I agree with what everyone else has responded with about what makes instagram so huge, but there is something else that made it popular:

You only upload 1 photo.

True, someone can dump a lot of photos one at a time, but I think that's a bit of an instagram faux pas. It tends to be that if someone is on vacation (for instance) they don't dump all their photos on instagram, they choose their one best photo, crop it, add a filter to it, and try to make it great. You don't create an album like you do on facebook. This makes the quality of what you see in your feed a lot higher than what you would see on facebook. I've been told by a few heavy users of instagram that this is what they love about it.

This is one aspect. Another is the ease of simplifying making a great photo. A large portion of more advanced photo editing is just moving various sliders around trying to find something that looks nice (yes, i'm oversimplifying) .. but taking this concept and putting it in the hands of regular users at no cost allows people the ability to take even crappy photos and make them look nice.

Even before instagram allowed full size photos, I was using another app to allow the whole photo to be edited, and then cropping the photo after, and then printing them out. My entire apartment is decorated with framed photos that I edited slightly in instagram, but you'd never know because the edits are very subtle. (to be clear i never even posted these photos to instagram, just used the app as the editor)

If you've ever edited a photo in instagram you realize the difference between the end result and what you started with.

Giving what used to be only reserved for people with expensive software and fancy computers to regular people (and making it easy), is definitely a huge piece of it too.

And another is having only a square aspect ratio, which simplifies framing for shooting, cropping AND displaying the photos (clean square grid, no pain from phone rotation to see landscape photos).

They actually got rid of this a little while ago, you can now share horizontal & vertical images within a range of aspect ratios [0].

[0] https://help.instagram.com/1631821640426723

My adolescent sister has straight told me she took down a photo of myself and her as a kid because it did not support her IG aesthetic.

IG is good because of that and this pushes IG to be more about experiences over BS news and meme-macros that set a FB feed into garbage. (Depending on the person obviously.) But the incentives for interaction are very different than those with a somewhat more "traditional" social app like FB. Furthermore it lacks the update nonsense of FB such that it doesn't feel like a chore to keep up with updates. The stream passes and what you miss you miss.

I think that is an important piece. That does make it feel more artistic and polished for sure.

Instagram was the first app of its kind to make phone cameras social.

At the time, about the only thing you could do with pictures you took with your phone was sync.

Instagram was released at a critical moment in history when phone cameras were starting to get good and cellular Internet was starting to get fast enough to reliably upload them.

You can't look at the landscape today and ask "Why is instagram popular?". You have to look at it in its historical context.

Source: radio interview with the founders

Facebook had image uploading via mobile at the same time instagram was purchased. So it isn't just that.

Instagram smartest thing they did was leverage the Facebook social graph (something much harder to do now) to integrate instagram photos as posts in the feed, so that when a user clicked on them, you ended up at instagram rather than staying inside Facebook.

Instagram was a camera + profile app. Snapchat was a camera+message.

Facebook took a long time to get mobile right. Instagrams simplicity, and Facebooks lack of response was what allowed Instagram to grow. And dont forget Instagram was originally more a photo hosting adoon for twitter, similar to imgur to reddit.

> leverage the Facebook social graph (something much harder to do now)

Could you give a bit more details about this?

Here's a good article on the subject: https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2013/01/24/my-pr...

One more: https://techcrunch.com/2013/01/18/facebook-data-voxer/

For anyone interested in listening to the interview, I believe aroman is referring to "How I Built This" from NPR: https://www.npr.org/player/embed/493923357/494083296

As an aside, our most successful projects were similar to this. Right place, right time, and people on HN would probably assume the MVP could be built in a week, which was true at least in our cases.

Yup. They were first and they iterated & made it great. Didn't even have to write an Android version for a while.

When you compare the amount of work required to get a startup off the ground then to what is required now. (dual mobile platforms & web & social) And the total number of apps & services. It's a deluge of information.

Then is there much change to start a service or company these days & see success? Maybe I'm getting too old, but normally I'd be full of ideas. These days I can't think of any.

The most distinctive thing about IG to me is that it is a 'safe space for narcissism'.

I agree with the other posters on Instagram's features leading to a lower volume of higher quality content.

The UI makes the app very much about sharing photos you've taken, making content about things you have done not things you have seen on the web. And the app lets you know that those things should be beautiful. By default profiles are public, making content production more selective, and content discovery less based on personal connections.

