The Story of Add Yours, Vol. 3

Missed the earlier installments? Here's Vol. 1 and here's Vol. 2.

Years ago, more than a decade now, I edited a series of personal essays for a magazine called Pacific Standard. This was toward the tail end of the personal essay renaissance, those years when first-person writing leapt out of blogs and into publications of every kind, from sedate and traditional to—real ones will remember—absolutely batshit insane. I’d written my own series of self-published personal essays, which had gotten a little attention, and that had led to this freelance gig. 

It was great! I loved doing it and had almost universally great experiences with the writers who pitched essays or whom I approached (and sometimes cajoled, gently but with great persistence) to contribute. One writer did get very angry at me for rejecting an essay, but I no longer remember the details and I hope they’ve forgiven me, wherever (whoever?) they are. Otherwise, it was genuinely rewarding in every way. To be honest, I’d even include that angry writer in the “genuinely rewarding,” because the experience taught me a lot. 

By that time in my writing career, I’d worked with a range of pretty good to deeply terrible editors. I’d also worked with a truly exceptional editor or two, one of whom kicked my ass so hard during the process that I was briefly afraid I wouldn’t be able to deliver what she wanted. But I did, and to this day it remains one of the best things I’ve ever written. (Thank you forever, Jessica!) I understood why writers needed editors, what editing was actually for, and how great editing could be. I also understood the many ways in which editing could absolutely suck.

Editing is a tricky endeavor. An editor has to (or ideally should) balance a lot of things on multiple levels. Obviously this includes grammar, structure, flow, and general readability. Accuracy, if we’re dealing with facts more than feelings. Permissibility and appropriateness, certainly, unless we’re working in the aforementioned batshit insane model. Tone and style of the publication might be very important, or it might matter less depending. And at the heart of this, of course, is the writer and their work. Writers, you may be surprised to hear, are sensitive and thin-skinned. Some are more socially awkward than readers expect, especially if a reader isn’t a writer and has developed a parasocial relationship with someone through their writing. It’s hard to remember that most writing was—and still is, in many ways—an inherently solo endeavor with little-to-no feedback, at least during the writing process itself. You only get feedback if you actively seek it out, or maybe after, when you post it online. Even then, you might not!

Others may disagree, but to me the role of an editor is to help shape a piece of writing into the best possible version of itself. This may mean very different things depending on the piece, the publication, the assignment, the pitch. The best editors I've worked with pushed me to write the best version of whatever it was I was writing. Writing that opinion piece for the New York Times required something different of me, and thus of my editor, than writing a personal essay, a short story, or a book proposal. At the same time, it required a lot of the same things, and I am still the same writer. I guess really, for me, a great editor is someone who helps me be the best writer I can be in that moment. And if I've got a great editor, I trust them completely. I'll delete entire sections, rewrite and reorganize and revise, if I think they're right. I'll only push back when I firmly believe they're wrong, and usually in those cases, I'm right. This was the kind of editor I tried to be when I did that essay series.

In a way, being an editor was a lot like being a user researcher. I had to listen on multiple levels, poke around in uncomfortable places, try and pull out the necessary information without totally pissing off the the writer, figure out what the bigger story is and help bring that story to life without actually writing the story myself. In both roles, the person opposite me was someone—whether writer or research participant—who wasn't used to someone else poking around in the thing they’re doing. How often do you go around asking another person all about the app they spend hours on, how they use it and where and why and what they get out of it? How often do you ask someone to tell you the honest truth about something you've poured your heart into creating?

You can imagine, then, why I couldn't say no to working on Instagram Stories when the opportunity came, evil empire or no. I wanted to help people tell their stories, in whatever form that took. But what form was that? I mean, what are Instagram Stories, anyway? Technically, in the most fundamental way, they're a ripoff of Snapchat: Images that disappear automatically 24 hours after you post them. But, like, really. What are they?

I can tell you that, in the fall of 2020, no one knew.

In the beginning, Stories as a product had done what it was built to do, which was reverse the two major trends and metrics everyone was panicked about. In particular, it reversed the decline in content sharing, and it stemmed the tide of teens bailing on Instagram. This was crucial for leadership after Snapchat surged in popularity in early 2015 and reported over 100 million active users.

By the end of 2016, people were once again sharing on Instagram, and teens weren't (completely) bailing on the app (yet). This is thanks to what I call the brute force approach, available to corporate behemoths: Why innovate when you can leverage everything you've got to quash an upstart, like a massive user base, shitloads of money, cultural cachet, and a total lack of scruples. Copy the competitor, and then use all those resources to funnel people into this "new" feature. It worked! After all, people still liked Instagram then. It was a massively relevant and major culture engine. It was insulated from Facebook's problems. Most importantly, people—especially teens—go where their friends are. By and large, everyone was still on Instagram.

I started at Instagram almost four years to the day that Stories officially launched. By this point, things were bad again. Most obviously pressing to Instagram was the TikTok problem, a much, much worse problem than Snapchat. By 2019, TikTok had over 500 million users, and by 2020 over 700 million. We all remember TikTok crashing into everyone's lives during Covid like a digital Kool-Aid Man. Unsurprisingly, this is why Instagram launched Reels, which it happened to do the same week I started my job. Only this time, the brute force method didn't work. Like, at all.

There are many reasons for this, any of which I would love to delve into. I will! I just think, for the sake of everyone's patience, I should at least try to stick to Stories for a minute. So put a pin in this and we'll come back to it.

Originally, Stories had given people a different option for sharing, one that was less polished, pressured, and permanent. But it had also introduced a ton of other brand new issues that no one knew how to solve. One big problem, you'll be amused to know, was that people felt the content in Stories was "too low quality." We all had that one friend who would go to a concert or on a hike and film part of it directly into Stories. There would be 15 segments, none of them would be good, and you couldn't fast forward, you had to either watch the whole thing or skip the whole thing entirely. A lot of people skipped, but not to another friend. They just skipped out.

Another problem with Stories was that people didn't know what to share, nor did they know what to expect when they went to watch Stories. One of the designers I worked with once said to me, "Stories is the junk drawer of Instagram." I've thought about that description for six years, because it's perfect. Instagram Stories are photos, but sometimes videos. Sometimes text, but sometimes polls or questions. Sometimes private original stuff, but sometimes content shared in from another account entirely. If I tap on a friend's Stories, am I going to get 15 random images like some kind of moving mood board? Am I going to get to see their vacation? Am I going to get a deeply personal confession? Who can say!

Many people are not very comfortable sharing on the internet. I don't mean regularly sharing, I mean sharing at all. It's funny to think of this because we're surrounded by what seems like everyone's every waking thought. But there are a lot, and I mean a lot, of people who are too uncertain or scared. They might not know whether they even have a story to share, or if they know how to share it. They aren't sure what's okay to share and what isn't, or what the best way of sharing might be. There are no guides, no clear norms, certainly no editors. All those spotlights, and all it did was give people stage fright. So what was a social media behemoth to do?

You knew it was coming. Tune in next week for another installment! See you next Wednesday.

Lx