What are you talking about? Plenty of people suck at golf and continue sucking at it. Or building model ships, or playing the piano. You do something fun because it's fun. People go to waterparks because they are fun. Once people start putting arbitrary standards on waterparks, saying you have to be GOOD at the wavepool, then it's not fun. It's one thing if people were marketing their photography skills and selling it as a product, and then you get a bunch of shitty wedding photos with the "Toaster" filter, and you paid a lot of money for it. But people taking photos that they like and putting them on Facebook? It's just fun. Instagram is the iPhone photography equivalent of a waterpark. It's a fun stupid thing to do. Let people have fun.

Plus, if you really feel that you have to strive to get better at something for it to be a legitimate hobby, you could argue that the presence of real photographers on Instagram (using it for fun), is instructive, and people could learn about composition, lighting, etc. from the presence of iPhone photos like these on Instagram: http://instagr.am/p/LVn2x3ld7_/ http://instagr.am/p/K53yn4ld8I/

Found object art is a big part of any fine arts curriculum. The point is using what you have at your disposal to make art. iPhones and Instagram arguably fall into that category. In fact, NYU's Tisch School of the Arts offers a few different classes in the use of cell phones as legitimate methods of creating art. http://filmtv.tisch.nyu.edu/object/BardoshK.html

When photography first appeared on the scene, traditional artists made the same claims of non-seriousness that people make about cell phone work now. But to do that is to underestimate the potential of the medium and misunderstand what its applications are. While my primary point is that people who take Instagram photos are doing it for fun and they're not hurting anybody so they should be allowed to have fun, it's also worth noting that we're marginalizing an entire medium because we feel it's something "my grandma could do."