“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, according to the influencer analysis company Dovetale.”
“Less than a hundredth of a percent of Instagram’s users have more than a million followers. At Instagram’s massive scale, that 0.00603 percent equates to more than 6 million Insta-celebrities, a majority of them rising to fame through the app itself.”
“For a sense of scale, consider that millions of people and brands have more Instagram followers than the New York Times has subscribers. Marketing through these people, who are basically running personal media companies through tastemaking, storytelling, and entertaining, is now a multibillion-dollar industry.”
“Systrom had seen enough startups with toxic cofounder relationships to know how rare it was to find someone he could trust. The founders at Twitter, for example, were always trying to undermine one another. Dorsey was actually no longer the CEO of the company. Employees complained he had been taking credit for all the ideas and success around Twitter while avoiding managing people. Dorsey would take breaks for hot yoga and sewing classes. “You can either be a dressmaker or the CEO of Twitter,” Ev Williams said to him, according to Nick Bilton’s book Hatching Twitter. “But you can’t be both.” In 2008, Williams worked with Twitter’s board to take over, ousting Dorsey.”
“We’re looking to have a level of impact on the world that is unmatched by any other company, and in order to do that we can’t sit around and act like we’ve made it. We need to constantly remind ourselves that we haven’t won and that we need to keep making bold moves and keep fighting or we risk peaking and fading away.”
“People who don’t take risks work for people who do,”
“Since consumers are much more likely to be swayed to buy something if friends or family recommend it, as opposed to advertisements or product reviews, these ambiguous paid posts were effective. The Kardashians, who built a fan base by being vulnerable on television and then on Instagram, were able to make their followers feel like the family was their friends, not salespeople profiting off their consumption. Their Instagram endorsements were so powerful, whatever they put their word behind would sell out quickly—whether it was makeup, clothing, or wellness products of ill repute, like their dieting teas and modern-day corsets called “waist trainers.” The Kardashian empire on Instagram was like Oprah’s Book Club in the late 1990s, with a supersize silicone injection.”
“Today, Kim Kardashian West has 157 million followers and makes about $1 million for a single post. Paris Hilton eventually joined Instagram too, and now has 11 million followers. Porch now has employee counterparts in Los Angeles who answer celebrity queries for the Kardashians and others, solving their problems directly while most of the app’s users fend for themselves.”
During rehearsal, DeGeneres saw a seat labeled with Meryl Streep’s name, near the aisle in the third row. It gave her the idea that if she could get Streep involved, her selfie would be even more exciting. Representatives from Samsung, a major sponsor for the Oscars, watched her practice her lines and heard her mention the plan. They jumped on the opportunity, calling an ad executive at Twitter to ensure that if DeGeneres posted, she wouldn’t use her personal iPhone and instead a Samsung one. The team presented her with a tray of Samsung options the morning of the event, all selfie-ready.
While live, Oscars host DeGeneres stepped off the stage and walked over to Meryl Streep. Bradley Cooper, also in the audience but unaware of the plan, improvised, taking the phone from the host’s hand and bringing other actors into the shot: Jennifer Lawrence, Lupita Nyong’o, Peter Nyong’o, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Jared Leto, Julia Roberts, and Kevin Spacey. The resulting post immediately became Twitter’s most popular of all time, retweeted by more than 3 million people.
When Vine content production started to slow down, Twitter added a re-Vine button, so people could share other people’s Vines in their own feeds. The move had an unexpected side effect, similar to what might have happened to Instagram had they added a re-gram button. Because people could share other users’ content in their own feeds, they no longer had a motivation to attempt time-consuming creative skits.
A couple years later, there was little original content production on Vine except from professionals, so those stars realized they had leverage. Twenty of the top Viners banded together to negotiate with Twitter, saying that for about $1 million each, they would post every day for the next six months. If Twitter rejected the deal, they would instead start posting Vines to tell followers to find them on Instagram, YouTube, or Snapchat instead. Twitter refused, the stars abandoned the app, and eventually, Vine shut down entirely.
Facebook employees, who were taught that sharing was central to the mission of “connecting the world,” applied certain strategies to make it a habit. 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. The Instagram employees wondered, was a click even an accurate signal of what a user wanted? Or were they being manipulated by the content itself? The viral links had headlines like, “This Man Got in a Fight at a Bar and You’ll Never Guess What Happened Next” and “We Saw Pictures of This Child Actress All Grown Up, and WOW!”
They would promote what they felt was their standard fare, like embroidery artists and funny-looking pets. 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. They would avoid promoting yoga and fitness accounts, so that they wouldn’t seem to approve of a certain body type and make their users feel inadequate—or worse, aroused. They would also avoid promoting accounts that showed off expensive experiences, like ones from travel bloggers.
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. Before meeting a new date, users would check out each other’s profile to see evidence of interesting hobbies and experiences, as well as of prior relationships. Singles would polish up their feeds. In casting for movies and TV shows, directors would check actors’ profiles, to see if they’d bring an Instagram audience if they got a role. Actors needed to become influencers, just as Ashton Kutcher had predicted.
