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Comment by sgdesign | Hacker News Reader

I'm starting to realize that Instagram is not the service I thought it was. I initially thought it was Flickr with social features, but more and more it's turning into Facebook with photos.

There is zero content discoveries features, so you have no way to get new followers or find new people to follow. And the top posters are all teenage pop stars that I've never even heard about who post completely uninteresting photos.

The more Instagram turns into Facebook, the more this opens up a spot for another company to build an actual social network around photos. Whether this will be 500px, Flickr (again), or somebody else entirely, I don't know.

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As soon as i read that FB was buying Instagram i quit and deleted my Instagram account. It was too predictable that something like this will happen.

Mark Zuckerberg is in a horrible position. I bet he would love to just build a cool and useful product. Instead he is damned to roll out all these awful money making features. And quick. Not only for his investors but also for the staff that owns FB stock.

How smooth could FB move along if their investors trusted them like they trust Jeff Bezos and his very long-term view.

How smooth could FB move along if their investors trusted them like they trust Jeff Bezos and his very long-term view.

I never looked at it that way. Great thought.

You say it like they have a reason to!? Amazon had a solid plan.

I think facebook could make quite a bit of money if they charged for their developer API.

Trust is earned. Zuck hasn't earned it yet. Not in the eyes of Wall Street.

Look what Bezos had to go through to get where he is today: http://i.imgur.com/2ie9t.png

Sounds like the Eyes of Wall Street will end up sinking Facebook if they're not careful.

It should be noted that Bezos also had significant bond issues that nobody thought they could make payments on. They were down in the junk bond basement. If he had failed to make those payments, Amazon would have become yet another failed dot com, just like eToys. (Which went out of business while making a profit - just not enough profit to make bond payments on excess warehousing purchased because they overestimated growth for 2000 after underestimating it in 1999.)

What's the alternative? A cool and useful product that makes revenues how? How do you propose that Instagram actually make money?

Not attacking. Just wanted to hear more specific thoughts.

Flickr, deviantART model - Freemium

Would it be viable to let users opt-in to selling their photos, with users and Instagram splitting the money? That seems to be a system that would appeal to both sides.

Mark Zuckerberg made his own bed. He can't be trusted no matter what you say, just look at how Facebook handles privacy!

I've always had issues with certain details on Flickr (perhaps since the Yahoo acquisition; I honestly can't remember what was just carried over) such as the inability to download all your photos at once for backup, lockout of your own photos when your pro membership expires (combined with the aforementioned non-feature), and some other things. But as far as I can tell, the community is definitely there. Whenever I am doing research on1 particular piece of equipment or materials (chemicals mostly) I'll often find a fairly helpful discussion on Flickr, and with plenty of well-tagged shots to back it up.

Earlier this year while I was staying in Ginza for the weekend a spring popped inside one of my lenses. I have some experience repairing and rebuilding mechanical SLRs (not so much lenses) but without any tools or parts I was hoping to find a repair shop nearby that wouldn't break the bank. Ended up finding a pic on Flickr from someone who had the same issue a few years ago of him and the repairman with his Victor Hasselblad diploma, and his business card. Totally random place on the 8th floor in San-chome, but he was a great guy who I never would've met if not for that post.

What would you have them do when your Pro a account expires?

I would like downloading everything to zip to be a pro feature, and a reminder that the feature exists in an email maybe one week prior to expiration. If customers leave, let them leave happily. They'll be much more likely to come back when they want/need the service again.

Flickr never locks you out of access to your photos, per se.

The only difference is that your photostream is limited to 200 photos. Every other way that photos are accessed continues to work - whether you've embedded them on blogs, other people favorited them, etc.

There are 3rd party tools to export your photos from Flickr via the API. Flickr hasn't written their own exporter (they probably should) but exporting apps aren't blocked.

That's what I thought too, but when I tried to grab them with existing apps the only way I could get it to work was by adding everything to a group and then searching for that. Can't remember if it was FlickrDown that finally worked or something else– three others flat out failed to capture anything until I resubscribed. So in theory they're still there, but they sure don't make it easy.

> I've always had issues with certain details on Flickr (perhaps since the Yahoo acquisition; I honestly can't remember what was just carried over) such as the inability to download all your photos at once for backup

The dozens of Flickr downloader apps, and countless free scripts on GitHub, let you not only download them all for backup, but often will keep them in sync with folders. Even iPhoto has this sync built in.

> lockout of your own photos when your pro membership expires (combined with the aforementioned non-feature), and some other things.

They notify you before it expires, and said tools take not long at all.

What's more, their policy is incredibly generous: they retain all the photos for you, and when you re-up, everything's back as it was. That's extraordinary customer service.

>There is zero content discoveries features, so you have no way to get new followers or find new people to follow.

Instagram has had an Explore view for a while now.

>And the top posters are all teenage pop stars that I've never even heard about who post completely uninteresting photos.

To be honest, I look at a lot of Instagram data because I work on a photo sharing startup that uses their API extensively, and the network as a whole is completely dominated by teen girls vying for each other's attention. The amount of content they create and consume is mind numbing.

well i sure hope it's Flickr again!

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