The Story of Add Yours, Vol. 4

Missed the earlier installments? Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Vol. 3

As a rule, I do not love starting out with housekeeping (I don't love housekeeping, period), but on the off-chance folks don't read to the end, I want to make sure everyone sees this:

First, thank you all so much for your kind and supportive comments last week. I you some responses, but let me say here that I appreciate not only the encouragement to take a break but the many good ideas you gave me for how to do that. I'll figure out my method—intrigued by the "seasons" idea, although not sure how it works and also not sure I can pull off that level of organization here—and will keep you all apprised. Don't worry, I won't clutter your inbox with "I'm on a break" messages. Whatever I send out will have something in them, whether a quick bit of scheduled writing or photos, except in the case of some weird emergency (exactly what kind of emergency do I imagine I would have here? Not sure).

Second, housekeeping of this variety will henceforth likely be found at the bottom of the newsletter, unless it's a big deal. I may also deploy a banner on the website and/or a call-to-action thing in the newsletter to let you know when I'm on break. I'll figure it out.

But really, thank you for being good humans and helping me create a good, humane space here. You're all wonderful. Now, onto the show.

Products, like most humans, mature. For a good long while they grow and change, hopefully for the better, often for the worse. No person, and no product, can grow forever. At some point growth ends and maybe even reverses. So too does the ability—or perhaps the willingness—to change, at least intentionally. A lot tends to calcify, but a lot tends to shift too, in ways that are hard to deal with, especially if you've been lax on upkeep and maintenance.

If you've never worked on a product, it might be funny to think about them this way. To you, a product might be a fixed entity, something you buy or start using for whatever reason. If you like it and want to keep using it, chances are you don't want it to change very much, unless there's something you particularly hate or something specific you'd love to see added. You might even think "I really like this product and will use it forever!" But how many products can you think of that you've truly used forever?

Look, I know: Over the years, more and more of what we use has been built in the era of planned obsolescence. It's hard to even find something you even can use forever without having to replace it. And if you do fall in love with something, chances are it gets discontinued or sunset if it's a tech product, or it changes so substantially that it's no longer what you fell for. Don't worry, I'm not putting this on consumers. But it is important to think about, especially when it comes to tech, and even more especially when it comes to social media.

We all remember what Instagram was like when it first launched in 2010. Square-only photos from your friends with some filters that seemed extremely cool at the time, presented in chronological order. If you went to their profile, the photos were all laid out nicely in a grid. It was the first visual-only social media on iOS. Flickr had obviously come before it, but Flickr wasn't social media in the burgeoning sense—it wasn't based on your social graph, with photos as the sharing mechanism, but rather had photos as the sharing mechanism, through which you connected with likeminded people and maybe made friends. The social graph was the huge shift ushered in by Facebook. People could connect with the people they already knew, people they'd lost touch with, friends from high school and long-lost family, and through those people connect with others. In a technical sense, Facebook put the social first, the media second.

And sure! That is how some friendships are formed. We reconnect with people from our past, or we meet people through our existing social circles, because they're already kind of like us and because they've already been kind of vetted by others we know. But that's not how all friendships are formed, nor is it how all culture is formed. Besides everyone stuck inside during Covid, this is one reason TikTok took off like rocket. People, especially teens, wanted "unconnected content," or content that was not connected to their social graphs but which they could take back to their social circles and share, more privately.

Instagram, as we've discussed, had changed substantially in the decade between its 2010 launch and the rise of TikTok. Part of that was the company's fault. Part of it was that, after a while, we do want to see more than a concert our friends went to, or a picnic they had with their kids. We want to see things we're interested in and that they're interested in, so our friendships can grow and deepen beyond whatever personal knowledge we already have. Part of it was that regular humans aren't built to constantly share content. And frankly, part of it was that the social started to feel lonely. Your friends weren't sharing to you, they were sharing to all their friends. Commenting wasn't a conversation, it was a drive-by acknowledgement. It was nice to be able to keep up with so many people in such an easy way, but it became increasingly more passive, and increasingly more lonely. We weren't really connecting, and we weren't really doing anything together.

Remember how I told you that sharing was down across Instagram, first Feed sharing and then Stories sharing? It wasn't just sharing, it was everything. You want to know something crazy? In 2021, almost a third of Instagram users were completely passive. No posting, no commenting, no liking, no messaging. Just scrolling. Do you know how hard it is to move a group like that? To get them to do something, anything, especially in a way that makes them want to do it again? It's really, really hard. It's at least as hard as getting new users. And you know what's even harder than that? Getting users who tried your product—and disliked it—to give you another chance. That was the biggest problem Instagram Stories had. It wasn't just that a lot of people weren't sharing in Stories, they weren't even looking at Stories at all! They were only scrolling and maybe interacting with Feed.

Up until January 2021, the team had tried basically everything they could think of. Increase the size of the Stories pogs (the circles at the top of Instagram Feed that you tap on to see Stories). Put more entry points for Stories throughout Feed. Integrate Stories into Feed itself. Nothing worked, and honestly a lot of it made the problem worse. You can't just push people through the door. You have to change what they experience once they go through.

But like I said, changing a product is hard. It's particularly hard when you have a "mature" product, which Instagram was. It was 10 years old and had 1 billion users with an incredible range of needs and use cases. Even small changes can cause big, big upsets, so what were we going to do?

One of the first things we did was have a brainstorm session to come up with new ideas. We did a brainstorm process that's called "Crazy 8s." You take a piece of paper, fold it in half, and then fold it in half again, so that when you unfold it all the way out, you get 8 sections. We then set a timer, and you have 60 seconds to sketch in an idea in one of those sections. Repeat that eight times. Then we take turns talking through each of our ideas, explaining what we came up with, how it would work, what our rationale was. At the end, once we've all explained, we vote. Everyone gets three votes, and they vote for the ideas they think have the most potential. The winning ideas get mocked up, and work proceeds from there. Our plan was for me to take the mockups and show them to 10 teenagers in what are called "concept tests," or interviews in which I show concepts to participants and have them explain what they see, what they think it is, how they think it would work, and what they think of it. My plan was to use those concept tests as a launchpad of sorts, from which I could ask questions about more abstract ideas, like about friendship and loneliness and connection.

In the brainstorm session, I thought about what I knew when it came to sharing content, but also what I knew about humans. But guess what? I'll finish telling you all about it next time.

Until next Wednesday!

Lx