No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

by Sarah Frier

Back in 2014, three months after the Vogue cover, Instagram announced that it had reached 300 million users and thus eclipsed Twitter in size. Ev Williams, Twitter’s cofounder, finally said publicly what he’d said privately all those times he had passed on buying Instagram: “If you think about the impact Twitter has on the world versus Instagram, it’s pretty significant,” he told Fortune. “Important stuff breaks on Twitter and world leaders have conversations on Twitter. If that’s happening, I frankly don’t give a shit if Instagram has more people looking at pretty pictures.” 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.