Hacker News Reader

HNHacker News

Top New Best Ask Show Jobs

Comment by whateveracct | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

whateveracct·

Instagram Reels is launching at a "convenient" time.. . . ..

View on HN

Especially right after Zuckerberg gets grilled in congress for being anticompetitive.

Meanwhile the president threatens to ban facebook's biggest competitor...

I do wonder if there's a deeper connection than Facebook simply having this feature ready to go and releasing it early. Was there cooperation of the sorts "you ban TikTok and we'll release Instagram Reels early to help distract upset users"?

Facebook has had a Tiktok competitor called Lasso for 2 years. It failed though. They are shutting that down and simply porting the features over to their existing Instagram app.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/01/lasso-facebook-tiktok-shut...

My comment wasn't about whether they already had it or not. It is obvious they were already working on it. No one could develop and release a feature so quickly. It is about the timing of the release, which could have very well been cooperatively timed.

AFAIK , tiktok's demographic (teenagers) is no way going to do the same things on facebook . It's probably going to be a new company (Franken-Vine maybe)

People said the same thing about IG Stories but now I'd say those Stories are bigger and more mainstream than Snapchat's.

I've had a number of tik tok-ers tell me they don't care what app it is. They care about the community and creators, and they will find each other on whatever replaces TT.

I was intrigued by this sentiment, the idea that the conceptual social network is the thing of value, not the application one interacts with it through.

Isn't this how real life social networks work? Some of your friends are on phone only, some you email, some on a chat service?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com