Sarah Frier > Quotes

“The more you give up who you are to be liked by other people, it’s a formula for chipping away at your soul. You become a product of what everyone else wants, and not who you’re supposed to be.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“A filter on Instagram was like if Twitter had a button to make you more clever.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“More important was the lesson that just because something is more technically complex doesn’t mean it’s better.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“On social media, the average user is scrolling passively, wanting to be entertained and updated on the latest. They are therefore even more susceptible to suggestion by the companies, and by the professional users on a platform who tailor their behavior to what works well on the site.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“Instagram posts would be art, and art was a form of commentary on life. The app would give people the gift of expression, but also escapism.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The inside story of Instagram

“More than 200 million of Instagram's users have more than 50,000 followers, the level at which they can make a living wage by posting on behalf of brands.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“Instagram’s early popularity was less about the technology and more about the psychology—about how it made people feel. The filters made reality look like art. And then, in cataloging that art, people would start to think about their lives differently, and themselves differently, and their place in society differently.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The inside story of Instagram

“People who don't take risks work for people who do.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“Everything breaks at a billion.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The inside story of Instagram

“just because something is more technically complex doesn’t mean it’s better.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The inside story of Instagram

“The apps start out with seemingly simple motivations, as entertainment that could lead to a business: Facebook is for connecting with friends and family, YouTube is for watching videos, Twitter is for sharing what’s happening now, and Instagram is for sharing visual moments. And then, as they enmesh themselves in everyday life, the rewards systems of their products, fueled by the companies’ own attempts to measure their success, have a deeper impact on how people behave than any branding or marketing could ever achieve.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“leadership philosophy: to ask first what problem they were solving, and then to try and solve it in the simplest way possible.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“Vulnerability now gets better engagement, because it’s more relatable.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“Facebook automatically catalogued every tiny action from its users, not just their comments and clicks but the words they typed and did not send, the posts they hovered over while scrolling and did not click, and the people's names they searched and did not befriend. They could use that data, for instance, to figure out who your closest friends were, defining the strength of the relationship with a constantly changing number between 0 and 1 they called a "friend coefficient". The people rated closest to 1 would always be at the top of your news feed.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“At one point in 2015, a few Instagrammers in Barnieh's crowd in Hong Kong took the game to another level: they made a habit of hanging off the side of buildings and the tops of bridges. In one shot by Lucian Yock Lam, @yock7, a man is holding another man's arm while he dangles from the side of a skyscraper at night, hovering above a busy street. The caption is a simple hashtag: #followmebro. It got 2,550 likes, a fleeting reward for putting one's life at risk.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“It used to be that the internet reflected humanity, but now humanity is reflecting the internet.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The inside story of Instagram

“Mosseri’s answer to the important question was perfect by Facebook standards: “Technology isn’t good or bad—it just is,” he wrote. “Social media is a great amplifier. We need to do all we can responsibly to magnify the good and address the bad.”
But nothing “just is,” especially Instagram. Instagram isn’t designed to be a neutral technology, like electricity or computer code. It’s an intentionally crafted experience, with an impact on its users that is not inevitable, but is the product of a series of choices by its makers about how to shape behavior. Instagram trained its users on likes and follows, but that wasn’t enough to create the emotional attachment users have to the product today. They also thought about their users as individuals, through the careful curation of an editorial strategy, and partnerships with top accounts. Instagram’s team is expert at amplifying “the good.”
When it comes to addressing “the bad,” though, employees are concerned the app is thinking in terms of numbers, not people. Facebook’s top argument against a breakup is that its “family of apps” evolution will be better for users’ safety. “If you want to prevent interference in elections, if you want to reduce[…]”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“Everyone at the company had access to the whole Facebook code base and was allowed to make changes to the product without much oversight. All they needed to prove was that their edit caused a boost, however small, for some important metric, like time spent on the app. That allowed engineers and designers to work a lot faster, because there was less arguing about why or whether they should build something. Everyone knew that their next raise would hinge on whether they affected growth and sharing. They weren’t held accountable for much else.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“Like any system, it can be gamed. And Instagram ended up fueling a problem not just about truth in advertising, but about truth in life.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“And they would avoid posting anything that perpetuated some of the new unhealthy trends on the app. They would never post a photo of anybody near a cliff, no matter how beautiful, because they knew that gaining a following on Instagram was becoming so desirable that people were risking their lives for perfect shots.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“One of Zuckerberg’s least favorite criticisms of Facebook was that it created ideological echo chambers, in which people only engaged with the ideas they wanted to hear. Facebook had already funded research,12 in 2015, to show echo chambers were mathematically not their fault. With the social network, everyone had the potential to engage with whatever kinds of ideas they wanted to, and tended to have at least some Facebook connections with people who held different political opinions. But if people chose not to interact with those they disagreed with, was that really Facebook’s doing? Their algorithm was just showing people what they demonstrated, through their own behavior, they wanted to see, enhancing their existing preferences.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The inside story of Instagram

