HN comment April 9, 2012: Bookmark this comment. See you in 2022 | Hacker News Reader

HN comment April 9, 2012: Bookmark this comment. See you in 2022

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103 pointsnabla941 comments

Paging @georgespencer (who hasn't posted or commented for a couple of years).

But seriously, Instagram has been Facebook's Youtube. 1.4B users: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...

It also looks like they are similar in size, with annual revenues in the $20+ billion range.

Kinda sad that the internet never seems to remember the guys who make insightful, prescient comments, but boy do they remember the comically incorrect predictions. Random music fan who thought the "new" iPod looked lame compared to his Creative Zen? Lives forever in infamy. HN SysAdmin who thought DropBox was silly because he can write his own backup scripts in Bash with rsync? That guy will be the face of "Linux Users Who Don't Understand The Average Consumer" for decades to come.

Just as a counter-example, one of my favorite HN comments of all time is from someone who remembered someone (kinda meta, right?) who called the Theranos fraud almost exactly years before it came out.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29765308 (this is the thread remembering that comment)

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6349349 (this is the thread with the original comment)

I also enjoyed all the HN takes that counteracted the uBeam hype machine in wireless energy transmission

I for one have learned through a lot of these over-hyped (and fraudulent) companies that when the public thinks something sounds impossible/highly infeasible, but the VCs swear there's something there, it's *much* more likely that the VC is buying into hype without doing sufficient research than it is that they know something that a generally intelligent public doesn't.

Usage really took off after 2012, so it worked out? That said YouTube is way more foundational to the web than Instagram (and more used[1]), if you're looking to view* any medium to long form video content you'll chances are, you'll be on YouTube.

Was there anything FB could have bought in 2012 which would have been as good an acquisition as YouTube was to Google in 2006? Nope? I'm sure they hoped Oculus (2014) was but that sure ain't it yet.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/04/07/social-media...

First, I misread your comment as YouTube being integral for long-term content storage of videos, but I think this is still a useful example:

The Memorial Service after the 22 July attacks in Norway [1] is only available for the public at youtube [2]. The national broadcasting agency, NRK, has a really good web player with a lot of shows and materials [3], but due to copyright issues, they cannot show the memorial service - despite this being, in my opinion, one of the most significant moments in modern Norwegian history. Even the official teaching materials related to the 22 July attacks are referring to the youtube recording [4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Norway_attacks

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNN2vuP2Nm0

[3] https://tv.nrk.no/

[4] https://22juli-ressurser.no/resources/minnemarkeringer/

I'm genuinely curious what I'm supposed to take away from that. Is or is not Instagram one of the best tech acquisitions of the last 10 years?

That no matter what, you probably need more than 640K of RAM.

Especially in order to run the Facebook app.

That this one guy was WRONG

They're saying it isn't one of the best acquisitions. Turns out it was for FB

Of course it is! Without Instagram Facebook would be irrelevant for anyone under 25.

The takeaway was that the user made an incorrect guess based off the information they had available.

Instagram has turned into one of the best acquisitions made in the last ten years, keeping the Facebook brand relevant to a younger audience than the main website.

But at the time it didn’t seem like all that special of an application given the nascent market in which it sat.

The comparison to YouTube still seems apt. It's very hard to avoid YouTube if you interact with the Internet at all, no matter your age or interests. On the other hand, I suspect most people over 30 can go weeks without ever interacting with Instagram.

I don't have an Instagram account. When someone sends me an Instagram link, my gut feeling is that I won't be able to access the contents, so I don't even bother. Instagram, much like facebook, feels to me like an alien portion of the web.

I can open most YouTube links that my location allows, regardless of being signed in or not. YouTube still feels like it's part of the web.

Yes but it sure didn't seem like it back in 2012 when Facebook acquired them. Keep in mind back then, IG was just the main feed and search IIRC. It looked like a more social alternative to Flickr.

I'm also unfamiliar with how the comparison shakes out, because I don't know the details. From a pop culture perspective, it doesn't seem equivalent - didn't TikTok eclipse Instagram in a big way? I know they're not the same medium, but I thought TikTok ate Instagram's userbase anyway. Regardless, I feel like YT is way bigger than Instagram, but I am also, as they say, completely out of touch.

