
Why Instagram Worked - colinprince
https://medium.com/backchannel/why-instagram-worked-45dbfeaa37c8
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onion2k
In my opinion Instagram worked because it algorithmically hides flaws in
photographs so everyone's pictures look "good", or more accurately "not as bad
as usual". Down-sampling an image hides noise and smooths tones, which hides
the sort of blemishes people hate in photographs of themselves. Immediately
pictures of people are closer to what they want to see so they'll like them.
Filters hide even more, especially if they boost the yellow and red tones to
add warmth (aka 'happiness') to an image. Further to that though, there's an
element of creativity to choosing a filter (sort of like the Ikea Effect[1]).
People love that.

The fact that the pictures are subjectively better coupled with easy social
sharing and sensible tagging made it a relatively likely success.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect)

~~~
GuiA
Nice, I like your idea about lower resolution meaning people are more likely
to like a picture of themselves, which they rarely do. Never thought of it
under that angle.

To me, Instagram is the culmination of photography, making shooting and
editing available to truly everyone. When photography first appeared, it was
this slow, clunky, expensive process that required extreme knowledge of the
tools to produce anything. Over time, it got easier - we went from
daguerreotypes to self-contained camera, to portable cameras that still
required fiddling with settings, to portable cameras that could take shots in
almost any conditions, to instant cameras, to digital cameras that still
require effort to share the picture, to digital cameras that can share the
picture instantly to the entire world.

And in counterpart to that, the editing process has gotten simpler too: we
went from needing to know the chemicals of photography, to bringing your film
at your local store, to tools like Photoshop (that allowed you to crop, adjust
colors etc. but still required knowledge to do so), to Instagram: where
there's no manual to read, and an instant a 12 year old teenager or a 75 year
old grandparent can crop, retouch, color balance, etc. their photos.

Sure, the purist might argue that Instagram filters are not the same as
balancing your chemicals yourself, blablabla - but look at the end result:
people are able to take ownership of photography in ways that were impossible
to in 1840. Ultimately, photography, like any form of expression, is as much
about the tools that enable it as the people it reaches.

Because Instagram (and other mobile photography apps of course, but Instagram
is kind of the figure head) have put photography in the hands of everyone, I
think they've really brought the medium to its best form.

(my views on this topic are mostly informed by the book "L'Image Sans
Qualités", sadly only available in French, and conversations with my uncle, a
hardcore photographer who develops his own pictures and builds (!) his own
cameras from scratch, also sadly only available in French)

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azinman2
Echoing the other comments here -- there isn't really any insight to be
gained. Especially from a founder of instagram this is really surprising. I
would have thought they would understood more deeply what's going on.

Here's my arm-chair analysis:

Producing content is hard. Writing, thinking, etc takes time, energy, and
creativity. Typing on a small smartphone keyboard only makes this even more
painful. Snapping a photo is easy and revolves around a moment -- something
easier to recognize when it's worthy of sharing.

If you take twitter's original premise of 'what are you doing now' where the
parody response would be 'im now sitting on the toilet', it's just not
particularly interesting to read. When a turned into a photo it suddenly gains
"994 words", and then you add on easy ways to enhance it with photo filters
and now it turns into something far more special (even if its still just your
feet on the ground). It's also remarkably easier to swipe through photos and
grok what's worthy than it is to read a bunch of text. Now add that you can
follow people who are visually inclined and suddenly you have a rich medium at
your fingertips that's just as easy for people to participate in as well as
passively observe.

All of these combine to having a unique experience that lead to explosive
growth. Add a public-default and now you don't even need to have any friends
in the app to still find it enjoyable, and even better if it let's you peer
into the lives of celebs (if you're into that). First mover advantage
certainly helped as well, as did having a walled off garden to contain the
content.

That's why I think instagram worked. Now where's my FB check??! ;)

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droopyEyelids
Well stated. I think the equivalent would be if Twitter had poetry filters.
(Poetry meaning evocative, succinct, and engaging writing.)

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frandroid
Amazing idea. :)

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VeejayRampay
The real answer: "Let's be honest here, we don't really know. Some hard work,
some luck, alignment of stars, go figure... I mean, Flappy Bird, right?"

~~~
lordbusiness
As seemingly facetious as this answer sounds, it's absolutely bang-on.

Special sauce was the order of the day. Because reasons. :-)

~~~
kokey
Indeed. With things like these there is limited value in trying to find the
core reasons it was a success while so many other similar things failed. Even
if you do find the reasons, it's not really possible to know that you did. You
can't use the same formula again to verify its success potential.

~~~
lordbusiness
Eloquently put. Exactly.

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jeffreyrogers
The problem with retrospectively explaining success is that you fall prey to
both survivorship bias and narrative bias. In physics this is known as
anthropic bias.

All post-hoc justifications for the success of any business are dangerous
because the gloss over the most important fact: the only reason we're asking
the question in the first place is because the thing turned out to be
successful.

So what can you conclude from this that is actionable and applicable to you?
Absolutely nothing other than the fact that we aren't good at predicting the
future, but are good at retroactively fitting the present to the past.

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dddrh
In my opinion Instagram worked because it was at the right place at the right
time.

Radar was a photo sharing app that I loved using in 2008-2009. You took photos
of what you were doing, edit them very simply, and shared them with your
community of friends. The problem with Radar is that it went quietly in to the
night. I don't recall the exact reason it shuttered, but I think they made
some poor choices in features that killed it.

I always find it interesting to read posts about the start of Instagram and
never to find references to Radar.

