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On the evening of September 26, Bailey Richardson logged into Instagram for the last time.
"The time has come for me to delete my Instagram," she wrote to 20,000 followers, using her white pants as a canvas. "Thanks for all the kindness over the years."
Richardson's decision is not new: according to the Pew Research Center, 68% of Americans have either stopped their activities or taken a break from social media.
But Richardson is not a spectator who counts with the ills of technology: she was one of the first 13 employees working for Instagram in 2012 when Facebook bought the viral photo-sharing app for $ 1 billion. She and four other people in this small group now claim that the sense of intimacy, art and discovery that defined the first Instagram and led to its success has given way to a market-driven on celebrities, designed to undermine the time and attention of users at the expense of their well-being.
"In the early days, you thought that your message had been seen by people who were interested in you and that you also liked," said Richardson, who left Instagram in 2014 and then founded a startup. up. "This feeling is completely gone for me now."
Richardson's decision to leave Instagram had a catalytic effect when co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger unexpectedly announced they were leaving the company. After they left, Richardson and other former Instagram employees worried that Facebook would crush the independent identity that the company had managed to keep.
She said goodbye to Instagram the next day.
Even in Silicon Valley, where it is common to hear novice workers become frustrated with the management after an acquisition, the disenchantment of the first Instagram employees is striking: people rarely disapprove or criticize the product that's out there. 39 they built, especially when it enjoyed such quality. Success. Instagram has reached 1 billion users this year.
People who have worked on social networks have long perceived the connection and freedom of expression that they facilitated as a powerful force for good and a proof of their contribution to society. For them, the public challenge to the role played by social networks in democracy and in people's lives, driven by concerns about privacy and health, is deeply personal.
Three of the first Instagram employees, including Richardson, have removed it – permanently or periodically, comparing it to a drug producing an increasingly weaker effect. One of the people said that he felt a little embarrassed to tell people that he was working there. Two of the other first employees said that they used it a lot less than before.
This development is part of an existential crisis for Facebook, which has seen the resignation of a large number of senior executives this year, including the leaders of its major acquisitions: Oculus, WhatsApp and Instagram. Some people are also abandoning Facebook: 4 million users in Europe have been lost in the last six months and growth has plateaued in the United States.
Instagram employees, including Richardson, said they hoped their concerns would not be viewed as a nostalgia and would be seen as a call for future entrepreneurs to recognize these pitfalls and pitfalls. build something better.
"There was so much pressure to do things that" staggered "to use the buzzword of Silicon Valley," said Josh Riedel, the third employee after Systrom and Krieger. "But when you have more than a billion users, something gets lost along the way."
Ian Spalter, head of design at Instagram, said in an interview that Instagram experiments are subjective – a person's frustration may be the pleasure of another person – and that the application does not. Was not designed to not please. "We are not in the game to leave Instagram feeling worse than when you entered," he said.
Brian Acton of WhatsApp, one of the founders of the company acquired on Facebook, actively encouraged users to remove Facebook, although he remains a developer and a user of WhatsApp. (He also funds a competing messaging application.) Other former Facebook executives have expressed regret over the products they've manufactured. Systrom Instagram continues to defend the service, but recently announced its departure: "You do not leave a job because everything is great, right?"
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When Richardson joined Instagram in February 2012, at the age of 26, the old major in art history was drawn to what was then a growing independent platform for artists. photographers, hipsters and artistic types who wanted to share interesting or beautiful things that they had discovered about the world. . At the time, Instagram was "a camera that looked at the world," said one of the company's first engineers, "against a camera that only spoke about me, my friends, who I'm with. . "
Richardson managed the start-up blog as well as the official @instagram account of the company's offices in the South Park neighborhood in San Francisco. Before there were software algorithms suggesting accounts to follow, Richardson selected the featured Instagrammers by hand. For the most dedicated users, she organized "Insta-meet" in places as far away as Moscow and North Korea.
"We felt like guardians of that passion," said Richardson.
One of the first characters she has put forward is an early Instagrammer in Spain. Richardson's exhibition at @IsabelitaVirtual, an amateur photographer whose real name is Isabel Martinez, helped Martinez become one of the country's most popular Instagram users and lead to a career in high fashion photography. of range.
Both say that this type of random connection that has resulted in their friendship is hardly possible in the current iteration of Instagram. Too many people to follow, too much sense of the show, too many vacillating posts, they say. "I do not even see it anymore," said Richardson. Martinez told The Post that although she did not want to leave Instagram for professional reasons, the app had become more distressing than enjoyable for her in recent years.
Even in his early days, Richardson knew that the application had a dark side. She was one of the first moderators of content and spent many days and weekends picking pornographic images and other unwanted images that sprang up as the app grew.
