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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.
Inside and outside Facebook, the story of Instagram is ultimately about the intersection of capitalism and ego—about how far people will go to protect what they built and to appear successful.
There is something powerful about that number—1 billion—in our society. It’s a marker signifying, especially in business, that you’ve achieved some unique untouchable status, graduating into an echelon that inspires awe and merits newsworthiness.
Instagram posts would be art, and art was a form of commentary on life. The app would give people the gift of expression, but also escapism.
Instead of trying to get everyone to use their app, they invited only people they thought would be likely to spread the word to their followers elsewhere, especially designers and creatives. They sold exclusivity to investors, even when so many of them were skeptical. In that sense, they were like a luxury brand, manufacturing coolness and tastefulness around what they’d built.
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Instagram’s early popularity was less about the technology and more about the psychology—about how it made people feel. The filters made reality look like art. And then, in cataloging that art, people would start to think about their lives differently, and themselves differently, and their place in society differently.
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New Instagram users found that basic things, like street signs and flower bushes and cracks in the paint of walls, all of a sudden were worth paying attention to, in the name of creating interesting posts.
If Facebook was about friendships, and Twitter was about opinions, Instagram was about experiences—and anyone could be interested in anyone else’s visual experiences, anywhere in the world.
The generation that had entered the workforce during the Great Recession seemed to be saying, with every Instagram post, that they valued being interesting more than they valued the nine-to-five.
The company was pushing faster, sleeker versions of the app to iPhones so frequently—once every couple weeks—that Sweeney didn’t have time to write a detailed description of what was new for the Apple app store. It would be too technical, anyway. He came up with a catch-all explanation, that other Silicon Valley apps would start borrowing: “bug fixes and performance improvements.”
Krieger did build a re-share button but never released it to the public. The founders thought it would violate the expectations you had when you followed someone. You followed them because you wanted to see what they saw and experienced and created. Not someone else.
Zuckerberg wasn’t sure how things would play out. But his motivation is outlined in a little red-orange book, handed down to new Facebook employees at every Monday morning orientation. On one of the last pages, against a navy backdrop, there are a few sentences in light blue writing that explain Zuckerberg’s paranoid leadership: “If we don’t create the thing that kills Facebook, someone else will. The internet is not a friendly place. Things that don’t stay relevant don’t even get the luxury of leaving ruins. They disappear.”
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.
Facebook automatically cataloged every tiny action from its users, not just their comments and clicks but the words they typed and did not send, the posts they hovered over while scrolling and did not click, and the people’s names they searched and did not befriend. They could use that data, for instance, to figure out who your closest friends were, defining the strength of the relationship with a constantly changing number between 0 and 1 they called a “friend coefficient.” The people rated closest to 1 would always be at the top of your news feed.
Once a week, Instagrammers would roll up their garage door and invite passing Facebookers in for coffee, in an attempt to make friends. (While there was free coffee everywhere on campus, Instagrammers could offer good coffee, the kind that came from the pour-over kits and espresso machines they had learned to prefer.)
“Facebook buying Instagram was like putting it in a microwave. In a microwave, the food gets hotter faster, but you can easily ruin the dish.”
virality had pitfalls.
Facebook hadn’t vetted the majority of its advertisers, only their credit cards.
Before making a decision about where to go for dinner, tourists would check Instagram to see how delicious their food would look, and so restaurants started to invest more in plating and lighting.
“What people are experiencing on Instagram is, they don’t feel good about themselves. It feels terrible. They have to compete for popularity.” —EVAN SPIEGEL, SNAPCHAT CEO
“Instagram is not for half-eaten sandwiches,” he would tell employees, setting up a contrast to Snapchat’s rawness. On a scale of quality images, rated 1 to 10, Instagram was for those ranked 7 and above, Systrom would say.
“Facebook was like the big sister that wants to dress you up for the party but does not want you to be prettier than she is.” —FORMER INSTAGRAM EXECUTIVE
It was all of these things Instagram avoided—hyperlinks, news, virality, edge stories—that cheapened Facebook’s relationship with its users.
Zuckerberg seemed to be saying that whatever problems Facebook had been blamed for creating, their solutions would be built by Facebook.
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.
Now that the products are adopted by a critical mass of the world’s internet-connected population, it becomes easier to describe them not by what they say they are, but by what they measure: Facebook is for getting likes, YouTube is for getting views, Twitter is for getting retweets, Instagram is for getting followers.
All of this perfection and commercial work masquerading as regular content has a price: a feeling of inadequacy for users who don’t understand the mechanics behind the scenes.
Facebook’s culture for responding to crisis was fully reactive: the company addressed problems only once they resulted in major blowups that politicians and the media were paying attention to.
Facebook’s core news feed product, where news and information could so specifically be targeted to users’ interests, also seemed to have a tremendous downside. You couldn’t know what someone else saw when logged onto Facebook, what shaped their reality. Some people were selling illegal drugs; some people were getting radicalized by the Islamic State; some people were not people at all, but bots trying to manipulate public conversations. Only Facebook had the power to understand and police it all—and they weren’t.
After all the hours Systrom had spent in leadership coaching over the years, all the books he’d read about how to be a better CEO, and all his personal improvement quests, he was faced with an unexpected personal discovery: he wasn’t the boss.
Instagram had long been able to scoff at Facebook’s growth tactics, because Facebook had made growth easy for them. Ironically, in an act of competitive defiance against their own parent company, they ended up doing what Facebook had always advised.
Hidden in the bland statement were two symbolic gestures. There was no mention of Zuckerberg. And they referred to Instagram as a separate company, which it had not been for six years.
Mosseri’s title would be “head of Instagram.” At Facebook Inc., there was room for only one CEO.
