The "Art Through Editing" App

The quality of the photos on Instagram are unbelievably great. How did that happen? Its founder Kevin Systrom loved art – he even went to Florence to learn photography, write Sarah Frier in her biography of Instagram. His teacher took away his camera and instead gave him a smaller device that could only take blurry, black and white, square photographs.

“The idea – of a square photo transformed into art through editing – stuck in the middle of Systrom’s mind.”

 

This weird form of training would prove useful. When the first mass market smartphone, the iPhone, was launched, it suddenly became possible for anyone to take a photo anytime. Except that its camera (and hence the quality of the photos) sucked. Besides, Internet speeds were low, which meant it was a pain to upload high-res photos anyway (I know, it feels a lifetime away). It was almost as if the stars had lined up for Instagram – it became the app with filters (“art through editing”). The app caught on fast, so much so that:

“User began to accept, by default, that everything they were seeing had been edited to look better.”

 

Then Instagram decided that it would not take the Facebook approach, and took the Twitter approach – you followed whatever topics interested you, not your friends. This decision meant that people followed those who posted the best pics. Another key decision was to not allow a re-share option – you couldn’t share pics you liked via Instagram. Which meant the only way to see those best pics was to follow the creator.

 

Both decisions ensured the most creative folks got the most followers, incentivizing them to continue to post and therefore stay on Instagram. With millions of followers, they found that they could make money by “subtle advertising”, e.g. a supermodel could advertise a watch via her pics on Instagram by adding the brand’s hashtag. Instagram was OK as long as such advertising was subtle and artistic; they frowned on and discouraged blatant ads. Later, when companies created their own accounts and wanted to post ads as pics, the founders would insist that they would vet the pics (ads) before it went online.

“(In one instance) Systrom was concerned that the food in one of the branded posts looked unappetizing…”

Obviously, this was a slow process, but they stuck to their guns. Art over money was their policy. Of course, they could be that way since by then Instagram had been bought by Facebook who was paying the bills, and Facebook wanted Instagram to grow first, worry about making money later – the mothership was minting money and could afford to be patient.

 

Funnily enough, as Instagram became the go-to place for great photos, it put pressure on users. One couldn’t post crappy photos on the app (nobody stopped you; but hey, who’d follow or “like” posts that sucked?) – this wasn’t Facebook or Twitter! And so teenage users, who are far more status conscious, started creating 2 accounts – one, where they posted their best stuff, and the other, which they called “finsta” or “fake Instagram” account, where they posted their average posts for friend to pre-review. Pics from the finsta accounts would go to the “real” account only if the feedback was good!

 

But of course, most people cannot create content that is Instagram-good. Ironically, this super-high Instagram bar became the reason another app, Snapchat, gained traction – it automatically deleted posts after 24 hours. Which meant you could post spur of the moment, average quality content without worrying – it was temporary stuff. Instagram would try and counter this via a new feature called “Stories”, a feature for “less polished moments”.

 

It still feels like a miracle that an app with over a billion users still has such overwhelmingly high-quality content on it. And like Google before it, the company’s name has become a verb - “to Instagram”.