The Story of Add Yours, Vol. 5

Missed the earlier installments? Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Vol. 3, Vol. 4

Why do we share on the internet? What is it about being online that makes people want to post, share, connect, comment, whatever it is they do? Is it different from sharing in person, or in other physical world ways? What is it about online that makes sharing feel wonderful, feel horrible, or sometimes both at the same time? It can't all be the dopamine, can it?

You might remember earlier this year when I wrote about my junior high science class experiment, in which I set out to learn whether a rat or a gerbil was smarter. Throughout my life I've thought about Brad and Janet (the rat and the gerbil) not infrequently, partly because they were cute (Brad especially) and because I'm still proud of junior high Leah's scientific ambition and joy before her high school science teacher (who taught every single physical science, chemistry, and physics classes) ruined science by trying to make good on the promise he'd made to her parents when he said, "I'm going to prove your daughter isn't as smart as you think she is."

But really I think about those two little rodents a lot because, obviously, I got a PhD in sociology and also worked in tech. There's a real "we're all just miserable lab rats pressing the pellet lever" vibe when we talk about tech, and for good reason. We focus a lot on the negative impacts of tech, particularly social media—the addictive nature of likes and comments and the endless scroll; the way algorithms can (inadvertently) funnel massive amounts of destructive and damaging content to users; the toxic bullying and worse, by hordes of faceless, anonymous, and potentially not even real people dogpiling onto a single individual; the ability for bad actors to more easily prey on unwitting, vulnerable people. All of these are very real, and very important to discuss and mitigate.

We talk less, however, about the good bits, and even less about how we build products that allow people to feel safe from the start and to engage with and create a more positive culture. The word "safe" is a tricky one here, because it means so many things, right? Safe from harm, safe from bad actors, safe in the face of actual danger. What I'm talking about, though, is a little less headline-grabby. I'm talking about quieter, less obvious types of safety that some of you might squint at and say, "Don't you just mean comfortable?" You know, like, "What makes someone feel comfortable sharing online?" Or conversely, "What makes someone feel uncomfortable sharing online?" But this is a form of psychological safety whose basis is more sociological. It has to do with social norms, cues, and signals, and it also has to do with understanding behavior, context, audience, culture, and more. It's hard enough to share something random online, and harder still when you don't feel totally sure that you're sharing the right thing in the right space, or that the people who will see it will react kindly to it.

If you want to get kinda abstract about it: What does it mean to feel psychologically safe to participate in space where the boundaries and culture are unknown, the norms are not clearly established, and the audience is not entirely defined?

Look at her! She is really putting that PhD to use.

Isn't it funny to take a step back and think about social media this way? It will be especially funny to you if you have ever built a tech product. Many directors and VPs have asked questions like, "Why aren't our users sharing/engaging with more content?" and many (many) product teams have scrambled to find the answers and solutions. Most (all?) of the time, these VPs are looking for conceptual, technical, and/or design-related answers and solutions, all of which product teams are happy to provide. But sometimes—more often than not, I'd be willing to bet, and way more often than has actually been acknowledged by any of these VPs—the answers and solutions have less to do with the product and more to do with the humans who are using the product. And I don't just mean "do they know how to use it, do they like it, is it functional, is it meeting a need." I mean, what is the very specific human problem that's getting in the way of them successfully using the product, and how do we try to meet that deeper human need, rather than just put another tech patch on top of it.

That path to problem solving is not a very popular one. It never was, and it's less popular now than ever. This is one reason it makes me laugh when VPs say, "We want more insights-driven product development," because come on guys. You absolutely do not. You want the results of insights-driven product development without the work or the culture changes required to get there. But every once in a while, this path sneaks in, and trust me when I tell you that it's where the real magic is.

So, as we've already discussed, people had stopped sharing in Stories for all sorts of reasons, and a brand-new team—Stories Studio—was created to try and help solve this problem. We had our Crazy 8s brainstorm session. Something I'd been thinking about a lot around that time was constraints. Most humans, I would argue, do better with constraints. The constraints that work for each person might differ in all manner of ways, but it helps to have them in some form.

