23 Instagram co-founders to step down from the company

This is worrying even if not surprising: everything Facebook touches goes to the dogs and Instagram resisted longer than Facebook’s other acquisitions but it has fallen hard over the last couple of years.

It is not the social network I once knew and enjoyed—and I know others who feel the same. It is become a media-collection alternative to Facebook. It is simply becoming a branch of Facebook recognisable with the parent company while once it looked nothing like it. Is this change? Is this change that is normal? Perhaps. Things change all the time but this isn’t just change. This is a pattern that has plagued every acquisition Facebook has ever made.

Perhaps those who came to Instagram from Facebook (as opposed to those who were here for Instagram since six years or more) will probably not notice anything different. And that works in Facebook’s favour because the change they are bringing in is simply to absorb Instagram into their fold and make strip it of its individuality. They also ramp up ways to make people spend for engagement because it pays them in turn and in multiple ways.

Instagram has gone from a social network based around photography to a net where Facebook can catch hold of a younger audience that had, over time, been weaning itself off of Facebook. Instagram now is Facebook with a different face. I’m happy to have quit it.