No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

by Sarah Frier

The founders picked their first users carefully, courting people who would be good photographers—especially designers who had high Twitter follower counts. Those first users would help set the right artistic tone, creating good content for everyone else to look at, in what was essentially the first-ever Instagram influencer campaign, years before that would become a concept.

And instead of inventing something new and bold, as potential Silicon Valley investors wanted them to, they improved on what they’d seen other apps do. They made a tool that was much simpler and faster to use than anyone else’s, taking up less of users’ time as they were out living the experiences Instagram wanted them to capture.

Beyond the product’s mechanics, the founders excelled in playing off the strengths of other people and other companies. They realized they weren’t starting from scratch. The technology industry already had winners; if Instagram made the giants look good, they’d get a boost in the process. Instagram was a crown jewel of Apple’s app store, later featured onstage at iPhone launches. It became one of the first startups to thrive on Amazon’s cloud computing. It was the easiest way to share photos on Twitter.

“Other people won’t always be in this for us,” Systrom realized. They could trust each other, and that was basically it. Nobody else was going to have Instagram’s best interests in mind.

“Anybody can build Instagram the app,” he said, “but not everybody can build Instagram the community.” Those artists, designers, and photographers were turning into evangelists for the product, and Instagram needed to keep them as excited as possible for as long as possible.

At Twitter and Facebook, executives reasoned that it was legally safer to be as uninvolved in content policing as possible. If there were problems, users could report or resolve them themselves, and it wasn’t the company’s job to tell them how to interact with the product. Riedel and Zollman saw it differently. Because Instagram didn’t have an algorithm or any way to re-share photos, there was no natural way for content to go viral. So Instagram employees had the opportunity to decide for themselves what kind of user behavior to reward, handpicking interesting profiles to highlight on their company blog. They also leaned on their users for help improving the product, asking via Instagram if anyone could volunteer to help translate the app into other languages, or if anyone could organize InstaMeets of their own around the world. They published tips for making higher-quality posts, with ideas for interesting angles and novelty perspectives, like shooting underwater.

Krieger stayed in San Francisco, but spent the weekend handling Facebook’s appraisals of Instagram’s technical infrastructure. He answered questions over the phone about how Instagram’s systems were architected, and what kind of software and services the company used. Facebook never asked to look at the code. We could be running this company on Legos and they wouldn’t know, Krieger thought.

Systrom gave four reasons. First, he reiterated Zuckerberg’s argument: that Facebook’s stock value was likely to go up, so the value of the acquisition would grow over time. Second, he’d take a large competitor out of the picture. If Facebook took measures to copy Instagram or target the app directly, that would make it a lot more difficult to grow. Third, Instagram would benefit from Facebook’s entire operations infrastructure, not just data centers but also people who already knew how to do all the things Instagram would need to learn in the future. Fourth, and most importantly, he and Krieger would have independence.

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. Analysts would later say that approving the acquisition was the greatest regulatory failure of the decade.

Instagram needed to sell to Facebook because Systrom and Krieger had been slow in hiring. They were so particular about picking employees who would be a perfect fit, despite being so frenzied with keeping the site alive.

Facebook in its discussions with regulators was right about one thing: Instagram was reaching a different audience than they were. Facebook required real names; Instagram allowed anonymity. Facebook had re-sharing and hyperlinks; Instagram did not. Facebook was about mutual friendships; on Instagram you could follow people even if they didn’t follow you back. 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.

Everyone at the company had access to the whole Facebook code base and was allowed to make changes to the product without much oversight. All they needed to prove was that their edit caused a boost, however small, for some important metric, like time spent on the app. That allowed engineers and designers to work a lot faster, because there was less arguing about why or whether they should build something. Everyone knew that their next raise would hinge on whether they affected growth and sharing. They weren’t held accountable for much else.

