(CNN) -- Something strange happened Monday on the Internet. Facebook -- the once-underdog social network founded by a kid in a hoodie in a dorm room -- may have officially cemented its status as a titan of the tech establishment it once challenged. What changed? Facebook -- no longer a feisty startup but a 3,000-person, soon-to-be-public corporation with $3.9 billion in cash and an $85 billion to $100 billion valuation -- spent $1 billion to gobble up a much-smaller competitor, the photo-sharing app Instagram. When it did so, it stirred up a caldron of ill will that the "People of the Internet" have been harboring toward Mark Zuckerberg's once-hip company. Some Instagram users said they were downloading all of their photos and then deleting them from the app just so Facebook couldn't get its hands on them.
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Facebook buying Instagram for $1 billion, as photo-sharing app hits mainstream
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Some Instagram users express outrage at the sale and threaten to pull their photos from the app
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Observers say Facebook isn't as cool as it used to be because it's so rich, popular and powerful
Maybe it was when CEO @placeholder started to seem less like that geeky, counterculture college kid and more like a run-of-the-mill billionaire.