No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

by Sarah Frier

Instagram was one of the first apps to fully exploit our relationship with our phones, compelling us to experience life through a camera for the reward of digital validation. The story of Instagram is an overwhelming lesson in how the decisions inside a social media company—about what users listen to, which products to build, and how to measure success—can dramatically impact the way we live, and who is rewarded in our economy.

Systrom spent the winter of his junior year, in 2005, snapping photos here and there in cafes, trying to appreciate a blurry, out-of-focus beauty. The idea—of a square photo transformed into art through editing—stuck in the back of Systrom’s mind. More important was the lesson that just because something is more technically complex doesn’t mean it’s better.

His last year at Stanford, in between Odeo and Google, Systrom worked to make some side money pulling espresso shots at Caffé del Doge on University Avenue in Palo Alto. One day, Zuckerberg walked in, puzzled to find the student he’d tried to recruit working at a coffee shop. Even back then, the CEO wasn’t comfortable with rejection. He awkwardly ordered and moved on.

The earliest stressors were of their own making. The app could have launched with hardier infrastructure, or a more robust set of features, but the founders hadn’t known if Instagram would be popular. Krieger reasoned that if they’d spent more time building, they might have missed their moment. He thought back to the crime data app he’d helped make, with its heavily produced graphics but nobody to appreciate them. It was better to start with something minimalist, and then let priorities reveal themselves as users ran into trouble.

Systrom and Krieger were getting better at understanding their limits—or maybe they were just afraid to ruin what they had. They would not pay celebrities or brands, they would not overcomplicate their product, they would not be pulled into investor drama. They would play nice with the tech giants, they would foster community through InstaMeets, and they would try to make Instagram live up to Zollman’s ideals of a friendly place on the internet.

In the middle of the night, Systrom burst into Kutcher’s room. They had to get outside—immediately. Kutcher’s room was already filling with smoke. The wall by the fireplace was up in flames. Systrom ran from room to room at around four in the morning, until all the guests made it out safe. They all stood outside in the cold, in their underwear and clutching their laptops and phones dearly, waiting for the fire department to come. Okay, Kutcher thought, Kevin’s a good leader. They became friends, and Kutcher would later help Instagram build more credibility in the entertainment industry.

Everyone was jolted back into reality, though, when Systrom explained that the news would become public in thirty minutes. “Call your families,” he said. “Do whatever you need to do before then.” Riedel picked up his iPhone, lying at Systrom’s feet. It turned out the phone hadn’t been on speaker mode, so Toffey hadn’t been able to hear anything. That was the first person he needed to explain this to.

“We’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently,” Zuckerberg’s Facebook post said. “It’s the first time we’ve ever acquired a product and company with so many users. We don’t plan on doing many more of these, if any at all.”

Zuckerberg had already tried this before—unsuccessfully, back in 2008, when Twitter CEO Ev Williams had indicated he would accept an offer worth about $500 million. But then Williams got cold feet, and now Twitter was a major competitor. Zuckerberg was upset about the outcome, but had done the same thing himself once. In 2006, when Facebook was about Instagram’s age, Yahoo! had offered him $1 billion. He went against the advice of his board and said no, confident that he could build Facebook to be bigger on his own. Zuckerberg derived much of his confidence from that pivotal moment of defiance. It affirmed that a founder’s instincts—his own instincts—should be trusted above all else.

“Hey, what’s up?” Zuckerberg asked him. “I understand you have concerns.” “Actually, after the last twelve hours, I think your instinct is spot-on,” Zoufonoun concluded. “We absolutely should buy this company.” “Okay, so what’s next?” Zuckerberg said, unsurprised at being right. “We should probably do this quickly. How quickly do you think we can get this done?”

Looking at Instagram’s history of investor financing restored Zoufonoun’s respect for Systrom. Here was a man who just a few years ago had been helping on Google’s deals team, making PowerPoint presentations. He had done all this in just eighteen months.

Instagram’s perceived independence at Facebook would help Zuckerberg win some otherwise impossible deals with headstrong founders, especially in 2014, with the chat app WhatsApp and the virtual reality company Oculus VR. But mostly, the Instagram deal would give Zuckerberg a tremendous competitive advantage. One Facebook executive would later reflect on the relative importance of the deal: 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.

In theory Dorsey would be richer too, as one of Instagram’s earliest investors, but all he felt was sadness. He couldn’t stop thinking about Systrom. After all his advice and support, he’d thought they were friends. Why hadn’t he called, even just for business reasons? Dorsey had always said the door was open at Twitter. He had always said the price was negotiable. Did Systrom, always preaching about craft and creativity, value Facebook-style world domination more? As time passed without any explanation from Systrom, Dorsey stopped feeling hurt and started feeling angry. He realized Systrom had never wanted to sell to Twitter. Twitter had been played. Dorsey deleted the Instagram app and stopped posting altogether.

Antitrust law was not written for modern acquisitions like Instagram. A traditional monopoly was a company with such a hold on its industry that it harmed others by fixing prices or controlling a supply chain. Facebook and Instagram presented no obvious consumer harm because their products were free to use, as long as people were willing to give up their data to the network. Facebook’s advertising business was relatively new, especially on mobile phones; Instagram didn’t have a business model at all. Something was a monopoly if it undermined its rivals; Instagram had many rivals. Instagram wasn’t even the first company to make a mobile photo app with filters.

Instagram was not supposed to be about obvious self-promotion, Systrom said. It was about creativity, design, and experiences. And honesty.

While Instagram was trying to give people new interests, Facebook was using data to figure out exactly what people already wanted, and then giving more of it to them. Whatever Facebook observed in activity from its users, it could use to define their likes and dislikes numerically, and then adjust those measurements if needed.