What's most interesting to me is how the product shaped the cultural norms on the service.

If Facebook is the lowest-friction/highest-distribution place to share what's going on inside your head, IG is the place for leisure choices as identity. There's not a range of reactions, because everything on the service should be an expression of individual pleasure.

Many posts and feeds seem to focus on conspicuous, aspirational consumption (apparel, beauty products, cocktails, destinations, art galleries, etc.). It was a very smart choice for an ad-network.

Why is Hacker news so popular, with its rudimentary comment system? The user community.

Instagram became popular with the right celebrities at the right time - someone internal to the company no doubt has the user acquisition timeline and has worked out who the "patient zero" was. This sparked a wave of people joining to follow them and has effectively supplanted OK! magazine and similar. Just have a look at the most popular accounts:

http://www.dailydot.com/debug/most-followed-instagram-accoun...

There's essentially two big themes represented there, female celebrities and footballers.

Filters were a relatively new thing. It was executed so well that any crap photo was instantly turned into a piece of art without needing any special skill or experience. Other apps had (and still has) filters, but they looked kinda lame. They feel like an afterthought.

The sharing and social factor was built in. Take a photo and sharing was automatic, which is pretty neat.

The name was also a huge factor. Photo Filter App 2.0 wouldn't have cut it.

Isn't it crazy to think you might have a great product, but the only reason it fails to go viral is the name

+ it's really hard to detect a failure point. I never read a postmortem post that featured "and we had a rather silly name". A good name can make or kill a brand. It should be obvious but often it's undervalued or overlooked.

It's fine releasing under a temp name, but you have to make it a top priority to change it asap. I could rant on this for long, but the long story short for B2C products it's essential. If you deliver surveillance software for governments you can get away with anything.

Filters might have been a new thing to smartphone apps with friction-free uploading, but reasonable filters with cute names were included in software bundled with the very first digital cameras...

I think that it's a case where fewer features is a benefit. It's a very mobile-focused platform, where adding tons of features tends to be more confusing than helpful. Do few things and do them well.

It's probably also a case-study in how to market social networks. Get the right people on at the right time, so people want to get on and follow them, and then post their own content.

For me and a lot of my friends the increased popularity of Instagram is entirely about how we hate Facebook but don't want to abandon our FB connections.

So we use IG as our primary way to say hello, send an update, and register a Like. And then we go on FB when we have more time, or want to share a link, or whatever. But this is less and less common, judging by the relative activity I see on IG vs FB for my own connections. (And even a lot of the regular FB users are cross-posting all their photos now.)

As such it's not that great a photo-sharing UI, but it works and it doesn't require Yet Another Social Graph.

I don't know how much this is a factor in IG's continued growth in the face of Snapchat -- after all I'm talking about a cohort 30 and older. But my gut tells me it's significant.

Enforced image sizing to make pictures "glanceable" while also being the only thing on the screen, preventing overwhelm.

Making it easy to positively reinforce your friends' content creation.

Fine-grained filtering of content that's relevant to you.

I used Instagram when it first came out as a way to put filters on my photos, I didn't realize it was posting to a social network until 6 months later.

Luckily none of the photos were too embarrassing.

The filters are a big part of it I'd say. Definitely contributed highly to its appeal and fun-factor.

They also helped mask how terrible the image quality of cellphone photos were at the time (they are, of course, much, much better now).

The one thing that bothers me more than it should is that their image viewing totally sucks.

You can't enlarge an image you're viewing. Designed for mobile first, yet the size you view an image at is tied to whatever size your phone screen is. Why? I'm sure the image they are sending over the wire isn't at all as small as your screen, so why restrict it like that?

Based on discussions with my wife and her friends, that's a feature, not a bug. You can post beach pictures for example, and be relatively comfortable knowing that people can't (casually) zoom in.

IG introduced pinch to zoom just a while back fwiw

I discovered it on accident

Wow, that makes the app so much better for what I use it for (following Instagram girls obviously)

> Dumb question, but what is it about Instagram that made it so huge?

I'd like to think the quality of their app has something to do with it. Unlike almost every mobile app I use, it's a joy to use (Android version). It's always snappy (this is huge), things always flow well, there is a ton of little detail functionality in there but it never overwhelms.

It's also great to see people's posts for a location you've tagged in your shot and compare their experience to yours. Or just find them. I know no other social network that does this so well.

It's the only social network I've stuck with and gotten any joy out of.

User base I think is the value here.