No Filter: The inside story of Instagram

by Sarah Frier

More than 200 million of Instagram’s users have more than 50,000 followers, the level at which they can make a living wage by posting on behalf of brands, according to the influencer analysis company Dovetale.

to ask first what problem they were solving, and then to try and solve it in the simplest way possible.

Instagram posts would be art, and art was a form of commentary on life. The app would give people the gift of expression, but also escapism.

The founders picked their first users carefully, courting people who would be good photographers—especially designers who had high Twitter follower counts. Those first users would help set the right artistic tone, creating good content for everyone else to look at, in what was essentially the first-ever Instagram influencer campaign, years before that would become a concept.

Instead of trying to get everyone to use their app, they invited only people they thought would be likely to spread the word to their followers elsewhere, especially designers and creatives. They sold exclusivity to investors, even when so many of them were skeptical. In that sense, they were like a luxury brand, manufacturing coolness and tastefulness around what they’d built.

Instagram’s early popularity was less about the technology and more about the psychology—about how it made people feel. The filters made reality look like art. And then, in cataloging that art, people would start to think about their lives differently, and themselves differently, and their place in society differently.

But pretending things were going more smoothly than they actually were was part of the job of being a startup CEO. Everyone needed to think you were on the right track. His posturing was perhaps analogous to the modern pressure Instagram would introduce—the pressure to post only the best photos, making life seem more perfect than it actually was.

If Facebook was about friendships, and Twitter was about opinions, Instagram was about experiences—and anyone could be interested in anyone else’s visual experiences, anywhere in the world.

It was better to start with something minimalist, and then let priorities reveal themselves as users ran into trouble.

“If we don’t create the thing that kills Facebook, someone else will. The internet is not a friendly place. Things that don’t stay relevant don’t even get the luxury of leaving ruins. They disappear.”

The real value of Facebook and Instagram was in their network effects—the momentum they gained as more people joined. Even if someone enjoyed using an Instagram competitor like Path more, if their friends weren’t on it, they wouldn’t stay.

Instagram was easier to buy than to build because once a network takes off, there are few reasons to join a smaller one. It becomes part of the infrastructure of society.

Making money, in Zuckerberg’s opinion, is something to try only once a network is strong enough, so valuable to its users that advertisements or other efforts aren’t going to turn them off. Facebook’s users were comfortable with sharing their intimate data on the social network before they had any reason to question the site’s motives.

It was Facebook’s job to not let anyone else catch up;9 Zuckerberg had instilled this value in his employees by ending all staff meetings with an unambiguous rallying cry: “Domination!”

Even Chris Hughes, one of the cofounders of Facebook, would in 2019 call for the deal to be undone. “Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American,”11 he wrote in the New York Times.

Facebook was like a constant high school reunion, with everyone catching up their acquaintances on the life milestones that had happened since they’d last talked. Instagram was like a constant first date, with everyone putting the best version of their lives on display.

It’s not that Systrom was against people selling products on Instagram. He just wanted them to do it in a way that masked their financial incentives.

Systrom didn’t want Instagram to turn into a collection of unsightly roadside billboards. When users posted about brands, instead of being so obvious, it would be best if they acted like they were letting their audience in on a life secret, or if they put the product in a spread of other beautiful things, or if they told a story.

Facebook automatically cataloged every tiny action from its users, not just their comments and clicks but the words they typed and did not send, the posts they hovered over while scrolling and did not click, and the people’s names they searched and did not befriend.

Facebook was all about personalization, not just for the ordering of its news feed but for advertiser targeting. A business could sell something with a message tailored to Facebook’s cat lovers in Toronto with college degrees, and sell the same product differently to Facebook’s blue-collar dog lovers in Vancouver. It was a revolutionary advertising business, because on television advertisers had no idea who they were reaching.

Facebook’s strategy for giving people what they wanted would be accused of addicting the world to the digital equivalent of junk food.

“This Journey Is Only 1% Finished,” the posters around campus declared. “The Riskiest Thing Is to Take No Risks.” “Done Is Better than Perfect.” “Move Fast and Break Things.”

Zuckerberg, frustrated that so far he could neither build nor buy what Snapchat had, resolved to get a lot better at understanding teens, why they had fled Facebook, and how he could recruit them back.

They knew not only the names of the apps people were playing with, but also how long they spent using them, and the names of the app screens they spent time on—and so, for example, could know if Snapchat Stories was taking off versus some other Snapchat feature. It helped them see which competitors were on the rise before the press did.

Onavo - VPN tool acquired by Facebook in 2013

Eventually, celebrities would learn to make money off their Instagram accounts, but the idea sounded tacky at the time.)

I wonder what Systrom thinks of Kim Kardashian using Instagram to promote appetite suppressant lolipops...

Today, Kim Kardashian West has 157 million followers and makes about $1 million for a single post.

The effect would depress some of the early Instagram employees, who had wanted so badly to build a community centered around the appreciation of art and creativity, and instead felt that they had built a mall.

visits to Trolltunga, a photogenic cliff in Norway, increased from 500 a year in 2009 to 40,000 a year in 2014. “What photos of this iconic vista don’t reveal is the long line of hikers weaving around the rocky terrain each morning, all waiting for their chance to capture their version of the Instagram-famous shot,”

“The more you give up who you are to be liked by other people, it’s a formula for chipping away at your soul. You become a product of what everyone else wants, and not who you’re supposed to be.”

At a nondescript office building in San Francisco, Nayak would sit in a room, facing teens sitting on a couch. Behind her was a mirror, which only reflected on her side. It was actually a window into the room next door, where Instagram product designers and engineers watched the teens, taking in their every word over a bottle of wine.

Trump’s win, in part because his team had taken full advantage of Facebook’s power to personalize and target information to a receptive audience, was an ideal outcome for any top advertising client. But Trump hadn’t been selling cookware or flights to Iceland—he’d been selling the presidency.

President Barack Obama tried to say as much to Zuckerberg. He warned the CEO that he needed to get a handle on how Facebook spread falsehoods,6 or else the misinformation campaigns in the 2020 presidential election would be even worse.

Social media isn’t just a reflection of human nature. It’s a force that defines human nature, through incentives baked into the way products are designed.

Even before the fallout over Russian influence in the U.S. election, the Federal Trade Commission had been looking into a different kind of covert manipulation, driven not by politics but by economics: influencer advertising on Instagram.

“Consumers have the right to know when they’re looking at paid advertising,”

Several of them cited a study that logged 259 deaths during attempted selfies between 2011 and 2017,7 mostly by people in their early twenties taking unnecessary risks.

Facetune was Apple’s most popular paid app of 2017,13 selling more than 10 million copies generally priced at $4.99.

The market for synthetic skin fillers, to plump up areas with wrinkles, adjust the jawline or make lips fuller, is undergoing a similar expansion, even among teens.

In May 2017, in a widely publicized study,22 the Royal Society for Public Health in the U.K. named Instagram the number one worst app for mental health for youth, specifically because it drives people to compare themselves to one another and fosters anxiety.

“At the end of the day, I sold my company,” Acton underscored. “I sold my users’ privacy to a larger benefit. I made a choice and a compromise. And I live with that every day.”

Whatsapp CEO on his departure from the company.