From transcript:
> How many people have heard of Burbn/use it? .... Long story short, we worked on that for a little while and then realized it wasn't really going anywhere. But the thing people loved the most about it was actually sharing images of what they were doing.
> So what we did was we listed out these five problems. And I remember the top three that we circled. Number 1 was that mobile photos don't look so great. We've all had that experience... you're seeing the sunset, you take a snapshot, and it looks washed out, you can barely see the sun, etcetera. And we were like, 'That's the major problem we want to solve.' Number 2 was that uploads on mobile phones take a really long time. So we were like, 'What could we do around that?' Well, maybe if we started the upload way before you're done even editing the photo's caption, and what if we sized down the photo just to fit perfectly on the screen but nothing else? And that's the small little problem and solution that it turns out really delights people because they press 'done' entering their caption, it's already been uploaded.
From Stanford to Startup [Entire Talk] http://ecorner.stanford.edu/videos/2735/From-Stanford-to-Sta...
I (strongly) disagree. There is some incredible work on Instagram from (many) thousands of 'amateur' and professional photographers alike. "Serious photography" isn't just restricted to DSLRs/MF/etc.
In many ways, the constraints of mobile photography (lower res, fixed focal length, small viewport when consuming) has benefits, just like constraints elsewhere in photography.
(I follow many photographers who primarily or solely publish to Instagram; many who aren't marketing their paid services.)
https://www.instagram.com/1st/
https://www.instagram.com/dariusaskari/
https://www.instagram.com/msalisbu/
https://www.instagram.com/tiny_teaa/
I would even argue that Instagram has in some ways redefined professional photography (by enforcing different constraints than a professional photographer is used to).
Aggregator accounts are one of the best ways to discover high quality users.