don't know the details. From a pop culture perspective, it doesn't seem equivalent - didn't TikTok eclipse Instagram in a big way? I know they're not the same medium, but I thought TikTok ate Instagram's userbase anyway. Regardless, I feel like YT is way bigger than Instagram, but I am also, as they say, completely out of touch.

That this one guy was WRONG

Yes but it sure didn't seem like it back in 2012 when Facebook acquired them. Keep in mind back then, IG was just the main feed and search IIRC. It looked like a more social alternative to Flickr.

They're saying it isn't one of the best acquisitions. Turns out it was for FB

Of course it is! Without Instagram Facebook would be irrelevant for anyone under 25.

That no matter what, you probably need more than 640K of RAM.

Especially in order to run the Facebook app.

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