The Story of Add Yours, Vol. 2

Missed Vol. 1? Read it here.

Depending on your propensity for philosophical noodling, you may have occasionally pondered elements of social media beyond the usual questions like "why is everyone's life more fun than mine" and "why am I doomscrolling at 2 a.m." and "why did we create these horrible products and why are they so hard to quit?" For instance, do you ever think about what is, or at least what was, fun about social media? What made it feel good, in the moments that did, or what made you want to post something or message another person? A lot of people, when asked questions like this, and especially when it comes to Instagram, often answer with some riff on the following: "I got to see what my friends were up to, in chronological order of what they posted, and it was great. I hated the algorithmic timeline, I hated how soulless Instagram became, and now I just hate toxic it is and how it makes me feel."

This, of course, is a reasonable response. I've felt all of these things myself and still feel them on a regular basis. But for a moment, I need you to try and set aside your own feelings about Instagram. Not because I want to defend it (trust me, I do not) but because I want you to try and step into the mindset of someone who, like me, works on products like Instagram. As a consumer, you have a different relationship to a product, and your feelings matter most. As a user researcher, feelings kind of matter, but you have to be careful with them. And your feelings don't really matter at all.

End-user-you, I hope, does not spend eight or more hours a day thinking about Instagram, at least not as a product. If you're using it for eight hours a day, it's in a different context, like you're a social media manager or a content creator (or you just really need help). You don't marinate your brain in behavioral data and metrics about the product and its end users, nor do you concern yourself with business needs. You certainly don't know what team builds which part of the product, or who's responsible for the change you hate or the feature you love. For you, the product as a product is low on the list of your intellectual and emotional priorities.

You're also concerned primarily with your own relationship to the product. Or maybe you and your family's, or your business's. It's a much more one-to-one relationship. The unspoken product contract is between you, the end user who is naturally the center of your own universe, and the product itself. We'll get to what I mean about the product contract a bit later.

As a consumer, it's easy to forget just how many people use these products. The numbers are mind-boggling. Isn't it wild that, in its heyday, Twitter was the smaller of the social media giants because it only (only!!) had something like 300 million users? Instagram has ONE BILLION. Facebook? THREE BILLION. Even if we set aside the bots, scammers, fake accounts, finstas, and more. it's still a lot of people. And almost all of them, like you, are the stars of their own little show. I mean this both in the way I described above—my main concern is my own relationship to this product—and in the more social media-specific way, where we're all standing in our own little spotlights, beaming out photos and videos and snippets of text into the darkness beyond the footlights, hoping the audience is not only there but is receptive.

This is, if you don't mind my saying it, fucking bonkers. What a wildly irresponsible thing to casually unleash on society.

Look. I am very familiar with the original premise that the internet heralded a new era for freedom of expression, for voices previously kept silent by the gatekeepers of yore, for connection and community and discovery without the constraints of traditional society or geography. You don't have to tell me about it. I was involved in early '90s internet communities and was very present for the first days of the modern World Wide Web. I still remember seeing Mosaic and then Netscape Navigator in a computer lab when I was maybe a sophomore or junior in college. A lot of people were excited about the new frontier, about the beautiful potential it held for human expression and connection. And of course, simultaneously, I remember a lot of other people were excited about having a new frontier to plunder. A magical unsullied landscape? Cool! Let's stick a billboard in it! It was very PLUR (peace, love, unity, and raves, for those who don't know) injected with, as always, an unhealthy speedball of capitalism.

Certainly, we've seen elements of that original, idyllic promise come to fruition. I watched videos of a gorgeous, glamorous Black woman who spent Black History Month cooking and baking lost Black-American recipes. I use a cookbook written by a young Korean-American in collaboration with her Korean mother, whose entire audience was built online. I met my best friend in the world on a photo sharing website (original Flickr, you were too good for this world) even though she lives and has always lived in Australia, and I live on the other side of the world. I even discovered great people and great content on (pre-hellscape) Twitter! So yes, it hasn't been only teen girl and/or democracy-destroying bullshit.

But a lot of it has been destructive. To loop back to two paragraphs ago, a major reason for this is that unleashing social media as it was and continues to be designed was and remains catastrophically stupid. Social media, as you've noticed, is missing some minor details. You know, little things like social cues, tools to help people navigate their experiences and emotions, more sophisticated options for actually engaging with or connecting to anything and anyone you see, and any thought literally at all to the entire concept of a thing we in the "soft" sciences like to call call social norms.

Then millions—nay, billions—of us poured in and wondered why we all hated one another.

At this moment you're probably thinking, "What on earth... I thought she was going to get back to Add Yours." This is me getting back to it. In the first installment I tried to catch you up on the first five months of my time at Instagram. In this installment I'm trying to catch you up on roughly 25 years of my thinking about all this stuff. Easy peasy.

Now, you've heard me say before that one of the bigger mistakes we made in this whole boondoggle was convincing ourselves "online isn't real." It is life-and-society-and-planet-alteringly real, and it always was. We regularly accept there are different kinds of "real" in our daily lives. We have things that are physically, tangibly real, like the grass we should all go outside and touch. We also have more abstract or intangible constructs that we mostly agree are real: the past, the future, religion, and so on. So why wasn't online real to people? It sure was real to advertisers and venture capitalists! But we didn't treat it as real from a human perspective. We somehow didn't think that billions of humans, from vastly different cultures and socioeconomic strata, speaking every single language on the planet, would perhaps want some kind of guardrails or support in trying to communicate with one another via text and imagery—the former a notoriously difficult mode of communication, and the latter a medium few of us are taught or naturally use as a way of communicating. We didn't think that, while everyone has a voice, not everyone has A Voice. Not everyone is an artist or a writer or a supermodel (although some of us are all three), and not everyone is built to churn out content once or multiple times a week to a mostly silent, non-paying audience.

