No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

by Sarah Frier

I came to the alley on a recommendation from a man named Gabriel, whom I happened to sit next to at a sushi bar my first night in Brazil. My Portuguese language skills were so poor that he stepped in to translate for the restaurant workers. I explained that I was on a journey to understand more about Instagram and its impact on culture around the world. As we talked, and as the chef delivered bites of sashimi and nigiri, Gabriel photographed each dish to post on his Instagram story, while lamenting that his friends were so obsessed with sharing their lives, he wasn’t sure if they were actually living them.

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. Less than a hundredth of a percent of Instagram’s users have more than a million followers. At Instagram’s massive scale, that 0.00603 percent equates to more than 6 million Insta-celebrities, a majority of them rising to fame through the app itself. For a sense of scale, consider that millions of people and brands have more Instagram followers than the New York Times has subscribers. Marketing through these people, who are basically running personal media companies through tastemaking, storytelling, and entertaining, is now a multibillion-dollar industry.

He had nailed the pitch, explaining to Systrom that he was offering a once-in-a-lifetime chance to be on the ground floor of something that would be truly huge. Facebook was going to open up to high school students next, and eventually to the whole world. The company was going to raise more money from venture capitalists and might one day be bigger than Yahoo! or Intel or Hewlett-Packard. And then, when the restaurant ran Zuckerberg’s credit card, it didn’t go through.

Google, far more functional and established than tiny Odeo, was led mostly by former Stanford students making data-based decisions. It was the culture that drove homepage leader Marissa Mayer, who later became CEO of Yahoo!, to famously test 41 shades of blue to figure out what color would give the company’s hyperlinks the highest click-through rate. A slightly purpler blue shade won out over slightly greener shades, helping boost revenue by $200 million a year. Seemingly insignificant changes could make a huge difference when applied to millions or billions of people.

Late one night, lit by the glow of his laptop in rickety Dogpatch Labs, Systrom was coding in a corner, trying not to be distracted by the fact that there was an entrepreneur pitch event going on. A man named Travis Kalanick was in front of an audience of mostly men explaining his company, UberCab, which made a tool that was supposed to help people summon luxury cars with their phones. It would officially launch in San Francisco the next year.

“I’m only inviting three angel investors into the deal,” he said. “It’s you, Jack Dorsey, and Adam D’Angelo.” D’Angelo was the founder of Quora and previously the chief technology officer of Facebook, whom Systrom had met when he was a Stanford student. The flattery worked. “That’s pretty badass,” Sacca said. Then he asked about some features he sensed were missing. “When we get to ten, fifty million users, we might be able to turn that on, but for now we’re just focused on keeping the product simple,” Systrom answered. Sacca was floored. Millions of users? Systrom had fewer than 100 beta testers. Sacca received so many pitches from entrepreneurs who talked up the bells and whistles of their products with polished presentations, but here Systrom was just calmly assuming success was inevitable, asking whether Sacca wanted in. He did.

What made Instagram any different than those? Systrom didn’t have an insightful answer, except to note that it seemed to be catching on. 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.

The company was pushing faster, sleeker versions of the app to iPhones so frequently—once every couple weeks—that Sweeney didn’t have time to write a detailed description of what was new for the Apple app store. It would be too technical, anyway. He came up with a catch-all explanation, that other Silicon Valley apps would start borrowing: “bug fixes and performance improvements.”

He said no to paying Bieber or taking his investment. Bieber followed through on Braun’s threat. But his on-and-off girlfriend, the Disney actress and singer Selena Gomez, loved to use Instagram, and their relationship was all the gossip blogs wanted to write about. Soon Bieber was back on the app, continuing to overload Instagram’s infrastructure, to the point where the company had to devote half a server just to his account’s activity. Bieber’s following was enough to change the nature of the Instagram community. “All of the sudden, Instagram was emoji heaven,” Rise later recalled. As younger users joined, they invented a new etiquette on Instagram, which involved trading likes for likes and follows for follows. “Instagram’s community of earnest people telling interesting stories in tiny moments really evolved to be super pop culture.”

To better serve the millions of people joining Instagram, she worked on transitioning content moderation, so that whenever people clicked to report something awful they saw on Instagram, it would just be funneled into the same system of people who were cleaning up Facebook. Facebook had low-wage outside contractors quickly clicking through posts containing or related to nudity, violence, abuse, identity theft, and more to determine whether anything violated the rules and needed to be taken down. Instagram employees would no longer be as close to their worst content. Their nightmares would be officially outsourced.

