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Comment by bps4484 | Hacker News Reader

I agree with what everyone else has responded with about what makes instagram so huge, but there is something else that made it popular:

You only upload 1 photo.

True, someone can dump a lot of photos one at a time, but I think that's a bit of an instagram faux pas. It tends to be that if someone is on vacation (for instance) they don't dump all their photos on instagram, they choose their one best photo, crop it, add a filter to it, and try to make it great. You don't create an album like you do on facebook. This makes the quality of what you see in your feed a lot higher than what you would see on facebook. I've been told by a few heavy users of instagram that this is what they love about it.

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This is one aspect. Another is the ease of simplifying making a great photo. A large portion of more advanced photo editing is just moving various sliders around trying to find something that looks nice (yes, i'm oversimplifying) .. but taking this concept and putting it in the hands of regular users at no cost allows people the ability to take even crappy photos and make them look nice.

Even before instagram allowed full size photos, I was using another app to allow the whole photo to be edited, and then cropping the photo after, and then printing them out. My entire apartment is decorated with framed photos that I edited slightly in instagram, but you'd never know because the edits are very subtle. (to be clear i never even posted these photos to instagram, just used the app as the editor)

If you've ever edited a photo in instagram you realize the difference between the end result and what you started with.

Giving what used to be only reserved for people with expensive software and fancy computers to regular people (and making it easy), is definitely a huge piece of it too.

And another is having only a square aspect ratio, which simplifies framing for shooting, cropping AND displaying the photos (clean square grid, no pain from phone rotation to see landscape photos).

They actually got rid of this a little while ago, you can now share horizontal & vertical images within a range of aspect ratios [0].

[0] https://help.instagram.com/1631821640426723

My adolescent sister has straight told me she took down a photo of myself and her as a kid because it did not support her IG aesthetic.

IG is good because of that and this pushes IG to be more about experiences over BS news and meme-macros that set a FB feed into garbage. (Depending on the person obviously.) But the incentives for interaction are very different than those with a somewhat more "traditional" social app like FB. Furthermore it lacks the update nonsense of FB such that it doesn't feel like a chore to keep up with updates. The stream passes and what you miss you miss.

I think that is an important piece. That does make it feel more artistic and polished for sure.

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