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.

In Japan, there is a word for this Instagrammable design movement: Insta-bae (インスタ映え), pronounced “Insta-bye-eh.” The more Insta-bae something is, whether it’s an outfit or a sandwich, the more socially and commercially successful it has the potential to be.

Seemingly insignificant changes could make a huge difference when applied to millions or billions of people.

From the outside, Silicon Valley looked like it was run by geniuses. From the inside, it was clear that everyone was vulnerable, like he was, just figuring it out as they went along.

Instead of continuing to build the app they’d originally promised investors, the cofounders stopped and tried a bigger idea. They aimed to do just one thing—photography—really well. In that sense, their story is similar to Odeo’s, when Dorsey and Williams switched gears to focus on Twitter.

Investor Steve Anderson reminded Systrom and Krieger of their strongest asset. “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.

June 11, 1997, the day the first camera-phone photo was shared.

According to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, nobody who provided an “interactive computer service” was considered the “publisher or speaker” of the information, legally speaking, unless they exerted editorial control before that content was posted.

Instagram was the biggest mobile app acquisition that had ever happened—the best equity they could have chosen. But if the Instagrammers accepted Facebook job offers, Facebook would cancel their stock options in Instagram and grant them restricted stock units in Facebook instead. Their equity vesting schedule would start over, as if they hadn’t already worked many months. Only three employees had been at Instagram long enough to have the option to buy a quarter of their Instagram shares and convert them to Facebook shares at a lower price. Everyone else would have no wealth from Instagram stock.

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.

Zuckerberg understood that the hardest part of creating a business would be creating a new habit for users and a group they all wanted to spend time with. Instagram was easier to buy than to build because once a network takes off, there are few reasons to join a smaller one. It becomes part of the infrastructure of society.

Instagram was also a threat to the thing Facebook wanted from its users the most: time on its site. Facebook was in fierce competition with any other network that people would choose to visit in a spare moment—anything that allowed people to see what was going on in other people’s lives and post about their own. The stronger Instagram’s network got, the more it would become an alternative to Facebook for those moments of blank space in a day—in a cab, in line for coffee, bored at work.

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.

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.

Threats to and opportunities for Facebook’s product were evaluated with the same depth of analysis as everything else. Facebook had access to data that tracked how often people were using different apps on their smartphones. The data acted as an early warning system for a potential competitor’s rise.

Facebook preached operating “at scale”—serving more users with less employee effort. Handing things off to Facebook seemed to always mean a trade-off, unavoidable if Instagram wanted to grow.

Facebook had copied Snapchat’s functionality but they had failed to copy the app’s cool factor. They were facing the same problem they’d had when trying to build a camera app that copied Instagram. The social networking giant could harness the attention of millions, but the quality and feel of the product had to do the rest of the job.

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.

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.

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.

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. The public was coming to a consensus about what kinds of designs were Instagrammable.

The pursuit of followers and influence was a symptom of how aspirational Instagram had managed to make its app. 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.

Janelle Bull, a therapist at Anchor Psychology in Silicon Valley, explained that as Instagram became more integrated into everyday life, so too did her patients’ anxiety about having an interesting account. Parents worried about giving their children Instagrammable birthday parties and vacations (well before their kids were running their own social media accounts), searching Pinterest or browsing influencer accounts for recipes and ideas that would ultimately photograph well, like special cakes that candy spilled out of when they were cut open.

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.

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.

“Instagram,” a teen explained one night, “is going to be the next Myspace.” Even though they had been in kindergarten at best during Myspace’s glory days, the teens understood the shade they were throwing. “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.

As Instagram got larger, he agreed with Facebook that he needed to think more often about data and start measuring Instagram the way he measured his coffee extractions and ski runs. Based on the information, they could tweak the strategy slightly, until the numbers were better. That was what Paradigm Shift was about. It was a Facebooky approach that at first had seemed antithetical to Instagram’s intuitive design culture, but would be valuable.

fast-following, as it was called in the technology industry, rarely worked.

It seemed Snapchat wasn’t just for “half-eaten sandwiches,” as Systrom had dismissed it; it was a way to give every person their own reality television show.

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.

But people mistrusted algorithms, in part because of Facebook. To users of Instagram, the change felt like an affront to the experience each of them had worked so hard to curate and control. The launch drew immediate backlash. When Instagram ran blind tests, users liked the algorithmic version more; when told it was algorithmic, they said they preferred the chronological version.

“Reels” was the code name at Instagram, but everyone was casually calling the product Stories.

Funny--now reels is the name for the TikTok feature·

In all of its Snapchat copycatting, Facebook was forced to learn, over and over, that just because it had made one world-changing product didn’t mean it could succeed with another, even when that product was a replica of something already popular.

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.”

Systrom had told his communications team that he would acknowledge to the press that the Stories format was a Snapchat invention that Instagram had copied, and that was why they had the same name. (“You’re going to do WHAT?” Facebook PR head Caryn Marooney exclaimed. Usually Facebook would spin any copied products as a “natural evolution” of what users wanted.) It was a good instinct because that was how the press evaluated the move anyway. All the major headlines used some version of the word “copy” in them. By not denying it, Systrom took the momentum out of the criticism. He explained that it was just a new form of communication, like email or text messaging, and that just because Snapchat invented it didn’t mean that other companies should avoid using the same opportunity.

