The acquisition news is not even a day old and there are already some Instagram users who are quite upset with its sale to Facebook.
Instagram was becoming a social network in its own right, serving as more than just a photo-sharing app to some of its users. Many had signed up with Instagram as an alternative to Facebook, which they did not trust.
“One of my favorite Instagramers, Elise Marie, shared a black screen in protest of the deal,” writes Om Malik for GigaOM. “There is a #instablack hash-tag that has been created to protest the deal. Clicking on #facebook on the service exposes one to even more photos expressing disappointment.”
Malik republished a 2005 post by Robert Young, originally written about MySpace, that explains the emotions involved with such a change. The post opens with the following: “There’s a certain level of what (for the lack of a better phrase) I will refer to as cognitive dissonance when you run a business based on community. And that’s that you quickly realize that the members of the community feel strongly that the service belongs to them, and the control that you, the corporation, think you have is actually, in large part, an illusion.”
“What Robert said in 2005 is even more valid today, except that instead of large media owners, the disruptors and social media platforms are finding themselves at a weird sport — the tail is wagging the dog,” concludes Malik.
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