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Comment by Larrikin | Hacker News Reader

If it was some insignificant photo sharing app with 13 employees why did they pay a billion dollars for it? Everyone knew when the sale closed exactly what they were doing.

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It's fun to see everyone arguing about what "everyone" thought.. when... we can just... look... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817840 is a fun thread from 2012.

The top reply to the top comment has some useful quotes for the purposes of this discussion...

> This is not going to be one of the best tech acquisitions of the next decade.

> Instagram is a photo service in a sea of other photo services.

> Bookmark this comment. See you in 2022.

Heh.

The top comment compares it to YouTube.

Back then Google was trying to be social. Remember Google+?

https://www.joyoftech.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/1523.html

> Remember Google+?

How about Google People? [1]

[1] https://qntm.org/perso

how about Google Buzz?

https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/introducing-google-b...

How about Google Wave ?

https://support.google.com/answer/1083134?hl=en

How about Google Orkut?

https://support.google.com/orkut/?hl=en

Those people aren't putting in their own money. The people who did put their money into Instagram got to see behind the corporate covers, and they decided to buy anyway. It's very easy to say whether you'd invest $1B if you're not putting in any of your money.

I think you are being selective. I looked at the top 10 top-level comments and by my judgment:

1. bullish 2. bullish 3. neutral 4. neutral 5. neutral 6. neutral 7. bullish 8. bearish 9. bearish 10. neutral

Of the top top-level comments, you have to go all the way to #8 to find a bearish comment.

Replies to the top comment are more bearish because they're directly responding to a bullish sentiment.

On the other hand the top ten comments as a whole are 3 bullish, 5 neutral, 2 bearish which is certainly not an overwhelming sentiment in any direction. That's despite the fact that bullish comments on start-ups tend to get more votes because it's a start-up community.

Sure, plenty of people thought that it was a good purchase, but my point is nobody thought of it as buying out their competition. The transition into a social media platform and algorithmic content machine occurred under Facebook's direction.

> "Where's the money in Instagram?" Preventing Instagram from developing into something that has a negative effect on Facebook. It's a "keep your enemies closer" move.

- Larrys 2012

HN is notorious for this kind of thing, such as the iPod: "less space than a nomad, no wireless, lame". Due to not understanding how much consumers value simplicity.

It's a recurring cognitive dissonance between cynical tech people and the actual mass market. I mean I'm cynical about most things but the ones that aren't and who get onto the hype train earn big money off of it.

Every time I see a comment accusing HN of having some specific consensual position like a hive mind, I go back and see comments both contradicting and supporting the stance. In other words, different opinions. Every single time I check, and every single time it shows the original commenter engaged in selection bias.

This case is particularly wrong, as that iPod quote is from Slashdot. HN didn’t even exist in 2001.

https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...

But hindsight of HN is different from hindsight of FaceBook.

FaceBook was literally collecting data on what apps people were using on their phones and empirically saw the rise of Instagram. Of course the rise of Instagram didn't need to continue but that's why you buy all the realistic competitors so even if most of them fail you have a moat of dead companies.

To be fair, the iPod comment was on Slashdot

After trying to set up wireless on my printer interface and enter a password with up and down arrows rotating through an entire set of keys, I'm fairly convinced that no wireless on the iPod was massively correct. If people were expected to set up wifi by entering a password with a rotation device adoption would be miniscule.

Fair, but other than browsing the web, a Blackberry was superior for communications than an iPhone back then.

Dunno why the internet enjoys dunking so much on a poor anonymous poster who guessed wrong about a product that would catch on, whether that's the iPod, the iPad, Dropbox, etc.

We don't seem to spend half as much energy taking major news outlets to task when they similarly guess wrong, unless we feel that somehow adding a question mark negates any responsibility (i.e. "The Ouya will revolutionize gaming" vs. "Will the Ouya revolutionize gaming?").

You took "everyone" literally but it's actually like "a lot/majority held the opinion/it was easy to see".

The top comment compares it to YouTube as a great acquisition.

> If it was some insignificant photo sharing app with 13 employees why did they pay a billion dollars for it? Everyone knew when the sale closed exactly what they were doing.

If everyone knew, why was the purchase allowed?

HP bought palm for 1.2 billion dollars and then did nothing with it. Why is doing something anti competitive but doing nothing not? I’m sure there are other examples than the hp/palm situation.

>HP bought palm for 1.2 billion dollars and then did nothing with it. Why is doing something anti competitive but doing nothing not?

Not sure anyone thinks thats true at all.

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