Companies become a reflection of their founders. Systrom had created a place on the internet where the most interesting people who were the best at what they did could be followed by others, praised, and emulated. He chose to grow that community with an editorial strategy that drew attention to top talents. The product was simply a venue for what its users were doing, and Systrom didn’t want to make big adjustments and risk ruining it, unless the change allowed the app to remain a high-end product experience.

Snapchat’s appeal with teens was crucial. Teens, about to leave high school and enter the wider world, were quickly building networks that would serve as infrastructure for the rest of their lives. At that age, they were building new habits and amassing spending power without oversight from their parents, developing affinities for brands they’d have loyalty to for years. Facebook might have started with college students, but Zuckerberg knew it needed power among this younger cohort.

Snapchatters would not “post to” their Stories; they would “add to” them. But now, with a broadcast tool, one that lowered the bar for what was good enough to capture on social media, Snapchat created a habit for the same young people they hoped to free from pressure.

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.

Influencers like the Kardashians helped brands get around the pitfalls of online commerce. With the rise of Amazon and other sites, consumers had an abundance of options for whatever they wanted to buy. Before making purchases, they would spend time reading reviews or hunting for the best deal. Branded posts on Instagram provided a rare opportunity to get consumers to make a spontaneous decision, since a trusted person’s endorsement made them feel they were making an informed choice, even about products as dubious as waist trainers.

In contrast to Facebook’s decisions, which were data-driven, Instagram’s curation developed out of its employees’ personal tastes.

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.

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. Pretty pictures were just tools on Instagram in the pursuit of being understood and validated by the rest of society, through likes and comments and even money, giving users a small slice of power over their own destiny.

Unlike Facebook, where employees looked for technical solutions that reached the most users, Instagram solved problems in a way that was intimate, creative, and relationship-based, sometimes even at the individual level if the user was important enough to warrant it.

The algorithm was hyper-personalized, so that any time someone clicked or shared something on Facebook, Facebook would log it as a positive experience and deliver more of the same. But virality had pitfalls. It addicted Facebook’s users to low-quality content.

But anyone losing an argument with Facebook had a last resort: running a test to see what the data showed. When Horsley tested whether Facebook would lose money by increasing the quality requirements, he miraculously found that the opposite was true. Advertisers took their ads more seriously, and spent more. The change was approved.

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.” It was an extremely risky strategy by Facebook standards, but Systrom couldn’t be convinced otherwise. He thought it was such a big change that everyone needed to be able to access it, or else it would be starved of the oxygen it needed to work.

The most shareable content on Facebook was what made people emotional, especially if it triggered fear, shock, or joy.

So Systrom understood the limitations of just numbers, which was one reason he’d invested so heavily in direct outreach and research.

Social media isn’t just a reflection of human nature. It’s a force that defines human nature, through incentives baked into the way products are designed.

By this point, around 2017, the public started to understand that the social media properties they loved weren’t just built for them, but were being used to manipulate their behavior too.

Besides the rise of Amazon, analysts cited the experiences-not-things trend for affecting retailers’ bottom lines.

But Zuckerberg wasn’t as moved by data in this instance as he usually was, because he didn’t imagine Instagram being so independent in the future. Now that he knew every Instagram success might result in a blow to the longevity of the main social network, it was more important to him than ever to coordinate between the teams. Facebook and its employees—and Zuckerberg himself—would have to be more directly involved in whatever Instagram did next, removing some need for hires.

Other reasons existed, besides making the network really, really big. The company could present a united front to regulators on their data policy. They could have the same content rules for users of every Facebook-owned app. Theoretically, it could make Facebook more difficult for the government to break up into pieces, should an antitrust challenge arise, though that wasn’t Zuckerberg’s stated strategy.

There are also the regulatory questions. Governments are waking up to the idea that the top alternative to Facebook is an app also owned by Facebook. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice are both probing whether Facebook is a monopoly, and revisiting the Instagram acquisition as part of their investigation.

“Technology isn’t good or bad—it just is,” he wrote. “Social media is a great amplifier. We need to do all we can responsibly to magnify the good and address the bad.”