Dude, most people would cry if you took their Instagram from them, and they won't forget it about it tomorrow. You're shoving the realities of the market under the table as if they didn't matter. Go ask someone who pays for apps to tell you what Instagram is.
They might cry for a day or two, but they will forget it soon. Instagram is not a necessity, it is just another cool app, that's all.
It is not email, it is not SMS, it is not voice or browser, or car key finder etc. People will find some other site/app for their photos.
I don't have a car key finder, I don't use SMS, I could care less about my computer talking to me. Honestly, I could dispense with email and just talk on facebook really, because most of my inbox are ads nowadays. Just like my mailbox outside. So all of these needs you have told me are not really anything I need at all. So how is it that we have too completely different experiences?
Remember Maslow? Look at the hierarchy. Instagram is meeting the need of community, the photo sharing is a tool to meet that need. Same thing as Hacker News. We're both here to talk about this stuff, even though forums are a solved problem right?
The world is not just about solving problems. That's actually the part people care the least about. Hence why you can solve the problem of writing code to make an app and get paid peanuts and why the 'Yet Another Photo Sharing App" is paying you to do it.
That may be true for people who can't see past our current consumerist bubble. I admit that this is probably a large percentage in the developed world. But we need to have a global and long-term perspective.
That is precisely the global and long-term perspective for it. Funny how you say current consumerist bubble when the bubble has been up for longer than you or I have been alive. The issue was that software hadn't been able to provide a real consumer-quality experience.
Now that it has, and people are starting to buy it, I don't think they're suddenly going to want less of what what they are paying for.
> But we need to have a global and long-term perspective.
Wouldn't a global and long term perspective include other "not developed" countries entering the "developed" category and this "consumerist bubble" you mention?
Again, no one really cares about getting their problems solved. There is a FAR bigger market in meeting needs. Instragram is more about meeting the need of people finding a community and giving them tools to do that.
The kind of life that ya'll are espousing, this I hole myself in the ground, I run the cheapest shit I can buy, to use low-quality apps that don't let me have any fun, to most people, is actually a very boring way to use the internet and computers in general, and something no one is willing to pay for, hence why no one but those weird few that use computers this way, and the occasional post talking about how they spent all day setting up their mail servers because data privacy ya'll that no one gives a damn about.
You do realize that this doesn't help your point in the slightest, right?
It's been solved countless times, and yet Instagram is indescribably more popular than the other options.
In other words, it really doesn't matter if some dev can throw it together in a couple hours because of HTML/JS. What matters is the polish, followed by the users. Notice none of that includes "make it easy for the developer".
