I began this book a bit worried about whether I was about to read another Silicon Valley hagiography. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that No Filter is as much a riveting tale of startup drama and Kevin Systrom's quirks—he's a craft coffee fanatic, for instance—as it is about how business and design decisions drive social products' human impact.
Early on, we learn that Systrom and his cofounder Mike Krieger are sticklers for detail. The pair were wary of growth hacks, believing that an uncluttered app and minimal notifications would promote a high-quality—even luxe—experience. And when Zuckerberg eventually convinced them to start running ads (their first partner was Michael Kors), Systrom personally edited the photo to fix the white balance. Consequently, No Filter largely ends up as a story about the culture clash between Instagram and Facebook and between curation and automation.
But there's no need to vindicate Systrom yet: after all, it's all easy to look like the good guy next to the Zuck. For instance, Frier explains how Instagram's aspirational, feel-good brand enabled the platform to escape much of the negative scrutiny Facebook received for issues like misinformation and algorithmic manipulation. While Systrom fraternized with A-listers and redesigned his office, it was Facebook that dealt with the brutal task of content moderation, antitrust hearings, and generating actual profits. Moreover, a 2017 study by the Royal Society for Public Health found that Instagram was the worst social network for young people's mental health. And Instagram's response to the issue—e.g. a hashtag campaign with Kylie Jenner—remained purely and unsatisfactorily cosmetic.
When Zuckerberg put his foot down on the revenue issue, Instagram's PMs conceded to the same features Facebook had already perfected, "like sending more frequent notifications and suggestions to users about who else they should follow... Instagram had long been able to scoff at Facebook’s growth tactics, because Facebook had made growth easy for them." By the end of the book, it certainly feels like Zuckerberg and his ruthless management model won out over Systrom's idealism, and I can't help but wonder whether Instagram's relative utopia could only exist because of Facebook's dystopia.
Either way, I'm glad that Frier challenges readers to look beyond Instagram's slick branding—or the equally reductive assumption that it's just for pretty pictures—when analyzing the app's undeniable cultural impact.
(oct 27, 2020)
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