She Decided To Quit Instagram This Year.... After She Had Also Helped Create It - Among the First 13 Employees
She Decided To Quit Instagram This Year. Had Also Helped
Create It
68 per cent of Americans have either quit or taken a
break from social media this year, according to the Pew Research Center.
·
At the age of 26 Bailey Richardson was among the
13 original Instagram employees in February 2012
·
She had 20,000 followers and deleted the app on
September 26
·
The catalyst for her was when Instagram
co-founders quit the company
By Elizabeth Dwoskin, The Washington Post November 14,
2018 22:25 IST
On the evening of Sept. 26, Bailey Richardson logged in
to Instagram for the last time.
"The time has come for me to delete my
Instagram," she wrote to her 20,000 followers, using her white pants as a
canvas. "Thanks for all the kindnesses over the years."
Richardson's decision isn't novel: 68 percent of
Americans have either quit or taken a break from social media this year,
according to the Pew Research Center.
But Richardson isn't a bystander reckoning with the ills
of technology: She was one of the 13 original employees working at Instagram in
2012 when Facebook bought the viral photo-sharing app for $1 billion. She and
four others from that small group now say the sense of intimacy, artistry and
discovery that defined early Instagram and led to its success has given way to
a celebrity-driven marketplace that is engineered to sap users' time and
attention at the cost of their well-being.
"In the early days, you felt your post was seen by
people who cared about you and that you cared about," said Richardson, who
left Instagram in 2014 and later founded a start-up. "That feeling is
completely gone for me now."
The catalyst for Richardson's decision to quit Instagram
came when its co-founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, unexpectedly
announced that they were leaving the company. With their exit, Richardson and
other former Instagram employees worried Facebook would squash whatever
independent identity the company had managed to retain.
She sent her goodbye to Instagram the next day.
Even in Silicon Valley, where it's common to hear
start-up workers become frustrated with management after an acquisition, the
disillusionment of the early Instagram employees is striking: People seldom
swear off or criticize the product they built, particularly when it has enjoyed
such remarkable success. Instagram reached 1 billion users this year.
The people who worked at social networks long saw the
connection and free expression they facilitated as a powerful force for good
and evidence of the contribution they were making to society. For them, the
public questioning of the role social networks play in democracy and in
individual lives, sparked by concerns over privacy and health, is deeply
personal.
Three of the early Instagram employees, including
Richardson, have deleted it - permanently or periodically, comparing it to a
drug that produces a diminishing high. One of the people said he felt a little
embarrassed to tell people that he worked there. Two of the other early
employees said they used it far less than before.
This shift is part of an existential crisis for Facebook,
which has seen a slew of top executives resign this year, including the leaders
of its major acquisitions: Oculus, WhatsApp and Instagram. Some people are also
abandoning Facebook: It lost 4 million users in Europe in the last six months
and growth has plateaued in the United States.
The Instagram employees, including Richardson, said they
hoped their concerns would not be dismissed as nostalgia and would be seen as a
call to future entrepreneurs to recognize these pitfalls and build something
better.
"There was so much pressure to do things that
'scaled,' to use the Silicon Valley buzzword," said Josh Riedel, the third
employee after Systrom and Krieger. "But when you have over a billion
users, something gets lost along the way."
Ian Spalter, Instagram's head of design, said in an
interview that experiences on Instagram are subjective - one person's
frustration may be another person's pleasure - and that the app was not
designed to be a time-suck. "We're not in the game to have you leave
Instagram feeling worse off than when you went in," he said.
One of the departed founders of a company Facebook
acquired, WhatsApp's Brian Acton, has actively encouraged people to delete
Facebook, though he is still a proponent and a user of WhatsApp. (He is also
funding a rival messaging app.) Other former Facebook executives have expressed
regrets about the products they built. Instagram's Systrom continues to
champion the service but recently said of his departure: "You don't leave
a job because everything is awesome, right?"
- - -
When Richardson joined Instagram in February 2012, at age
26, the former art history major was drawn to what was then a fast-growing
indie platform for photographers, hipsters and artistic-types who wanted to
share interesting or beautiful things they discovered about the world. At that
time, Instagram was "a camera that looked out into the world," said
one of the company's first engineers, "versus a camera that was all about
myself, my friends, who I'm with."
Richardson ran the start-up's blog as well as the
official @instagram account from the company's offices in San Francisco's South
Park neighborhood. Before there were software algorithms suggesting accounts to
follow, Richardson selected featured Instagrammers by hand. For the most
devoted users, she organized in-person "Insta-meets" in places as
far-flung as Moscow and North Korea.
"We felt like stewards of that passion,"
Richardson said.
One of the first people she featured prominently was an
early Instagrammer in Spain. The exposure Richardson gave @IsabelitaVirtual, an
amateur photographer whose real name is Isabel Martinez, helped Martinez become
one of the most popular Instagram users in the country and led to a career in high-end
fashion photography.
Both say that type of random connection that resulted in
their friendship is hardly possible in the current iteration of Instagram. Too
many people to follow, too much showmanship, too many posts flickering by, they
say. "I don't even see her posts anymore," Richardson said. Martinez
told The Post that while she wouldn't quit Instagram for professional reasons,
the app has in recent years become more anxiety-producing than pleasurable for
her.
