A number of articles quickly popped up discussing alternatives to Instagram, an echo of the intense but fleeting interest in Diaspora, which arose during a period of dissatisfaction over Facebook's privacy policies.

Instagram responded on Twitter on Tuesday afternoon.

Others expressed skepticism that the back and forth would amount to much.

Social media services have periodically come under fire over their privacy policies, without much impact on their popularity, wrote Sarah Lacy in an article on Pando Daily. She argued that the frequency of these controversies actually makes each one less important:

"As someone who has been the subject of a mass social media mob before, I can attest that these things feel huge when you’re in the middle of them. But the truth is they rarely amount to much of anything and they pass. What’s more: The more frequently they occur, the more everyone realizes that no one will really be forced to change anything."

Ambivalence was already percolating on Twitter by Tuesday afternoon. 

The changes may inspire only a small percentage of Instagram users to take action, but the most valuable users may be most likely to leave, wrote John Paul Titlow on ReadWrite:

"Even if 98% of Instagram users stay put, those who stick around will probably see a drop in the quality images. That's because the people most likely to jump ship are the people producing the best content: serious photographers.  

"And who can blame them? People who make a living taking photographs already face a daunting landscape in the age of Google Image Search and stock photography. Many photojournalists and other pros had trouble warming up to Instagram in the first place, assuaged only by its rapid rise and guarantee of a sizable audience. It's a great marketing tool for photographers, but ceases to be worth it once Instagram starts monetizing their work without compensating them."

In an Atlantic article entitled "Why You Should Want to Pay for Software, Instagram Edition," Alexis Madrigal described the controversy as another sign of the tension inherent to free Internet services:

"Truly, the only way to get around the privacy problems inherent in advertising-supported social networks is to pay for services that we value. It's amazing what power we gain in becoming paying customers instead of the product being sold. 

"Here's an alternative version of what Instagram could have done before Facebook purchased them. Instagram has, what, 100 million users? If they got $5 a month from 20 million of those users, they'd be looking at $300 million in quarterly revenue. That's a nice chunk of change when you have a baker's dozen employees. You think those guys could split more than a billion dollars a year and call it good."

The idea was echoed by others on Twitter.

And then, of course, there were the jokes.