If all you're doing is keeping up with a tight-nit group of friends, you could use a million other services. Group SMS, I-message, discord, Hangouts, even plain old email.
Obviously there's a a key difference between instagram and all those others services I just mentioned and I posit that common difference is why you're using instagram instead. What is it?
The key difference is that all those other services you list have UX that is mostly centred around active use ("Check this out: Your friend Joe is doing a thing right now!"), while Instagram's UX is mostly centred around passive use ("Now that you have some free time, let's catch up on what your friend Joe did last week").
Ultimately they can all be used for the same purpose, sure. At the end of the day you're pushing the same bits around. But UX can make all the difference.
The mechanics of something like Facebook are that you have your “friends” and people can engage as much or as little as they like or dip in and out. I find I’ll occasionally post something that relates to overlapping friends circles but people can easily ignore stuff that doesn’t really involve them. It’s a very different model from a much more deliberate mailing list or SMS chat.
I do have some group chats and email threads but there’s a broader that extends beyond that which social media apps can be useful for.
> Obviously there's a a key difference between instagram and all those others services I just mentioned and I posit that common difference is why you're using instagram instead. What is it?
It’s the media bit… Insta is created to share pictures and videos with your _own_ selection of followers. You couldn’t do that in WhatsApp without creating some horrific cartesian product of different groups chats for every node on your social graph. Even then the UX is designed around messaging, not as a content repository.
This has to be one of the most asinine takes I’ve ever seen.
Yeah you couldn't do it by whatsapp, but you could do it with discord, slack, teams, skype and a bunch of other services that you failed to mention to create a strawman.
That you get so defensive is really, and I mean REALLY, telling of the real reason.
You couldn’t create anything resembling the Instagram experience on any of those services, let alone using some of your other suggestion like email. If the only thing you think a substitute service requires is a way to send images, then you could replace Instagram with the postal service by that standard.
The most absurd part of this argument is that discord, WhatsApp, messenger, etc… are all also social media platforms. This is by far the silliest “well actually” I’ve ever seen on HN.
Discord is a social media platform. And you absolutely could. I’ve been in quite a few servers where channels were used as a dumping ground for whatever people were doing at a time and felt like showing off. It’s an extreme example, but one that works because ultimately Instagram’s ability to display this information is no different than anything else’s. You simply believe Instagram is some perfect solution that cannot be replicated and refuse to understand the basic definition of a social network.
You _could_ use email as an Insta replacement as well. But the suggestion that they deliver the same service or experience is rather contrived.
But that’s really besides the point, because as you said, they’re all social media platforms, and it’s social media when somebody posts content on them to their large public audience, and it’s social media when I post to my small audience of friends. It’s the suggestion that one of those scenarios is social media and the other isn’t that’s completely illogical.
If all you're doing is keeping up with a tight-nit group of friends, you could use a million other services. Group SMS, I-message, discord, Hangouts, even plain old email.
Obviously there's a a key difference between instagram and all those others services I just mentioned and I posit that common difference is why you're using instagram instead. What is it?