No Filter Quotes

“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.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“A filter on Instagram was like if Twitter had a button to make you more clever.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“More important was the lesson that just because something is more technically complex doesn’t mean it’s better.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“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.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The inside story of Instagram

“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.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The inside story of Instagram

“On social media, the average user is scrolling passively, wanting to be entertained and updated on the latest. They are therefore even more susceptible to suggestion by the companies, and by the professional users on a platform who tailor their behavior to what works well on the site.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“People who don't take risks work for people who do.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“More than 200 million of Instagram's users have more than 50,000 followers, the level at which they can make a living wage by posting on behalf of brands.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“The apps start out with seemingly simple motivations, as entertainment that could lead to a business: Facebook is for connecting with friends and family, YouTube is for watching videos, Twitter is for sharing what’s happening now, and Instagram is for sharing visual moments. And then, as they enmesh themselves in everyday life, the rewards systems of their products, fueled by the companies’ own attempts to measure their success, have a deeper impact on how people behave than any branding or marketing could ever achieve.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“Everything breaks at a billion.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The inside story of Instagram

“just because something is more technically complex doesn’t mean it’s better.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The inside story of Instagram

“Vulnerability now gets better engagement, because it’s more relatable.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“leadership philosophy: to ask first what problem they were solving, and then to try and solve it in the simplest way possible.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“Facebook automatically catalogued 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.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“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.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The inside story of Instagram

“Like any system, it can be gamed. And Instagram ended up fueling a problem not just about truth in advertising, but about truth in life.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“Once Facebook purchased the VPN company, they could look at all the traffic flowing through the service and extrapolate data from it.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The inside story of Instagram

“It used to be that the internet reflected humanity, but now humanity is reflecting the internet.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The inside story of Instagram

“One of Zuckerberg’s least favorite criticisms of Facebook was that it created ideological echo chambers, in which people only engaged with the ideas they wanted to hear. Facebook had already funded research,12 in 2015, to show echo chambers were mathematically not their fault. With the social network, everyone had the potential to engage with whatever kinds of ideas they wanted to, and tended to have at least some Facebook connections with people who held different political opinions. But if people chose not to interact with those they disagreed with, was that really Facebook’s doing? Their algorithm was just showing people what they demonstrated, through their own behavior, they wanted to see, enhancing their existing preferences.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The inside story of Instagram

“Mosseri’s answer to the important question was perfect by Facebook standards: “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.”
But nothing “just is,” especially Instagram. Instagram isn’t designed to be a neutral technology, like electricity or computer code. It’s an intentionally crafted experience, with an impact on its users that is not inevitable, but is the product of a series of choices by its makers about how to shape behavior. Instagram trained its users on likes and follows, but that wasn’t enough to create the emotional attachment users have to the product today. They also thought about their users as individuals, through the careful curation of an editorial strategy, and partnerships with top accounts. Instagram’s team is expert at amplifying “the good.”
When it comes to addressing “the bad,” though, employees are concerned the app is thinking in terms of numbers, not people. Facebook’s top argument against a breakup is that its “family of apps” evolution will be better for users’ safety. “If you want to prevent interference in elections, if you want to reduce[…]”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“And they would avoid posting anything that perpetuated some of the new unhealthy trends on the app. They would never post a photo of anybody near a cliff, no matter how beautiful, because they knew that gaining a following on Instagram was becoming so desirable that people were risking their lives for perfect shots.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“Gabriel photographed each dish to post on his Instagram story, while lamenting that his friends were so obsessed with sharing their lives, he wasn't sure if they were actually living them.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“Systrom and Krieger didn’t want any of this to be on Instagram and knew, as the site got bigger, that they wouldn’t be able to comb through everything to delete the worst stuff manually. After just nine months, the app already hosted 150 million photos, with users posting 15 photos per second. So they brainstormed a way to automatically detect the worst content and prevent it from going up, to preserve Instagram’s fledgling brand. “Don’t do that!” Zollman said. “If we start proactively reviewing content, we are legally liable for all of it. If anyone found out, we’d have to personally review every piece of content before it goes up, which is impossible.” She was right. 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. The 1996 law was Congress’s attempt to regulate pornographic material on the Internet, but was also crucial to protecting internet companies from legal liability for things like defamation.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“At one point in 2015, a few Instagrammers in Barnieh's crowd in Hong Kong took the game to another level: they made a habit of hanging off the side of buildings and the tops of bridges. In one shot by Lucian Yock Lam, @yock7, a man is holding another man's arm while he dangles from the side of a skyscraper at night, hovering above a busy street. The caption is a simple hashtag: #followmebro. It got 2,550 likes, a fleeting reward for putting one's life at risk.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“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.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“Los factores estresantes de la primera etapa fueron producto de su propia gestión. La aplicación podría haberse presentado con una infraestructura más fuerte o con unas funciones más robustas, pero los fundadores no sabían si Instagram ganaría popularidad o no. Krieger afirmó que, si hubieran pasado más tiempo creando la aplicación, habrían perdido su oportunidad. Recordaba la aplicación sobre datos de delitos que había ayudado a crear, con sus gráficos carísimos, pero sin usuarios que los apreciaran. Era mejor empezar con algo minimalista y dejar que las prioridades fueran surgiendo sobre la marcha,”
― Sarah Frier, Sin filtro: La historia secreta de Instagram

“Poco después, probó su trabajo con una foto de un perro de pelo claro que vio delante de un puesto de tacos. El perro mira a Schuetz, cuya sandalia aparece en una esquina de la foto. Y esa fue, el 16 de julio de 2010, la primera foto publicada en la aplicación que se convertiría en Instagram.”
― Sarah Frier, Sin filtro: La historia secreta de Instagram

“Los fundadores se apoderaron de una pizarra en una de las salas de reuniones de Dogpatch Labs e hicieron una lluvia de ideas que serviría como fundamento de toda su filosofía de liderazgo: preguntar en primer lugar qué problema querían solucionar y luego intentar resolverlo de la manera más sencilla posible. Krieger y Systrom empezaron”
― Sarah Frier, Sin filtro: La historia secreta de Instagram

“Systrom sabía que su aplicación era entretenida, pero ¿era útil? ¿Solucionaba un problema común a la mayoría de las personas?”
― Sarah Frier, Sin filtro: La historia secreta de Instagram

“Facebook is for getting likes, YouTube is for getting views, Twitter is for getting retweets, Instagram is for getting followers.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram