Great article, this is how I feel about Instagram personally:<p>- Great app who turned a camera phone into a powerful camera for those who couldn't afford one of those expensive Canon/other brands of good cameras.<p>- Democratizing photography made phone vendors spend more time build better camera, we're at a point where cameras on certain phones are as a good as stand-alone cameras for photography.<p>- Filters have been around forever but with filters in instagram a whole generation became addicted to what they're able to do - turn a simple picture in a more interesting picture. To the point where people had to start create the #nofilter hashtag. Snapchat took the filters to the next level or rather the next iteration and also made itself a name because of them.<p>- Instagram also has it's darkness too: some people say you can get depressed if you browse instagram too much, seeing all those happy pictures of delicious food, beautiful looking humans, cars, paradise-like places, etc.
It sounds crazy right? :shrugemojigoeshere:<p>Short aside: Friends of friends who used to work in the same building with the founders of Instagram told me that on the night of their launch they stayed up till the early morning hours to fix their server issues because their initial instagram app was such a success! Honestly, you can't get more real than that - almost like a movie!<p>Thanks instagram co-founders for your creativity throughout the years: Although copying most of Snapchat's features wasn't a great move, it was a business decision that worked really well for your userbase..I can smell that being a very Facebook thing to do. I remember Snapchat turning down $3B acquisition offer, I guess that move really showed how much FB wanted Snapchat's features.<p>Back to Instagram - were the co-founders good businessman? I don't know, instagram pre-acquisition was very cool and ad-free. Now it's ad-ridden and almost an annoyance.
Every 3rd post/video/story has ads on it. Blocking those ads is a pain (I still haven't found a universal workaround since ad-blocking doesn't work as well). Another reason why I don't use FB's app.<p>You can smell the FB influence on Instagram far 10 miles, I would also feel sad to see my own creation being taken over by a bunch of product managers who come from the company who acquired my app because they need to "ad-ify all the things".<p>Finally, I think instagram is the only app I use on the daily, every single day (more than Uber/Lyft, more than Spotify and as much as Twitter but not as much as Chrome) ! Hope they can find something cool they're passionate about and build the "next" Instagram, even if it's not a camera-app!