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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Sarah Frier
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December 25 - December 30, 2020
“I like to say I’m dangerous enough to know how to code and sociable enough to sell our company. And I think that’s a deadly combination in entrepreneurship.”1 —KEVIN SYSTROM, INSTAGRAM COFOUNDER
the foundation for their entire leadership philosophy: 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.
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.
And instead of inventing something new and bold, as potential Silicon Valley investors wanted them to, they improved on what they’d seen other apps do. They made a tool that was much simpler and faster to use than anyone else’s, taking up less of users’ time as they were out living the experiences Instagram wanted them to capture. And they had to do it via their phones, because there was no Instagram website, making those experiences feel immediate and intimate to others.
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 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.”
Companies try to intuit what a good measure of happiness for their users might be and, by building their sites to prioritize those metrics, manipulate their users over time. On Facebook, once the company started rewarding its employees if they increased the amount of time users spent on the app, users started seeing more video and news content in their feeds. As was apparent in the election, rewarding content that sparked users’ emotions helped give rise to an entire industry of fake-news sites.
The apps start out with seemingly simple motivations, as entertainment that could lead to a business: Facebook is for connecting with friends and family, YouTube is for watching videos, Twitter is for sharing what’s happening now, and Instagram is for sharing visual moments. And then, as they enmesh themselves in everyday life, the rewards systems of their products, fueled by the companies’ own attempts to measure their success, have a deeper impact on how people behave than any branding or marketing could ever achieve. Now that the products are adopted by a critical mass of the world’s
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At Meow Wolf in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the settings are more surreal. Billing itself as an experiential art collective, Meow Wolf invites visitors to walk through a forest of neon trees, or load themselves into a clothes dryer that appears to be a portal into another universe. And they’re not slowing down; they’ve raised $158 million from investors in 2019 to expand across the United States.12
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.
