More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
For a sense of scale, consider that millions of people and brands have more Instagram followers than the New York Times has subscribers.
More important was the lesson that just because something is more technically complex doesn’t mean it’s better.
“symbolic systems”—the
to ask first what problem they were solving, and then to try and solve it in the simplest way possible.
He didn’t think about the long-term consequences of giving up his art to a company, making it available to the masses. Optimistic though he was for his new friends, he knew that most startups failed.
They could bask in modern creativity. There was a millennial optimism to it all. The generation that had entered the workforce during the Great Recession seemed to be saying, with every Instagram post, that they valued being interesting more than they valued the nine-to-five.
Bigger technology companies had the resources to separate their community growth work from their content cleanup work—and usually didn’t devote so much attention to such things so early in their life cycle, because the law said they didn’t have to. But understanding the ugly potential of the platform early helped Zollman and Riedel think not just about how to address the problems, but also about how important it was to actively promote the kind of content they wanted to see.
Without Instagram, he would not have had health insurance in time for his wife to give birth to their first daughter.
They were a quirky band of twenty-somethings figuring out their lives together, all superfans of the product they were building.
They asked their friends and learned that it wasn’t uncommon for startup founders to distribute life-changing sums to their employees after a big deal.
Instagram was coming of age in an industry that revered and empowered founders above all else.
Zuckerberg understood that the hardest part of creating a business would be creating a new habit for users and a group they all wanted to spend time with. 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.
Facebook was a master at strategically massaging the truth to reduce government scrutiny, presenting itself as a scrappy upstart when it wasn’t.
Today, Facebook is still the most dominant social network in the world, with more than 2.8 billion users across several social and messaging apps, and the primary driver of its revenue growth is Instagram.
They were exhausted. Selling was the simplest way to solve the problem.
within. They would just have no relief in the meantime. Their investments in employees and infrastructure were on hold, pending the deal close, at a time sign-ups were accelerating. As usual, Krieger’s erratic sleep schedule was the surest sign of Instagram’s unending expansion.
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.
Instagram was teaching and rewarding storytelling.
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. They could use that data, for instance, to figure out who your closest friends were, defining the strength of the relationship with a constantly changing number between 0 and 1 they called a “friend coefficient.”
And the more people who joined the product, and the more content they produced, the more slots there would be in the news feed for brands to place ads.
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.”
“It would be easy to get complacent and think we’ve won every time we bring ourselves to a new level, but all that does is just decrease the chance we’ll get to the next level after that,”
Instagram was told that the recipe for growth at Facebook—sending notifications and reminder emails, clearing sign-up hurdles, understanding the data, playing defense—was the most important thing to learn if they wanted the app to be truly important one day.
Mostly, they had completely underestimated how much their users would mistrust—and even hate—Facebook.
Systrom was still a CEO who didn’t make money.
The shift would birth an economy of influence, with all of the interconnected Instagram activity at its nexus,
Soon Hilton had a perfume line, a clothing line, and philanthropic projects: she had turned “famous for being famous” into a new kind of entrepreneurship.
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.
Few people realized that choosing to build a business on Instagram meant placing one’s future at the mercy of a small handful of people in Menlo Park, California, making decisions on the fly. The only way to be certain nothing bad would happen was to build a relationship with an Instagram employee like Porch or Toffey. As Facebook would say, the strategy didn’t scale.
post at ideal times of day, like during lunchtime, or in the late afternoon or late evening, when people were most likely to be checking the app.
“When you engage in self-promotional behavior of any kind on Instagram, it makes people who have shared that moment with you feel sad inside.… We ask that you keep your interactions on Instagram meaningful and genuine.”
It was just better if it looked effortless.
Because people could share other users’ content in their own feeds, they no longer had a motivation to attempt time-consuming creative skits.
Facebook had proved that the bigger a network became, the bigger the unintended consequences of its decisions.
But virality had pitfalls. It addicted Facebook’s users to low-quality content. The Instagram employees wondered, was a click even an accurate signal of what a user wanted? Or were they being manipulated by the content itself? The viral links had headlines like, “This Man Got in a Fight at a Bar and You’ll Never Guess What Happened Next” and “We Saw Pictures of This Child Actress All Grown Up, and WOW!”
the app was becoming a competition for fame.
Having an audience would always mean having a business opportunity.
The pursuit of followers and influence was a symptom of how aspirational Instagram had managed to make its app. By constantly serving users images of visually appealing lives and hobbies, their community in turn sought to make their lives more worthy of posting about.
“Does the parent want attention or the kid?”
“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.”
The employees did what twenty-something-year-olds do when uncomfortable: they memed it.
“No company can be all things to all people and still win,” Lafley wrote.
“Sometimes you do have to fight. Where that’s true, you should fight and win. There is no middle ground: either don’t throw any punches, or strike hard and end it quickly.”
His employees saw him as stubborn, narcissistic, spoiled, and impulsive. Spiegel hated product testing, product managers, and optimizing for the data—basically everything that had made Facebook successful.
In the three months prior to the election, the top stories with false information reached more people on Facebook than the top stories from legitimate news outlets. Some of them came from makeshift websites designed to look real, with names like The Political Insider and Denver Guardian.
in an attempt to promote environments they said were neutral and open, but that in practice were rarely policed.
One of Zuckerberg’s least favorite criticisms of Facebook was that it created ideological echo chambers, in which people only engaged with the ideas they wanted to hear.
