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Comment by bluehorseray | Hacker News Reader

I think Meta really screwed up by not creating a stand-alone Reels app and instead trying to integrate it with Instagram. As someone who doesn't really like Meta as a company, I would admittedly be interested in trying out a totally new video-centric app released by them.

But instead all they did was make instagram a little worse. I mean they already had instagram videos, shoe-horning a fifth tab at the bottom isn't what people wanted. Seems like a really corporate, safe way of trying to compete.

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It's also stopped me uploading video to Instagram because now "your video will be uploaded as a Reel" and controlling the "share to Facebook" permissions for Reels isn't possible via facebook.com, you have to use the iOS app (which I do not have installed.)

Instagram won because it was a low-friction way of sharing images (cf Flickr at the time which was ungodly frictional.) Now it's just friction-a-gogo and if the communities I wanted to connect with existed elsewhere, I'd go elsewhere.

>I think Meta really screwed up by not creating a stand-alone Reels app

The fact you don't know of Lasso, but do know of Reels is telling of how well that strategy works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasso_(video_sharing_app)

It's their Google+ moment (as a reminder, Google+ destroyed Buzz, Reader, and heavily damaged Talk, YouTube and generally Google's reputation; I liked it, but it went too far on so many things). Or dare I remember when every app was integrating a "story" feature to compete with Snap ? Their are probably other examples of this.

This 100%

A lot of the comments here about why TikTok does so much better don't mention that the person that opens TikTok is already committed to watching lots of short videos, whereas the person using Instagram still has options other than the short reels, diluting the things people are doing.

I agree. There's something to be said for app/services that decide that medium sized is good enough and they'll stick to doing their one thing well. Flickr springs to mind (although is much past its hey-day). I know people who left facebook for Instagram because of the changes to facebook but the changes just followed them to Instagram.

They did actually create a standalone app, it was called Lasso. They put Lasso out there and did Reels at the same time. Then I guess their metrics made them decide to focus on Reels, possibly they looked at the wrong ones.

They did go through a period of releasing these experiments as extra apps but then they never push them beyond the first week and then wonder why they fail.

Agreed. I loved Instagram as pictures with an occasional video. I uninstalled it this year.

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