There's still a day left for it all to fall apart for Instagram.

The pattern at big tech companies seems to be that once they reach a certain size they lose their product focus and the money-focussed people take over.

This has definitely been the case at Facebook. The social media market was theirs to lose, and if trends in my circles are anything like typical, it seems like that's exactly what is happening. I'd put that down largely to user-hostile decisions that are pushing their users away (Facebook has turned from a place where you could see photos and personally written sharing from family and friends with a few adverts mixed in, to mixture of clickbait and a lot of adverts), and that they didn't need to make as they were incredibly profitable anyway.

I suspect Instagram (being owned by Meta) will go this way eventually. But for now they seems to have avoided the worst of this.

Why are we discussing a random 10 year old comment on someone's opinion on a random topic? Surely it cannot be the mere fact that someone asks to bookmark it for review 10 year later.

What is the OP looking to achieve, also given the title (which doesn't refer to the actual topic on the acquisition)? They want praise for putting this in their calendar? They feel we should put this George person in their place for getting it wrong?

Interestingly, I also had that comment favorited. I enjoyed it because it was a relatively reasonable take - but it shows how someone can make a prediction based on false assumptions. And of course the boldness of the take made it memorable.

I think it's kind of a lesson: dig deeper when you hear about an acquisition or major move that doesn't make sense. There are often larger implications.

It's possible OP thought it might be fun. I enjoyed it (most of the comments anyway). Thanks OP.

This is why I don't like to put predictions in writing. It's very hard to predict events over a 10 year time period. (you don't know what you don't know)

Even if you're wrong, I think it's a fun exercise from an anthropological perspective about what people thought and predicted based on the evidence available at the time.

Big fan of https://longbets.org/ as well for similar reasons.

I agree, it is fun. I remember the day this happening thinking they overpaid.

I wish there was a bookmark from 2021/22 on the price of BTC/ETH and the prevalence of NFTs in 10 years ...

I predict that predictions will get easier and automated over the next 10 year time period.

I'll bookmark this comment

I also don't put my predictions in writing, but I appreciate those that do. It's easy to look at the state of the world today and say, "Of course. How could it end up any other way?"

Looking at how badly old predictions miss the mark serves as a good reminder that the bets we make today for the future are probably just as wrong.

That is exactly why you should put predictions in writing!

Take a look at a project I worked on, Long Bets: https://longbets.org/

The theory is that putting predictions out there is the best way to learn. And looking at the results from this project, I think that's the case. The specificity of the predictions and the description of the reasoning helps us understand both the world and ourselves.

So I congratulate georgespencer for making a specific, testable prediction that turned out wrong. It's very interestingly wrong! Instagram didn't end up being just a photo service. Instead, it's a social phenomenon that uses photos in a deeply different way than we had seen previously. His prediction helps us see how much has changed in the 10 years since. There are a lot of people out there doin' it for the 'gram. There are plenty of people who life for and/or live off of it.

And personally, I suspect I would have agreed with georgespencer at the time. I like photography and like sharing photos. But I really dislike Instagram; it's not for me. So this is a reminder to me that just because a thing doesn't make sense to me doesn't mean it won't be hugely popular in world-changing ways.

Only if your self-worth is tied to being right.

Getting things wrong is common and thinking the reasons for being wrong is illuminating. Learning and calibrating from previous errors is a good thing.

10 years? You're very generous. I think we should write down our predictions exactly as a personal reminder of how wrong we can be in our understanding of the world in general. Most of us tend to just brush it off, which is why we constantly have analysts on tv explaining with hindsight why someone else's predictions for the past year were off, to ironically follow with predictions of their own for the coming year. And on the circle goes.

@nabla9: just curious, how did you find this and remembered?

He probably bookmarked the comment

They might have put it in their Outlook or Google calendar, haha.

@mikko (Mikko Hypponen) tweeted it. https://twitter.com/mikko/status/1512416500468101120

Can confirm.

how did you find this and remembered?

But the submitter nabla9 didn't even have that HN account in 2012!

He had a different one

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