The blog cited anonymous Facebook contractors who said they routinely served up content from publishers like the New York Times and the Washington Post, but eschewed right-wing Fox News and Breitbart Gizmodo also reported that employees were openly asking Facebook management whether they had a responsibility to prevent a Trump presidency.

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Instagram had created what felt like a friendly alternative to Facebook, which allowed people to consume or create content related to their interests, whether ceramics, sneakers, or nail art—interests they might not have found until Instagram offered them up via their various curatorial strategies. It was all of these things Instagram avoided—hyperlinks, news, virality, edge stories—that cheapened Facebook’s relationship with its users.

Facebook was indeed biased, not against conservatives, but in favor of showing people whatever would encourage them to spend more time on the social network. The company was also in favor of avoiding scandal, appearing neutral, and giving the public what they wanted. But as Facebook became a destination for political conversations, the human curation in “Trending Topics” wasn’t the actual problem. It was how human nature was manipulated by Facebook’s algorithm, and how Facebook looked away, that got the company in trouble.

If Facebook users were all in a digital town square, they were each listening to the public speaker Facebook thought they would find most interesting or urgent, while experiencing whatever companions and entertainment Facebook thought would please them. Then, without any knowledge of what someone else’s town square looked like, users were trying to make a decision collectively about who the mayor should be.

Trump’s win, in part because his team had taken full advantage of Facebook’s power to personalize and target information to a receptive audience, was an ideal outcome for any top advertising client. But Trump hadn’t been selling cookware or flights to Iceland—he’d been selling the presidency.

But Systrom didn’t argue. He’d seen Zuckerberg fight with other, more headstrong leaders at Facebook, especially from acquired companies WhatsApp and Oculus, the virtual reality arm, and knew how it could end. For example, after Zuckerberg bought Oculus in 2014, he wanted to change the name of their virtual reality headset, the Oculus Rift, to the Facebook Rift. Brendan Iribe, a cofounder of Oculus and then CEO of that division, argued that it was a bad idea because Facebook had lost trust with game developers. Over a series of uncomfortable meetings, they settled on “Oculus Rift from Facebook.” In December 2016, after a number of similar disagreements, Zuckerberg pushed Iribe out of his CEO position. When someone is having an emotional reaction, you don’t poke at it, Systrom thought.

Systrom decided Instagram should lean into its feel-good image, giving people even more tools to block out what they didn’t want to see. By December 2016, Instagram was letting users turn off comments for posts entirely if they wanted. Systrom’s willingness was in stark contrast to the attempts by Facebook and Twitter to err on the side of leaving content up, in an attempt to promote environments they said were neutral and open, but that in practice were rarely policed.

Since at least 2015, Facebook’s communications team had regularly polled the public, surveying users on Facebook about whether the company was innovative and good for the world. Considering Zuckerberg’s reputation and that of the company were inextricably linked, they also asked these questions about Zuckerberg himself. Because Zuckerberg’s tour wasn’t helping the numbers, Facebook’s communications team gathered for an off-site meeting that spring of 2017, where Caryn Marooney, the PR head, presented research showing Facebook’s brand had a more unfavorable rating than that of Uber—a ride-sharing startup beset with scandal during that period.

Systrom understood the limitations of just numbers, which was one reason he’d invested so heavily in direct outreach and research. But now that Facebook was studying whether Instagram was statistically likely to cannibalize Facebook’s success, he wanted to get better at forecasting.

When Schultz completed his research on whether Instagram would cannibalize Facebook, the leaders read the data very differently. Zuckerberg thought the research showed that it was likely Instagram would threaten Facebook’s continued dominance—and that the cannibalization would start in the next six months. Looking at the chart years into the future, if Instagram kept growing and kept stealing users’ time away from Facebook, Facebook’s growth could go to zero or, even worse, it could lose users. Because Facebook’s average revenue per user was so much higher, any minutes spent on Instagram instead of Facebook would be bad for the company’s profitability, he argued. Systrom disagreed. “This is not Instagram taking away from the Facebook pie to add to the Instagram pie,” he said in their Monday morning leadership meetings. “The total pie is getting bigger.” It wasn’t just Instagram versus Facebook. It was all of these Facebook properties versus every other choice in the world, like watching television or using Snapchat or sleeping.

Everyone with a blue checkmark, after realizing that their comments would be prominently displayed, had an incentive to comment more. The comment ranking helped brands, influencers, and Hollywood types fight their deprioritization by the main algorithm. Instagram commenting became marketing, or, in the vernacular of Silicon Valley engineers, “growth hacking.”

The version of Instagram that the founders had set out to create, one that would foster art and creativity and provide visual windows into the lives of others, was slowly being warped by the metrics Instagram prioritized, turning the app into a game that one could win.

Companies try to intuit what a good measure of happiness for their users might be and, by building their sites to prioritize those metrics, manipulate their users over time.