The surge in this type of activity couldn’t have come at a worse time for Instagram’s business endeavors, as the company was in the midst of convincing official advertisers to spend money on the app for the first time. If marketers knew a significant portion of the Instagrammers were bots, they wouldn’t be as interested in paying money to reach them. Instagram took its first big swing at the problem in December 2014. Once they thought the technology was ready, they deleted all of the accounts that they thought weren’t those of real people, all at once.
By 2015, dozens of firms, including Instagress and Instazood, offered a compelling service: their clients could focus on perfecting their Instagram posts and they would do all the networking work. Clients would hand over the password credentials for an account, and the services would turn it into a popularity-seeking machine, following and commenting on thousands of others’ work in order to be noticed.
For an article he was writing, Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Max Chafkin tested out Instagress to see whether it was possible to become an influencer quickly. By the end of one month, he’d spent $10 on automated technology that caused his account to like 28,503 posts and comment 7,171 times, with prewritten generic reactions, including “Wow!” “Pretty awesome,” and “This is everything.” Those whom he interacted with reciprocated, boosting his audience into the thousands. The project ended when he received his first opportunity for a sponsored post—to model a $59 T-shirt. It’s unclear whether the accounts that followed him back were automated too.
Employees, many of whom had transplanted from Facebook, were not impressed by Systrom’s new trash rules. It wasn’t practical, and seemed like a distraction from what they should be focused on—their competition. To them, it was a demonstration of peak preciousness, which was a manifestation of Systrom’s opinions about the product itself. The idea that the Instagram app was some pristine display of the world’s beauty was at best outdated, and at worst a dangerous positioning that could limit its opportunity, ceding market share to Snapchat. A hundred million people were logging into Snapchat every day—a number Facebook could estimate pretty closely from the Onavo tool. Employees had lost confidence that Systrom knew what to prioritize for Instagram’s future.
It was harder to talk about the reasons, at the root of the #trashcangate jokes, that they were actually upset. 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.
All the so-called barriers to sharing were rounded up in a brutal report by one of the company’s researchers. The company started on a program to solve them, called Paradigm Shift. To address the finsta trend, Instagram would start to allow people to switch between accounts more easily. For the #doubleinsta problem, Instagram would make it possible to share several photos in the same post. And on and on. Systrom usually wasn’t one for war analogies, but if they were at war with Snapchat, Paradigm Shift was their beachhead, he would say.
In their comments, they used super-affirming language: “OMG you’re a MODEL!” or “I hate you, you’re so beautiful!” Often it was accompanied by the heart-eye emoji. If the selfie poster cared about the friendship, they would have to comment back, within minutes again, with a reply like “No YOU’RE the model!” (Never “thank you,” which would imply that they agreed they were beautiful, which would be horrifying.) The girls expected 130 to 150 likes on their selfies, and 30 to 50 comments.
The conversations on Instagram—especially the nature of who was commenting on whose photos, and who showed up in whose selfies—were what defined their friendships, their social standing at high school, and their personal brand, which they were already acutely aware of. As they explained to Glass on the radio show,
When Weil arrived at Facebook headquarters, he had just received both texts and direct Twitter messages from Twitter’s head of revenue, Adam Bain, marking the end of their friendship. Weil was shaking, wondering if he had acted unethically. Sheryl Sandberg called him into her office to calm him down.
“We’re media companies, in the same line of work,” Sandberg explained. “Imagine if you worked for ABC or CBS, and then got recruited by NBC. Would it be unethical to go there?” Weil supposed not.
Jack eventually apologized to Weil for his anger, which had deep roots in his own feeling of betrayal after Instagram’s sale to Facebook so many years earlier. Spiegel, always paranoid, decided Weil had probably been spying on behalf of his new employer, and put a moratorium on hiring anyone from Instagram for about six months. The only thing left for Weil to do was prove that he’d made the right career decision.
Facebook had contacts with the Vatican, which Porch leveraged to request a papal audience for Systrom. He had a strategy argument. The Catholic Church, with a network of 1.2 billion, smaller than Facebook’s, needed to stay relevant. It could use Instagram to reach a young audience. Miraculously, Pope Francis agreed to meet, just two years into his papacy.
Up until this point, all of the content on Instagram had been arranged with the newest posts first. But Instagram’s chronological feed had become problematic and unsustainable in terms of keeping everyday people engaged. The more professional Instagrammers tended to post at least once a day, at the most strategically viable time, with content they expected would get the most likes, while more casual users might post less than once a week. That meant that anyone who followed a combination of influencers, businesses, and friends would log on and then most likely see content from professionals at the top of their feed, not the posts from their friends. It was bad for their friends, because they didn’t get the likes and comments they needed to be motivated to post more, and it was bad for Instagram, because if people didn’t see enough amateur posts, they were more likely to feel their own photos were unworthy by comparison.
