The history of Instagram

My first Instagram photo, posted on October 31, 2010. Instagram launched earlier that month.

Over the past week, I had the strange experience of reading a book about a period of history I lived through: the history of Instagram. No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram, by Sarah Frier, starts with Instagram’s origins in 2010 and ends with founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger leaving Facebook in 2018. Along the way, the book charts the twists and turns we didn’t necessarily see, and illuminates some behind-the-scenes dynamics that had a huge impact on global culture.

I moved to San Francisco in 2009 and met a few people on the early Instagram team just as they were getting going. I joined Instagram the month it launched in October 2010 and stayed close to it, even sharing a group Airbnb with one of Instagram’s community managers at SXSW 2012. By then, I was back in Boston at business school, but had flown to Austin to facilitate a panel of community managers at SoundCloud, Airbnb, and Foursquare. Here’s the panel description we put together when submitting our pitch to SXSW:

Tech startups have long known that a strong community will amplify a company’s successes, bolster growth, and make work worth waking up for. Today's unstoppable startups understand that putting community first means putting community management first. And yet, the field of online community management is still in its early days, and we haven’t stopped figuring it out as we go along. Through case studies and never-before-told stories of three veteran community managers from SoundCloud, Foursquare, and Airbnb, we’ll reveal what it takes to build a community to last.

Nine years later, it’s remarkable to think that all of those communities really did last: SoundCloud’s, Foursquare’s, Airbnb’s, and especially Instagram’s. And what struck me in reading No Filter was that this whole generation of sites managed community in a way that was essentially editorial. Each site’s community team had a perspective on what was good, what was to be celebrated, what belonged. Their perspectives happened to be inclusive, elevating the interesting creations and discoveries of everyday people. But they were editorial nevertheless.

A few moments from No Filter that highlight the role of community management in Instagram’s rise…

Soon after launch:

Investor Steve Anderson reminded Systrom and Krieger of their strongest asset. “Anyone can build Instagram the app,” he said, “but not everyone can build Instagram the community.”

The editorial lens became more visible when challenged:

Bieber’s following was enough to change the nature of the Instagram community. “All of the sudden, Instagram was emoji heaven,” Rise later recalled. As younger users joined, they invented a new etiquette on Instagram, which involved trading likes for likes and follows for follows. “Instagram’s community of earnest people telling interesting stories in tiny moments really evolved to be super pop culture.”

After Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram:

Instagram considered its community team to be the soul of the place, doing work that helped set the tone for the rest of the millions of users. Whatever they highlighted on the @instagram account would be either followed or mimicked by others. They also kept tabs on the ways the product was used differently in various countries, alerting Instagram’s product managers about the requests, struggles, and opportunities they saw.

As part of Instagram’s overall ethos:

Unlike Facebook, where employees looked for technical solutions that reached the most users, Instagram solved problems in a way that was intimate, creative, and relationship-based, sometimes even at the individual level if the user was important enough to warrant it.

The standards the community team held themselves to:

They would promote what they felt was their standard fare, like embroidery artists and funny-looking pets. And they would avoid posting anything that perpetuated some of the new unhealthy trends on the app. They would never post a photo of anybody near a cliff, no matter how beautiful, because they knew that gaining a following on Instagram was becoming so desirable that people were risking their lives for perfect shots. They would avoid promoting yoga and fitness accounts, so that they wouldn’t seem to approve of a certain body type and make their users feel inadequate—or worse, aroused. They would also avoid promoting accounts that showed off expensive experiences, like ones from travel bloggers.

All that community management was a lot of work, but it did make a difference. Instagram’s impact on the world has not been wholly positive—absolutely not. But the net effect was that Instagram did feel like a place: a place suffused with the hope and pressure embedded in the idea that life can be more interesting if we just pay attention.