instagram vs wallstreet

the cost of maximizing shareholdervalue

I remember the first picture that I posted to Instagram. It was a wind chime carefully perched on a nail hanging over my gallery. The picture itself was nothing spectacular, but with an Instagram filter, it was share worthy. Editing was now so simple. No need for any software, just swipe across and choose a filter to your liking. That was the initial premise of Instagram, to share picture with your friends that look amazing but didn’t require any sort of heavy or professional editing. The pictures on Instagram in the beginning were the subject and you, were the artist. Popular accounts displayed amazing pictures of landscapes, then portraits, then lives.

The subject became lives. Lives of the rich and famous. These lives were now referred to as “influencers”. This was not the initial intent. In April of 2012, Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 Billion dollars. Six years later, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, co-founders of Instagram left Facebook after six years of working on the app. So, what happened? Simply put, things changed.

In an episode of Recode Daily with Kara Swisher, she interviewed Kevin and asked about his time working under Mark at Facebook. Being coy with his answers but making it clear that Mark and himself had different ideas about how the future of Instagram should be. This disagreement led to Kevin deciding it was time to move on. In my opinion, a tragedy for all. Instagram is now the extended arm of the advertising juggernaut under the umbrella that is all Facebook.

Today, November 11, 2020, Instagram just announced that it is making Reels — it’s app feature to compete with TikTok — a more central component of Instagram. Pictures are very old news, 15-second Snaps are old news, 15-second AI curated videos to your liking are in! Change ad nauseam if necessary to grab the attention. It’s feels like Instagram is no longer cares about the user experiences as so long as it satiates the algorithmic KPIs. In an effort to compete with TikTok, Instagram understands that it must, curate your feed, provide quasi validation, with occasional advertisement in the most covert possible way creating the holy trifecta of time wasting while sprinkling in a little bit of AI tweaks here and there for “optimization”.

So where do we go from here? To higher profit margins. I wouldn’t be surprised if the engineers at Facebook bonuses were pegged to introducing a feature within Instagram that leads to higher amounts of “engagement”. I’ve probably even mentioned before that over engagement on social media is nothing but a tax on an individual’s mental bandwidth and there is a lot of scientific proof that we are horrible multitaskers. All that being said, I’m never going to be the one to vilify social media as it has brought a lot of positivity to the world but too much of anything is never a good thing. There is definitely a law of diminishing return on anything we spend our time on and as that line on the x-axis plateaus, we need to know where to draw the line.

As always, if you enjoyed reading these short insights and would like to get more of this in your inbox consider following.

Thanks for reading,

Daviel