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. Snapchat, meanwhile, learned that it could ignore Facebook’s repeated attacks. In fact, Facebook was so apparently unthreatening during this period that a Snapchat executive proposed trying something crazy: being friends.
Robby Stein, the product director in charge of Stories, would later compare the anxiety around the launch to that of a major life event, like getting married or having a child, where you have convinced yourself it’s a good thing and anticipated it for many months, but you know everything will be forever changed once you do it.
The most shareable content on Facebook was what made people emotional, especially if it triggered fear, shock, or joy. News organizations had been designing more clickable headlines ever since the social network became key to their distribution. But those news organizations were getting beaten by these new players, who had come up with an easier, more lucrative way to go viral—by making up stories that played on Americans’ hopes and fears, and therefore winning via the Facebook algorithm.
Not long after Zuckerberg’s talk, a data scientist posted a study internally on the difference between Trump’s campaign and Clinton’s. That was when employees realized there was another, maybe even bigger way their company had helped ensure the election outcome. In their attempt to be impartial, Facebook had given much more advertising strategy help to Trump.
Trump’s campaign had a total of 5.9 million different versions of his ads, compared to Clinton’s 66,000, in a way that “better leveraged Facebook’s ability to optimize for outcomes,” the employee said. Most of Trump’s ads asked people to perform an action, like donating or signing up for a list, making it easier for a computer to measure success or failure. Those ads also helped him collect email addresses. Emails were crucial, because Facebook had a tool called Lookalike Audience. When Trump or any advertiser presented a set of emails, Facebook’s software could find more people who thought similarly to the members of the set, based on their behavior and interests.
Clinton’s ads, on the other hand, weren’t about getting email addresses. They tended to promote her brand and philosophy. Her return on investment would be harder for Facebook’s system to measure and improve through software. Her campaign also barely used the Lookalike tool.
But there was a second problem. People on Facebook were not posting updates like they used to. They were sharing links and making events, but they weren’t posting their original feelings and thoughts as often. Earlier that year, Facebook had tried to make it more fun to post, giving users options for colorful backgrounds and fonts so their writing would become more eye-catching. The social network was even prompting people on the top of their news feeds with photos from their pasts, so perhaps they would re-share memories. Facebook was also alerting them about obscure holidays and events, like National Siblings Day, in hopes that people would post about them.
Critics were still saying Trump’s election and Britain’s vote to leave the European Union were the result of a Facebook-fueled polarization of society. 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, 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.
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.
Every day, the family followed a schedule, posting about whichever product launch or life event was their designated big news. When they commented on each other’s photos, appearing publicly supportive, it had the added benefit of sending a strong signal to the algorithm: this post is important and should be ranked higher. It was a problem because, as they told Porch’s team, the public never saw their extra efforts. The comments section for the Instagram-famous was such a constant stream of activity that important stuff got buried. And if you were Kylie Jenner, getting hundreds of comments in minutes after posting about lipstick, there was no way to see and react to a supportive message from half-sister Kim in a way fans would expect.
Porch’s team liaised with Instagram’s engineers and came up with a solution: algorithmic ordering for comments too. Starting in the spring of 2017, comments on anyone’s photos from people who were important to them—maybe they were closer friends, or had a blue checkmark by their account saying they were “verified” as a public figure—appeared positioned higher and more prominently in the display.
Instagram measures follows, likes, and comments. Since users know they will be judged in each category with every post, they tailor their behavior to meet the standards their peers are hitting, the way a gymnast knows they will be evaluated on the difficulty and execution of their routine. The bigger Instagram grew, the more its users strived for followers, likes, and comments, because the rewards of achieving them—through personal validation, social standing, and even financial reward—were tremendous.
An Instagram user’s path to success was obvious, based on benchmarking against others. All you had to do was create the right kind of content: visually stimulating, with a reflective but optimistic caption, inspiring some level of admiration. En masse, those activities spilled over into real life and real business decisions. 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.
The effect had already played out in other parts of the internet, where user-generated content reigns. On YouTube, the site’s algorithm gradually started to reward creators according to watch time, thinking that a longer time spent on a video meant it was engaging enough to be displayed higher in searches and recommendations. In response, those seeking fame on the site stopped making short skits and started making 15-minute makeup tutorial videos and hour-long debates about video game characters, so they could be displayed in rankings more prominently and slot in more ads. YouTube also measured average percentage of a video viewed, as well as average watch duration, as signals for ranking. So YouTube creators tailored their behavior to those metrics too, getting angrier and edgier in their videos to retain viewers’ attention. Some of them stoked conspiracy theories, saying anything sensational enough to keep people tuned in. Anyone who erroneously believed in chemtrails or the flat earth found new support and community on the site.
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. 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.
When someone goes to Google, their inbox, or their text messages, they generally know what they want to accomplish. But 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.
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.