No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

by Sarah Frier

Celebrities were often confused by the two products being part of the same organization but having different rules and strategies. Facebook, unlike Instagram and Twitter, was willing to dole out incentives to encourage celebrities and media organizations to create the kind of content they wanted.

Facebook’s strategy wasn’t about buzz. It was all about growth. By the end of 2013, Facebook was making about half its advertising revenue off mobile phones—dramatic progress in just more than a year,

Investors fixated on the slowdown in user growth, which he hadn’t expected them to care about so quickly. The investors realized that if revenue growth follows user growth, the opposite must also be true—that any slowdown in user growth would lead to a slowdown in revenue growth.

Twitter was based on live events and virality, so they wanted stars to use the site to do things that would start conversations and lead to a lot of retweets. Nowhere was that more obvious than at the March 2014 Oscars.

Selfies had boomed in popularity since Apple had introduced a front-facing camera in its devices and since Instagram had popularized social photography. “Selfie” had even been the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year in 2013.

When the team at Instagram saw what Twitter had accomplished at the Oscars, and all the media buzz it generated, they were frustrated.

As the Instagram user guidelines stated, in a tone as if talking to a child: “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.”

Twitter was good at relationships with celebrities and public figures but, unlike Instagram, didn’t have any sort of human curation, or an opinion on what ideal Twitter content looked like. Twitter, like Facebook, billed itself as a neutral platform, governed by whatever the masses wanted to see, through their retweeting and commenting on content.

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

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!” Facebook employees had seen their stock options soar in value from rapid growth that came, in part, from not judging their users’ choices.

Zuckerberg would eventually force Instagram to open the floodgates and let in ads from any random business buying on the Facebook website. Before they did, for the next few months, the app’s engineers raced against the clock to build a system that would save Instagram from death by pixelated digital billboards.

The idea of an influencer was so new, companies just wanted to pay someone that another advertiser had already trusted.

Users didn’t really care about filters much anymore. Cameras on phones had dramatically improved in the few years since Instagram’s launch. And

Enthusiasts weren’t the only ones getting strategic. Barnieh watched new cafes all around the world adopt aesthetics that were popular on Instagram. They would hang bare Edison bulbs, buy succulent planters, make their spaces brighter, fill the walls with greenery or mirrors, and advertise items that were more eye-catching, like colorful fruit juices or avocado toast. In their quest to look modern, he thought they all ended up looking the same, the way airports and corporate offices all look the same.

He heard the phrase “Do it for the ’gram” start to catch on. The people who were trying to build businesses off their Instagram photography needed to stand out, so they would venture to picturesque overlooks and beaches, which saw an increase in foot traffic. On the one hand, this quest brought people outside more, and to new locales; on the other hand, it damaged the environment the photos were meant to appreciate with litter and overuse. National Geographic wrote about how Instagram was changing travel: visits to Trolltunga, a photogenic cliff in Norway, increased from 500 a year in 2009 to 40,000 a year in 2014.

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.

They found that about a third of Instagram’s user base followed at least one of the people on her list.

The strategy was a success. Young people were obsessed with Instagram. In 2015, 50 percent of teens in the U.S. were on the app. It became quite important to the structure of their social lives—to the point that it was creating enormous pressure.

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?” she wondered. It was becoming a competition. She advised parents that they should take an occasional social media detox to reset their priorities, explaining, “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.”

On Instagram, it was easy to do. While Facebook was for people using their real identities, Instagram allowed anonymity. Anyone could make an account based on an email address or phone number. So it was quite easy to make more seemingly real people, and sell their attention. If you searched “get Instagram followers” on Google, dozens of small faceless firms offered to make fame and riches more accessible, for a fee. For a few hundred dollars, you could buy thousands of followers, and even dictate exactly what these accounts were supposed to say in your comments.

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.

Instagram’s square photos were iconic, so much so that Apple designed a way for iPhones to capture images in that shape. To

Instead she found him receptive. “I imagine if there was a stadium of people, they would unanimously be saying, ‘Why is it so hard for them to make this call?’ ” Systrom told her. “And that tells me we’re holding on to this for the wrong reasons.”

Soon, Instagram’s investment in data and analytics would help illuminate something important. It turned out that the high pressure to demonstrate a perfect life on Instagram was actually bad for the product’s growth. And it was great for a now-formidable competitor: Snapchat.

In the three years since the acquisition, Systrom had been bothered by the fact that Instagram’s headquarters weren’t obviously Instagram’s.

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.

