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For a sense of scale, consider that millions of people and brands have more Instagram followers than the New York Times has subscribers.
Chris Messina, the technologist who was user no. 19 and invented the hashtag, the introduction to other people’s visual perspectives on Instagram was a stunning novelty—perhaps equivalent to the psychological phenomenon astronauts experience when looking at the Earth from outer space for the first time.
Srsly!?
“Don’t do this Facebook thing,” she said. “It’s a fad. It won’t go anywhere.”
Systrom was an earnest, curious kid who loved going to the library and playing the futuristic, demon-riddled first-person shooter game Doom II on the computer. His introduction to computer programming was creating his own levels in the game.
People who weren’t yet using Facebook were suddenly getting email alerts that photos with their faces in them were appearing on the website, and were tempted to click to see. It became one of Facebook’s most important manipulations for getting more people to use the social network, despite the hint of creepiness.
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.”
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.
At Twitter and Facebook, executives reasoned that it was legally safer to be as uninvolved in content policing as possible.
That same month, Krieger was invited to be Michelle Obama’s guest at the State of the Union, to explain that he wouldn’t have been able to help start Instagram without an immigration visa.
In 2013, venture capitalist Aileen Lee came up with a name for startups with billion-dollar values: “unicorns.” At the time, there were 37. When she wrote an update on the rare breeds in 2015, there were 84. By 2019, there were hundreds. But if it’s a bubble, it hasn’t burst.)
Zuckerberg went to his freezer and pulled out a large slab of venison, or maybe boar—something with lots of bones. “I don’t know what meat this is but I think I hunted it at some point,” he said. The prior year, it was Zuckerberg’s goal to only eat meat from animals he’d killed himself.
Imagine an alternate reality, in which Microsoft buys Apple while Apple is still small. That would have been tremendous for Microsoft. And that’s what Facebook got with Instagram.