And this, my friends, is why, in the beginning, everyone took so many fucking pictures of what they had for lunch.

This was a small part of the problem Instagram needed to fix when I joined. Over the years, as the platform had grown, different kinds of sharing had declined. First it was Feed sharing. Regular people stopped sharing as much on Instagram as they had before. There were a lot of reasons for this, including but not limited to:

• Instagram was no longer where everyone shared photos of their lives (and lunches). Unsurprisingly, the visual-first platform had developed a specific and highly polished aesthetic. Feed photos had to stand out. Moments had to be "grid worthy." This was a showcase for your life: All highlights, no lowlights, minimal behind-the-scenes mess. Naturally, this pressure meant a lot of people posted less often, and did so irregularly. Polished content takes some work! Graduation doesn't happen every week!
• Before you blame Instagram the company for this, please remember: People liked polished content, at least in the beginning. It felt like higher quality content, worth engaging with. As we've discussed, the more users engage with something using the built-in system mechanisms, the more the system tells the company "I guess they like this stuff."
• You know who was good at producing polished content on a regular basis? Brands. Savvy media organizations. Celebrities with huge creative teams behind them.
• You know who else got good at it? Influencers and content creators.
• A lot more of those accounts started popping up, because it quickly became obvious that Instagram was a goldmine for advertisers. Plus, people liked and followed them. They had high-quality content! As more of those accounts emerged, so did more of their content end up in people's feeds.
• Those accounts released content on a schedule. There was a lot more brand content than friend content. So everyone's Feeds quickly filled up, chronologically, with brand content, which was bad, because users originally came to Instagram to share photos with their friends.
• This is the unspoken product contract I mentioned earlier: A person decides to use a product because of what they've heard about it. This person has a set of expectations based on publicity, what they've heard from other people, and the promise (often explicitly) stated by the product itself. So I, a user, will give you either my money or my data, and in return, you, the product, will give me photos of my friends's lunches in chronological order. (Then I will complain about this until I no longer get my friends's photos, and instead I will complain about that.)
• You might not believe me, and I'm not defending the algorithmic timeline, but this is one reason it was introduced. Brands released way more content than normies, and they did so a lot more often. If it had been chronological, your friend's enviable vacation photo post from five days ago would have been lost to time, and you'd only see, like, posts from Rothy's.
• People followed a mix of friends, brands, celebs, and creators. Most of us were and are terrible about curating our follow lists—mine is like an amazing archaeological dig with layered strata of interests, phases, friends over the years—so any friend content that did get posted was drowned out, which meant it got less engagement, which meant people were even less interested in posting to their grids. Rinse repeat.
• Yes, I know the algorithms did a terrible job of surfacing that friend content when it did get posted. While I'd like to ascribe this to the evil machinations of the Meta monsters, I can promise you that Instagram really, really, really wanted you to see your friend content, because Instagram knew very well your friends are what got you to join and kept you on a social media platform that, like Instagram, was driven by the social graph. The problem was that the Instagram algorithms were (and still kind of are) notoriously terrible. This was a subject of countless discussions with coworkers and teams, and I've mentioned it before. Just trust me when I tell you IG desperately wanted you to see your friends content, and to get you and your friends to share more content. I know this because it's the reason Add Yours exists.
• Surprisingly, we're not there yet! We're still on the decline of Feed!!! I refuse to apologize because I told you this would take a few installments!!!!!

Ok so! Instagram as a platform now served a bunch of different purposes. It was no longer just your friends's sandwiches. Now it was also OnlySandwiches. Users were like, wow this platform kinda sucks. Think about it: The platform was built first around people sharing photos, and secondly, as a distinct afterthought, around people maybe interacting with those photos or doing some other stuff. If photo sharing suddenly and rapidly declines, the platform has a problem.

But here's a more fucked up thing for you to think about. The problem wasn't that you and your friends's photos were driving a huge share of consumption, and thus the consumption metric was down. You and I know very well that your 27 likes didn't do shit for Instagram. The problem was that if you and your friends didn't post, you and your friends didn't open Instagram as often or stay on it as long, and if you didn't open Instagram or stay on it, then you couldn't be an audience for the small percentage of celebrities, content creators, and brands whose content was responsible for the vast percentage of consumption—and thus of ad revenue.

Ah. Now you see.

So! Instagram had to do something to fix this. Luckily, it was owned by Facebook (not yet Meta) at that point, so as an industry behemoth it could engage in two time-honored tactics: Copying a competitor and using brute force to change a metric. Instagram's grid too polished, too permanent, too much pressure? You know what would be amazing is something more ephemeral, like photos that automatically disappear after 24 hours. Sound familiar? It was Snapchat, the upstart social media platform that had already introduced these automatically disappearing photos to millions of teens Instagram could ill afford to lose as users. No matter. Meet Instagram Stories!

Which we'll do in Vol. 3! Until next Wednesday!

Lx