For Reference:
[http://readwrite.com/2009/01/27/radars_photo_sharing_app_com...](http://readwrite.com/2009/01/27/radars_photo_sharing_app_comes_to_the_iphone)

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joering2
Is there anything interesting behind this story?

For every successful startup, there is hundreds or tens of thousands that
failed and you've never heard of them.

In all seriousness, this article is not different than confessions of someone
who happened to hit the jackpot.

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zimpenfish
It worked because it's a simple, quick, ultra-low friction way of sharing
photos. Take or pick a photo, type a title, press send, voila. Couple of extra
taps if you want to send it to other places as well.

(Even in 2015, it's easier to get a photo on Flickr via the Instagram app than
the official Flickr app. Madness.)

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72deluxe
The article did not really explain anything, other than providing some
(interesting?) background.

I don't know if it "worked" either, as I don't use it! Of course, I am a small
market of 1; thousands more use it for old-looking photos.

I am surprised by the repeat of the same ideas again and again. Since the
early 90s when Geocities was available you could easily share text and
pictures in your own site. Then MySpace allowed the same, Bebo, Facebook,
Twitter (with limited text!), Google+, Instagram.... is there anything else
I've forgotten? Each one mandates an account to post data or view specific
data.

They all allow sharing pretty much the same (some content, whether it is text
or photos) yet they are each hailed as the next big thing and the best thing
since sliced bread, and you must be a sad weirdo if you're not a member of the
currently fashionable site. Remember the looks of surprise/shock/disgust/anger
when you state that you don't have a Facebook account? There are over 252
million (or more?) domains active yet there is obsession over a handful.

Maybe I'm an old fart, but I don't get it? I wonder if people class Google
Image Search as the next big thing? You can see pictures in there too. You can
also get text if you click on the "web" search tool too. Apologies for the
sarcasm there :-)

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azinman2
There isn't a way to endlessly scroll geocities of relatively high quality
images (filters are important and unique), let alone do that with just your
friends or people of interest. If you start to compare to myspace, bebop, fb,
twitter, etc... it's just as much about what's removed as what 'feature' they
allow.

~~~
72deluxe
I see your point. The removal of features to make it more specific or aim at a
niche area is important.

I wonder if there were any Geocities sites of importance that needed
aggregating for an endless (memory-eating) scroll view?

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jsnathan
I do think there are some interesting tidbits here, (albeit none of them
exactly new), only that OP does not explicitly highlight them. The article is
simply a narrative of their success story, with most of the analysis being
left up to the reader.

That being said, what I got from it was:

1\. Acute Observation. They had a prior product (a tiny social network), and
they noticed that one of the features they had implemented (experimentally, I
expect), namely the photo-filters, was disproportionally popular among their
user base. This is a prime example of what Drucker calls "unexpected success",
and drawing lessons from that.

2\. Focus. Their original product had a much broader scope and they narrowed
it down considerably. Not only did they discard a lot of their existing
feature-set, but they also reduced the platform support in order to launch
earlier, and test their idea ASAP.

3\. Traction Can Carry. They had an existing user base, albeit small, and they
managed to cross-sell some of those users on their new product from the start,
using them as beta testers. This is similar to the "halo effect", only on a
much smaller scale.

4\. Luck. As OP puts it: "[Our] combination of being photos-first and public-
by-default would prove to be a combination that solved an unmet need."[1] I
suppose they thought this through, but as far as turning out to be right, I
suppose one could say they got lucky.

The take-away for me then is that we could try to observe "unexpected success"
of experimental features in our own, or even other people's products, and use
the same strategy of applying focus; and that in the end there is always an
element of chance, so one needs to keep trying different things, or different
variations of the same thing, until one gets it right.

[1] Someone else mentioned Radar.net as a precursor to Instagram; but that app
did not have the feature of being public-by-default.

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rmsaksida
Surprisingly shallow article. What I take from it is that Instagram really
resonates with people - and that accounts for most of its success. There might
have been similar apps (indeed, photo sharing is obvious no matter how you
look at it)... but none so charismatic.

The design of Instagram - the colors, the icons, the filters - makes it very
personal, which might in part explain why people love it so much.

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Plough_Jogger
Another major aspect in the success of Instagram was timing. The close
proximity between its release and the release of the iPhone 4 meant that for
the first time, consumers carried network-connected, (relatively) high
resolution cameras daily.

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npinguy
Clickbait article. Not a single explanation to be found. Just some history and
background

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cheshire137
Is it just me or is scrolling on medium.com weird? It seems to only scroll
further down the page for me every other time I try to do so.

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yoanizer
The article fails to explain why it worked.

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Avalaxy
So apparently it took off, but why? Where did the initial 25.000 users come
from?

In my opinion Instagram is completely useless and doesn't add anything to our
lives. I really don't see the value of sharing photos with some "artistic"
filter applied to them. I can share photos on facebook if I want, or on
Twitter. I can edit photos with my phone, no instagram needed.

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k-mcgrady
>> "I can share photos on facebook if I want, or on Twitter"

And if you didn't use Facebook or Twitter and wanted somewhere to share your
photos you'd probably use Instagram. The filters enable you to make shitty
photos look better in one tap. Lots of people don't use them. I think that was
the initial appeal but now that cameras are better it's just a good place to
share and view photos. The ability to share it to lots of other sites in one
tap is also very useful.

>> "I can edit photos with my phone, no instagram needed."

So can I. Instagram isn't really a photo editor. You can apply filters and do
basic edits but that's the point. If you apply the filters your stuff
automatically 'looks good' and you don't need to spend time editing.

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jarkarj
You are always in my heart!