Systrom was focusing too much on what he wanted Instagram to represent, setting a high bar for quality. But Systrom’s high bar was exactly what was keeping his team from shipping new features. It was also creating pressure for Instagram’s own users, who were intimidated about posting because they thought Instagram warranted perfection.

But because these other teens were recruited and paid by a third party called watchLAB and didn’t know which company their interview was for, they were more likely to be totally honest about how they felt. Sometimes brutally honest. The teens revealed that they would meticulously manage their feeds to make a good impression. They had all sorts of unspoken social rules for themselves. They kept track of their follow ratio, and didn’t want to follow more people than were following them back. They wanted more than eleven likes on each photo, so the list of names turned into a number. They sent selfies to their friends over group chats to get feedback before determining whether they were good enough for Instagram.

While older users typically kept all their photos up forever, providing a history of every vacation and wedding they’d experienced, some younger people would regularly delete all of their posts, or most, or get entirely new accounts to reinvent themselves as they entered new school years, or wanted to try a new aesthetic theme. If they wanted to be themselves, that was what a “finsta” was for.

And in late 2015, teens had less need for their finstas, because they could be more real and silly on Snapchat, where everything disappeared shortly after you posted it.

“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.

Between 15 and 20 percent of users had multiple accounts, and among teens, that proportion was much higher.

The team had previously assumed people with multiple accounts had been sharing their phones with family or friends. To add to worries about users’ behavior, the analytics team, led by Mike Develin, unearthed the “reciprocal follower problem.” Instagram had emphasized celebrities and influencers too much, and now users’ feeds were full of famous people who didn’t follow them back.

Develin’s team also found that users weren’t posting more than one picture a day. It was considered rude, and even spammy, to take over your followers’ feeds by oversharing, to the point that people who did so started using a self-aware hashtag, #doubleinsta.

Less content being posted indicated that Instagram was becoming less important in people’s lives.

The company started on a program to solve them, called Paradigm Shift. To address the finsta trend, Instagram would start to allow people to switch between accounts more easily. For the #doubleinsta problem, Instagram would make it possible to share several photos in the same post. And on and on.

Systrom, like the teens, was posting less frequently on his own feed, putting only the best stuff, curating and deleting things he didn’t want to be part of his permanent record.

Earlier that year, team members had an idea for a feature called Boomerang that would allow people to take a quick succession of images that would combine into a short video, playing forward and then reversing, and then forward, and then reversing. It made simple movements entertaining: cake would be cut and uncut, water would be spilled and unspilled, over and over. Instagram employees John Barnett and Alex Li, expecting the idea would be rejected by Systrom, didn’t approach him about it.

The teens, named Julia, Jane, and Ella, explained that in their high school, if they didn’t comment on one of their friends’ selfies within ten minutes, those friends would question the entire nature of their budding relationship.

If the selfie poster cared about the friendship, they would have to comment back, within minutes again, with a reply like “No YOU’RE the model!” (Never “thank you,” which would imply that they agreed they were beautiful, which would be horrifying.) The girls expected 130 to 150 likes on their selfies, and 30 to 50 comments.

Systrom was unmoved. “We will not ever have Stories,” he said. “We shouldn’t—we can’t—and it doesn’t fit with the way people think and share on Instagram.”

“Rivalry causes us to over-emphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past,” venture capitalist and Facebook board member Peter Thiel wrote in his 2014 book Zero to One, which Systrom asked all his managers to read. “Competition can make people hallucinate opportunities where none exist.”

trend. A lot of them were using their posts to refer fans to more exclusive behind-the-scenes videos—on Snapchat.

It turned out stars had the same trouble teens did: they didn’t want to overload their followers or post things that would last forever.

“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.”

Dorsey was blindsided and visibly upset. While he’d known Weil was leaving, he’d been under the impression it was to take a break, not go to a major competitor. Weil was escorted off the premises, and then Dorsey wrote an angry email to Twitter’s entire staff about his disloyalty.

The pope’s new account became international news, with that first post in March 2016 garnering more than 300,000 likes.

That meant that anyone who followed a combination of influencers, businesses, and friends would log on and then most likely see content from professionals at the top of their feed, not the posts from their friends. It was bad for their friends, because they didn’t get the likes and comments they needed to be motivated to post more, and it was bad for Instagram, because if people didn’t see enough amateur posts, they were more likely to feel their own photos were unworthy by comparison.

Their best solution was an algorithm that would change the order of the feed. Instead of putting the most recent posts at the top, it would prioritize content from friends and family over that from public figures.