Instagram, on the other hand, was trying to build a premium experience, brainstorming directly with advertisers about their ideas and manually placing their ads. They knew that this system couldn’t work forever, but Systrom and Krieger always urged people to do the simplest thing first, the way they had when they first built the app. Working manually on a small version of the product made more sense than spending precious engineering resources and navigating politics with Facebook’s ads sales team, for a system that might not ultimately work.

There was something awkward about his role, though. Instagram’s Emily White was only sort of his boss. Carolyn Everson, the new head of sales at Facebook, was the one in charge of advertising strategy. A lot of people on the sales and marketing side of Instagram had double bosses like this. The independence Zuckerberg had promised Instagram was holding for the product and engineering side, but the sales and operations side, run by Sheryl Sandberg, was starting to assert a deeper level of control.

Moore would pay a paparazzo to wear a green scarf so Hilton would know exactly whose lens to look into when she stepped out of her house, out of a club, or, at one point, out of jail. Then Moore would anonymously broker a deal to sell the picture to a celebrity news site. “Then the publication would come back to us and ask for a comment—and the whole time they had no clue we were behind it,” Moore explained. “The paparazzi was essentially Paris’s daily Instagram post, and that reality show was the weekly Instagram story.”

Still, bloggers tried to decode the process for getting featured by Instagram, via the company’s posts on its @instagram account or the suggested user list. There was little to explain, because no formula or algorithm existed. In contrast to Facebook’s decisions, which were data-driven, Instagram’s curation developed out of its employees’ personal tastes.

If something became popular on Instagram—whether a fitness routine, a home decor trend, or a flavor of cookie—did that make it more valuable in real life? Were endorsements from the Insta-famous worth seeking out or paying for? And if you had a popular brand in real life, should you try to get popular on Instagram too?

When Vine content production started to slow down, Twitter added a re-Vine button, so people could share other people’s Vines in their own feeds. The move had an unexpected side effect, similar to what might have happened to Instagram had they added a re-gram button. Because people could share other users’ content in their own feeds, they no longer had a motivation to attempt time-consuming creative skits.

What Porch understood, which everyone else eventually would, was that Instagram’s power lay not in what was posted there, but in how those posts made people feel. Because there was no re-sharing on Instagram, it wasn’t about news and information—it was about individuals, and what they wanted to present to the world, and whether others thought they were interesting or creative or beautiful or valuable.

Systrom thought that move, if navigated poorly, could ruin the brand Instagram had built. Sure, they would make money by accepting Facebook’s fire hose of ads, but those looked like ads made for Facebook, many of them with tacky text and clickbait wording that would clash drastically with Instagram’s aesthetic, and what its users had come to expect in the experience. Facebook hadn’t vetted the majority of its advertisers, only their credit cards.

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 magazine wrote.

Instagram took its first big swing at the problem in December 2014. Once they thought the technology was ready, they deleted all of the accounts that they thought weren’t those of real people, all at once. Millions of Instagram accounts disappeared. Justin Bieber lost 3.5 million fans, while Kendall and Kylie Jenner lost hundreds of thousands. The 1990s rapper Mase dropped from 1.6 million followers to 100,000, then deleted his account entirely out of apparent embarrassment.

Still, he was embarrassed by the place. Systrom had just returned from a management training day at Pixar, where the offices, despite being part of Disney, obviously reflected and celebrated scenes from the animation studio’s famous features like Toy Story and The Incredibles.

Krieger and Systrom realized that this was what Li, Barnett, and others had been trying to tell them: Instagram users now had a place to put all the content they would otherwise leave on the cutting room floor. If they didn’t make it possible to put that content on Instagram, they might lose those people forever to Snapchat. You’re at a fork in the road, Systrom thought to himself. You can either stay the same because you want to hold on to your idea of Instagram, or you can bet the house. He decided to bet the house. Systrom was fully aware that if he failed, he could be fired, or ruin everything. But at that point, the only failure that could be certain was if he decided to do nothing.

Barnett, who was now working on Facebook’s youth team, came to see what he’d advocated for finally come to life. Systrom came up to him to congratulate him. “Sorry I unfollowed you on Instagram,” he said. Barnett had been posting too much. “I’m going to follow you again right now.”

It turned out that the public didn’t think of Instagram as part of Facebook’s controversy, or as part of Facebook, period. The brands were so separate that U.S. users saw Instagram as an escape from the big social network’s political debates and viral fluff. Most Instagram users had no idea that Facebook owned the app. Systrom and Krieger had been careful to preserve their reputation.

As Hocke explained, “You need to keep feeding the machine. You always need to produce content. People think we live the life of our dreams, which is true, but you’re always thinking, ‘Where can I find good content, good content, good content?’ ”

The story hit all of Facebook’s weak spots: shoddy data practices. Negligence. Lack of transparency with users. And a role in Trump’s win. It stoked distrust among politicians the world over. The worst part was that Facebook had known of the data leak for years, and hadn’t properly enforced its policies, or let users know when their information was compromised.

The tech industry’s obsession with measurement and trend analysis, honed by Facebook to give the people what they want on their news feeds, seemed at first to be incompatible with an app based on art and creativity. But over the years, Facebook infused its ethos into Instagram. As Instagram became part of our culture, Facebook’s culture of measurement did too. The line between person and brand is blurring. The hustle for growth and relevance, backed by data, is now the drumbeat of modern life online. No matter what Instagram does with like counts, our communication has become more strategic. Instagram has made us not only more expressive but also more self-conscious and performative.