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Comment by spike021 | Hacker News Reader

Not sure I understand what you mean.

You can set your Instagram to private and even if friends from Facebook see that you have an account there they can't just view your content. They'd need to send a follow request to do that.

IG can easily still be a private space. I don't accept everyone who's on my friends list from Facebook.

e: Also, while it's potentially more work there's nothing stopping you from having multiple accounts on Instagram. The UI is actually pretty simple when it comes to swapping between more than one as needed.

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You're absolutely correct. I'm not arguing whether it's possible to use Instagram like one would use Snapchat — it is, and my points won't make any sense from that POV.

I was laying down my observations on what's the default, and hence seemingly most common behavior for the given network. All snapchat accounts are private by default (yes, you can make stories public like on Instagram). All Instagram accounts are public by default (yes, you can make it private) The power of default has a significant role to play in how people think about and use a particular network. This is even more true for the people who are not very tech savvy, which is the majority.

Again, not arguing if Instagram is better than Snapchat, or vice versa. Instagram probably will win the majority of the market, and will have an order of magnitude, if not more, users, engagement and revenue. Will Snapchat become irrelevant and die? I'd say it's too early to make that call.

Snap lets you send stories (or whatever they're called) to specific groups of people, yes?

That's a huge differentiator, in my book. It provides a simple interface for sharing experiences with specific people. Not really any different than a group SMS or other form of group chat, really. But a very different experience from Instagram, for sure.

You can do that in Instagram as well. You can create chat groups and specifically send them one of the exploding "snaps" for lack of a better word.

Instagram has 1:1 feature parity now. You might not have checked it out in a while. I've been on since it launched when they didn't have parity but they quickly caught up.

It's possible to send disappearing video or photo stories to only selected individuals or selected group chats or a mix of both.

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