Let's say I handed you a piece of paper. Would it be easier if I said "draw something" or "draw an animal"? (If drawing is easy for you, substitute something else, like writing.) For most people, and especially for most people who are not regularly drawing or writing or practicing some form of creative expression, a blank sheet with zero constraints isn't freeing. It's paralyzing. How do you decide what to draw? What if you can't draw? What if you draw the wrong thing? How will you know? What if other people draw something different from you, or are better? Are you going to do it right? What is right, anyway?

Something else I'd thinking a lot about was what I mentioned above: Comfort. Psychological safety. A quantitative researcher on Stories had just finished a big project on "sharing comfort," which looked at what made people feel comfortable or uncomfortable sharing on different social media platforms, and what issues arose around the idea of sharing comfort. A few things stood out. People, you should not be surprised to learn, look for safety in numbers. On social media, that's stuff like "what's everyone else doing, are they doing this thing, is it safe or okay or cool to do this thing, will I look incredibly stupid if I do this thing." Something major I'd realized some years prior was that one of the worst things a product could do to a user was make them feel dumb. No one wants to feel dumb, and that is especially true if the feeling dumb happens in front of others. Humans are social creatures, so we look to others to see what sorts of behaviors are being modeled in order to figure out what kinds of behaviors we want to engage in. So if you're using a product like Stories, in which no one is clearly modeling any single kind of behavior, how do you know what is and isn't ok to share? How do you know what will be acceptable to the people who see your content?

Remember, Stories had been launched in large part to reverse the declining metrics of Feed, which was too polished. "Let's give people the ability to post in a less pressured way, to share stuff that won't go to their grids and won't be permanent. It can be casual and behind the scenes!" But unlike Feed, which began with clear constraints—a single square photo—there was no clear constraints in Stories, which meant no one could model any specific set of behaviors. People were just dumping everything into Stories, from endless videos of them hiking to reshared content from other accounts. Users felt that Stories content was lower quality, which made them less interested in consuming it, which made other users less interested in sharing, and the problem worsened. No constraints meant no clear norms. So in that brainstorming session, I thought, why don't we try to define the space and enable our users to create a small constraint?

Now, I knew that the last thing users wanted was for us to create a constraint. We needed to facilitate the constraint, but not be heavy-handed about it, which was especially important since one of the biggest concerns was making sure teens kept using Instagram Stories. If you can set aside all the very valid and scary teen-related social media stuff you know, please try for now. We can talk about that later. Just know that teens are the demographic when it comes to social media, in large part because where teens go, so too does everyone else follow. Makes sense, right? You don't see Gen Z and beyond rushing to use Facebook. And what do teens dislike? Heavy-handed constraints. As one of my dear friends recently said, "A teenager needs you, but they don't want you." I knew that Instagram's job was, in the abstract sense, to design an invisible set of constraints inside which users could have a lot of freedom. In other words, we create the feature, you make everything else.

What was the simplest constraint I could think of? The kind we send our friends all the time! Requests like, "I know you went to the dog park this morning, please send me dog photos." Or, "Can I see the outfit you wore last night" and "What's the most beautiful place you've ever gone for a holiday?" Even, "Do you want to see what I looked like as a kid?" This is what humans do. We ask each other to share, and we ask if it's ok to share. We're curious. We like to watch! And maybe most importantly, we love to be invited to share something that's meaningful to us. Not everyone wants to share every single aspect of their lives on social media. In fact, a lot of people absolutely do not want to do that. But if I walked up to you and said "Please show me the cutest photo you ever took of your pet," wouldn't you whip out your phone with delight? That invitation to share is a wonderful part of human communication.

That was one of my eight ideas. I called it "Prompts." (Don't act surprised, you know how bad I am at naming things, especially under pressure). A user could create a prompt for sharing, and other people could contribute. I even suggested that the user could tag friends from whom they especially wanted to see photos, but in a private direct message way, so no one would feel imposed on or left out. It was important to me that no one felt bad, whether because they were ignoring a public request or because they hadn't been asked publicly. The feature, a sticker in Stories, would enable one user to ask other users to show something specific (within the community guidelines, of course).

There were a lot of fun ideas in that brainstorming session, but Prompts was one of the most popular. At the end, we voted on which ideas to mock up and show to users, and then take to our next meeting with leadership. Prompts was one of a handful of ideas the Studio team decided to go with. The rest is history, but I do want to tell you about that history, so I'll see you next week when I really will try to wrap this up. Until next Wednesday! (ish)

Lx