[nl]

The only people who thought FB overpaid for Instagram were the same people who complained that FB wasn't a real business and was going to collapse at any moment. Ironically many of these people were HN commentators.

Anyone who worked in the space thought it was the most desirable property available, and wasn't surprised at the price given that Google was looking at social properties at the time too.

And no matter what people on HN thought, FB did buy Insta because it was a competitor:

The exchange was one of several potentially damning pieces of evidence in documents obtained by the U.S. House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust, showing that Zuckerberg leveraged Facebook’s market power over competitors and bought Instagram because he was concerned about the fast growing company’s potential to turn users away from Facebook.

https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/facebook-bought-inst...