Systrom was competitive, but it was always very important to him to do things the best way. He would pick his wine from the highest-rated year, he would try to absorb knowledge from the most talented people, and he would read stacks of books about whatever new skill he hoped to master. He’d soon have a personal stylist, a personal trainer, and a management coach. He would drink coffee made from Blue Bottle beans only at their peak point—four days after roasting. “I have a special machine for it and a scale that reads out the extraction by the second, so you get a graph,” he later told the online journal of the fashion brand MR PORTER.

Zuckerberg, on the other hand, was set on doing things better than anyone else. He loved board games, especially strategy games like Risk. In the early days of Facebook, he would occasionally play in the office, tweaking his technique so his opponents could never predict his next move. He once lost to a friend’s teenage daughter while playing Scrabble on a corporate jet, and was so frustrated he built a computer program to find him all the word options for his letters.

Years later, as millions more people became Insta-famous enough to post sponsored content, perusing the accounts of the Instagram elite would start to feel like visiting an alternate reality where anything negative in life could be cured by a purchase. There would be semifamous people pretending to be vulnerable so they could sell products that they pretended to love, which supported a lifestyle they pretended was authentic. The flurry of aspirational branded posts would manipulate the masses into feeling bad about their normal lives. 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.

At the very least, they tried to address the fact that the app was becoming a competition for fame. They killed a feature they thought was fueling it: the algorithmic “Popular” page. In its place, Instagram built an “Explore” page, which could be less easily gamed. At first, all of its categories, from food to skateboarding, were curated, handpicked by members of the community team, not via automated selection. There, they chose to embrace some of the new weird corners of Instagram. They had a category called “Oddly Satisfying” that was mostly for videos that were calming and pleasing to watch, like those of people smooshing and stretching homemade slime, carving soap, or slicing kinetic sand. But the incentives for their users were clearer than ever. Having an audience would always mean having a business opportunity. It wouldn’t be long before there were mini-famous slime influencers on Instagram too, going to slime conventions and developing relationships to cross-promote their goo videos.

Even though they had been in kindergarten at best during Myspace’s glory days, the teens understood the shade they were throwing. “Becoming the next Myspace” was the bogeyman of all tech—the idea that you might be the best thing in the market, until the next best thing catches you off guard and ruins you. In the case of Myspace, the disruptor was Facebook. Paranoia over obsolescence festered at Facebook’s very core, and was the reason they’d bought Instagram and attempted to buy Snapchat in the first place.

Barnett and Li had spent many afternoons at the on-campus Philz—the only place at Facebook where you had to pay for coffee—scheming

Soon after, Systrom arranged an emergency meeting for all his top product executives. On a whiteboard at the front of the South Park conference room, he drew a mock-up of the Instagram app with little circles at the top of the screen, and passed out a document with Choi and Barnett’s concept—which simultaneously shocked and flattered them. He explained that every user would get to add videos, which would disappear within 24 hours, to their personal reel and that he wanted the team to launch this new feature by the end of the summer. To most people in the room, it felt dramatic and novel, a moment where they were inspired by their leader, who was finally willing to take major risks. “It was like being in the room when John F. Kennedy announces you’re going to the moon,” one executive later recalled. Few people knew the tension behind the decision.

Facebook usually launched something to a tiny percentage of its user base, around 1 or 2 percent, to see how people reacted. Then it could roll the new product out to 5 percent, or a couple countries, before eventually reaching the rest of the world. Zuckerberg thought it was important to gather data on how a product would affect the company’s underlying usage metrics. Facebook also tended to release products half-baked, and use the feedback to tweak them in real time. The Instagram team was going to try the opposite: launching Stories, at least a simple version of it, to all 500 million of its users at once. They called it a “YOLO launch,” after the acronym for “you only live once.”

Around the world, Instagram’s biggest fans—the people who have become famous and rich through the app—have spoken out about how difficult it is to keep up appearances. Instagram has been privately advising its stars to stop trying so hard to be perfect, and start posting more raw and vulnerable content. They explain that perfection is no longer novel. Vulnerability now gets better engagement, because it’s more relatable.