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A few months after Richardson started his work at Instagram, Systrom announced to the dozen employees that the company had been acquired by Facebook, taking everyone by surprise. The entire team boarded a bus and drove about 30 miles south of Facebook's headquarters in Menlo Park, California, where Facebook employees cheered when they entered the building. CEO Mark Zuckerberg took them to his office, where he greeted them with enthusiasm and assured them that they would maintain their unique identity.
Richardson said that she was excited but fearful. The details of the acquisition were still unclear. In the end, only Systrom and Krieger left with hundreds of millions of dollars; Facebook has offered other first-time employees small signing bonuses and limited stock grants on Facebook. And Facebook was known to have alienated users from its privacy scandals, including charges it had settled at the Federal Trade Commission the previous year for sharing personal information with app developers. and the public.
A few months later, the team is officially installed in Menlo Park, where Instagram has a separate area on campus to work.
His employees were considered cool kids on campus. They had discovered how to make viral a product intended only for smartphones, which Facebook was still struggling to achieve before its imminent public offer.
But there were things that Facebook wanted to improve on Instagram. Facebook's growth team – an influential unit whose goal was to identify and implement measures to acquire and retain users – has arrived and has selected each feature of the application, said three of the former employees.
No detail was too small. The team helped solve the tedious login process of Instagram, which was leaky to users. He borrowed techniques that had worked on Facebook, like sending users an email alert about the activities of their friends while they had not used the app for a long time. They deployed photo tagging, to the chagrin of Instagram employees, who felt that these features were too Facebook-related and that they would fall out of the Instagram user base, said four of employees.
The photo tagging feature triggered "emotional anxiety," said the first engineer. "This has introduced a whole new dynamic."
The Richardson team, made up of about six employees and focused on managing the most passionate users of Instagram, has also been targeted for change. Facebook told them that in order for the product to fit a broad audience, software tools should replace manual processes, said Richardson and two former employees.
Richardson stated that she was caught off guard, "not because of her daring or because of the misery it made me and my contribution, but because of the misunderstanding of what we were trying to make."
She began planning for her departure and resigned in 2014, with most of the employees with whom La Poste has been servicing. At that time, the application had more than 200 million users, against about 30 million at the time of acquisition. Three of the original 13 employees are still on Instagram or Facebook, according to Facebook.
Instagram migrated to an algorithmic flow in 2016 – before publications were sorted in chronological order – and software now performs most of the discovery on behalf of users, providing them with relevant content. The Stories feature, added the same year, introduced a flickering element into Instagram design by automatically reloading new stories into a carousel. The result of these changes and precedents was an increase in the number of followers, the creation of larger social networks with weaker links and an increase in time spent in the application.
Richardson, who is a big fan of hedgehogs, has found himself watching a lot more on Instagram. "I clicked on one of them, but I have dozens, which goes beyond my brain," she said. "This takes away the entire agency."
Spalter, the Instagram design manager, pointed out that the rapid growth of Instagram has forced the company to create tools that will help users find publications and users. "We have a billion people," he said. "That means we have content from all the strange niche interests, and we've made it easy for you to find things – it's also the beauty of having a much bigger community."
Instagram is aware that its software offers too much celebrity content and strong people content at the expense of messages from people that users know personally, according to Spalter, who joined Instagram in 2015. The company reorganized the software to adjust the scale, he says.
"Managing this balance is essential for the future of Instagram, so if you are feeding celebrities, you will not be comfortable sharing content with your friends," he says. declared. "I understand how, in the early days, when you connect with everyone, it's very special.We are in a different phase of development, and it's a different world that way. But it's still a place where people connect. "
He added that Instagram had released tools in August to help people manage the time spent on the application.
Richardson says the content on Instagram is now "too attractive for your attention". Previously, "you had to make an effort to find someone, and that meant something for you and for the people you found.Today, I am amazed by the little honor accorded to each content. "
After leaving Instagram, Richardson traveled the world to meet the Instagram users she had connected with online. She eventually settled in New York, where she founded a start-up called People & Company, where she helps non-profit organizations and businesses, including Nike, find ways to connect with others. line with their audiences.
She stated that she was not actively thinking about Instagram until the end of September, when news of her founders was resigned, which again surprised most of their employees.
Richardson was inundated with memories. She remembered her first meeting with Martinez and everything that had changed since then. She called a friend of her Instagram time and they concluded that Instagram had more value in their lives. Together, they decided to resign. She composed her last message while she was sitting in her car.
"It's like we're all addicted to a drug that no longer lifts us to the top," she said about the decision. "So I wanted to make room for something that really does."
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