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Comment by dmvinson | Hacker News Reader

I wonder about Instagram's success if they had decided to reject the Facebook acquisition. While there's no way to know who got the better end of the deal, it would be better for the tech ecosystem to have more large players and their success feels inevitable in hindsight.

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Facebook probably would have copied them somehow, though I don't know if it would have been successful. FB's duplicate of Snapchat has been a huge success and is a major part of IG today. I don't know if FB would have been able to successfully replace Snapchat without using the Instagram app as a springboard.

Instagram Stories seem like a logical extension of Instagram itself. Adding a pure photosharing section to Facebook or something like that in order to copy Instagram seems much more redundant and difficult.

To be fair though, the minds of Facebook have much more incentive to find a good way to do so than I do

they did copy them, it failed. it was called "facebook camera"

edit: they also had a snapchat clone called, "poke" that too failed. the only reason they got to snapchat was because instagram was so popular and they just went ahead and copied the most popular aspect of snapchat: stories.

I feel like Facebook would have found an alternative to squash the competition, but also, in this case I agree that they were already bound to be successful given the ease of use.

I found the story of Instagram interesting, if you're curious. Link to the "How I Built This" podcast episode on Instagram: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/national-public-radio/how-i...

At the time, all the pundits thought it ($1 BN) was insane.

They'd compare revenue and time since founding to acquisition price, and used it to dismiss the Silicon Valley bubble.

I guess they could’ve made more effort to cater to professional photographers (and steal marketshare from Flickr and 500px and similar) and offered paid plans.

I guess you could look at Snap. Independent of the other big players who ejected being acquired.

I think Instagram has much better business fundamentals than Snapchat though. There was nowhere near as much of a struggle to monetize Instagram as Snapchat from what I recall.

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