Even in the early days, Richardson was aware that the app
had a dark side. She was one of the first content moderators and spent many
days and weekends culling through pornographic and other undesirable images
that sprung up as the app grew.
- - -
A few months after Richardson started her job at
Instagram, Systrom announced to the dozen employees that the company had been
acquired by Facebook - taking everyone by surprise. The entire team got in a
bus and drove about 30 miles south to Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park,
California, where Facebook employees broke into applause as they entered the
building. CEO Mark Zuckerberg took them into his office, where he welcomed them
excitedly and assured them that they would maintain their own unique identity.
Richardson said she was excited but apprehensive. The
details of the acquisition were still murky. Ultimately only Systrom and
Krieger walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars; Facebook offered
other early employees small signing bonuses and limited Facebook stock grants
for staying on. And Facebook had a reputation for alienating users with its
privacy scandals, including charges it had settled with the Federal Trade
Commission the previous year for sharing people's personal details that they
thought were private with app developers and the public.
A few months later, the team was officially installed in
Menlo Park, where Instagram was given a separate area on campus to work.
Its employees were seen as the cool kids on campus. They
had figured out how to make a smartphone-only product go viral, something
Facebook was still struggling to accomplish ahead of its impending public
offering.
But there were things Facebook wanted to improve about
Instagram. Facebook's growth team - an influential unit whose goal was to
identify and implement measures to acquire users and keep them engaged - came
in and picked apart every feature of the app, three of the former employees
said.
No detail was too small. The team helped fix Instagram's
clunky sign-in process, which was leaking users. It borrowed techniques that
had worked on Facebook, like sending users an email alert about their friends'
activities when they hadn't used the app in a while. They rolled out
photo-tagging, much to the frustration of Instagram employees, who felt these
features were too associated with Facebook and would fall flat with Instagram's
user base, said four of the employees.
The photo-tagging feature triggered "emotional
anxiety," said the early engineer. "It introduced a whole new dynamic."
Richardson's team of about six employees, which was
focused on managing Instagram's most passionate power users, was also targeted
for change. Facebook told them that in order for the product to scale to a
large audience, software tools would need to replace manual processes,
Richardson and two former employees said.
Richardson said she was taken aback, "not because of
the boldness of it or because of how crappy it made me and my contribution
feel, but because of the misunderstanding of what we were trying to do."
She began making plans to leave and resigned in 2014,
along with most of the employees The Post spoke with. By then, the app had more
than 200 million users, compared with roughly 30 million at the time of the
acquisition. Three of the original 13 employees are still at Instagram or
Facebook, according to Facebook.
Instagram moved to an algorithmic feed in 2016 - prior to
that posts were in chronological order - and software is now doing much of the
discovery on behalf of users, feeding them tailored content. The Stories
feature, added the same year, introduced a flickering element to Instagram's
design by automatically reloading new stories in a carousel. The result of
these changes and others prior to it was increased follower counts, produced
larger social networks with weaker ties, and more time spent in the app.
Richardson, who is a big fan of hedgehogs, found herself
looking at many more of them on Instagram. "I clicked on one, but then I
get dozens, which is more than my brain can possibly manage," she said.
"It takes all the agency out of it."
Spalter, the Instagram design chief, pointed out that
Instagram's rapid growth has required the company to build tools that will
assist people in finding posts and users. "We have a billion people,"
he said. "That means we have content from every weird niche interest, and
we have made it easier for you to find things. That's also the beauty of having
a much larger community."
Instagram is aware that its software was offering up too
much celebrity content and content from people with large followings at the
expense of posts from people who users know personally, according to Spalter,
who joined Instagram in 2015. The company has rejiggered the software to adjust
the balance, he said.
"Managing that balance is critical to Instagram's
future. ... If you feed gets overrun with celebrities, you won't feel
comfortable sharing content with your friends anymore," he said. "I
get how, in the early days, when you're connecting with everyone, that's very
special. We're at a different phase of development at this point, and it's a
different world in that way. But it's still a place where people connect."
He added that Instagram released tools in August to help
people manage the time they spend on the app.
Richardson says that content on Instagram is now
"too eager for your attention." Before, "you had to make an
effort to find someone, and that meant something to you and to the people you
found. Today I'm amazed by how little honor each piece of content is
given."
After leaving Instagram, Richardson traveled around the
world, meeting Instagram users whom she had connected with online. She
eventually settled in New York City, where she founded a start-up called People
& Company, where she helps nonprofits and businesses, including Nike, find
ways to connect with their audiences online.
She says she wasn't thinking actively about Instagram
until late September, when news broke that its founders were resigning - once
again taking most of their employees by surprise.
Richardson was flooded with memories. She remembered
first meeting Martinez, and all that had changed since. She called up a friend
from her Instagram days, and they concluded that Instagram no longer had value
in their lives. Together, they decided to quit. She composed her last post
while sitting in her car.
"It feels like we're all addicted to a drug that
doesn't get us high anymore," she said of the decision. "So I wanted
to make space for something that really does."
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited
by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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