“Facebook was like a constant high school reunion, with everyone catching up their acquaintances on the life milestones that had happened since they’d last talked. Instagram was like a constant first date, with everyone putting the best version of their lives on display.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The inside story of Instagram

“Systrom and Krieger didn’t want any of this to be on Instagram and knew, as the site got bigger, that they wouldn’t be able to comb through everything to delete the worst stuff manually. After just nine months, the app already hosted 150 million photos, with users posting 15 photos per second. So they brainstormed a way to automatically detect the worst content and prevent it from going up, to preserve Instagram’s fledgling brand. “Don’t do that!” Zollman said. “If we start proactively reviewing content, we are legally liable for all of it. If anyone found out, we’d have to personally review every piece of content before it goes up, which is impossible.” She was right. According to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, nobody who provided an “interactive computer service” was considered the “publisher or speaker” of the information, legally speaking, unless they exerted editorial control before that content was posted. The 1996 law was Congress’s attempt to regulate pornographic material on the Internet, but was also crucial to protecting internet companies from legal liability for things like defamation.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“Once Facebook purchased the VPN company, they could look at all the traffic flowing through the service and extrapolate data from it.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The inside story of Instagram

“Gabriel photographed each dish to post on his Instagram story, while lamenting that his friends were so obsessed with sharing their lives, he wasn't sure if they were actually living them.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“Businesses born of Instagram that have had better luck are those that leveraged the psychology of their users—the need for followers and recognition—while simultaneously creating interesting content.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The inside story of Instagram

“فیسبوک همیشه شبیه تجدید دیدار دانش‌آموزان بود و همه آشنایان‌شان را در جزیان اتفاقات بزرگ زندگی که از زمان آخرین گفت‌وگویشان رخ داده بود، می‌گذاشتند. اما اینستاگرام همیشه شبیه قرار اول بود و همه بهترین نسخه‌ی زندگی‌شان را به نمایش می‌گذاشتند.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“Anybody can build Instagram the app,” he said, “but not everybody can build Instagram the community.” Those artists, designers, and photographers were turning into evangelists for the product, and Instagram needed to keep them as excited as possible for as long as possible.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram

“The worst part was that Facebook had known of the data leak for years, and hadn’t properly enforced its policies, or let users know when their information was compromised. The company had even sent threatening legal notices to the media to keep the story from coming out.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The inside story of Instagram

“The dog account’s popularity spread beyond her family and friends to a few thousand people. But on a Monday night in December 2012, the account started gaining fans around the world. After Toffey posted three pictures of Tuna on the Instagram blog that night, the dog’s following grew from 8,500 to 15,000 within 30 minutes. Dasher pulled to refresh the page: 16,000. By the next morning, Tuna was at 32,000 followers. Dasher’s phone started ringing with media requests from around the world. Anderson Cooper’s talk show offered to fly her to DC; she appeared via webcast, thinking it wouldn’t be feasible to take a vacation day. But as requests for appearances continued to come in, her friends warned her about what was coming before she realized it: she would have to quit her job at the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles and run her dog’s account full-time. It sounded ridiculous, so she took a month off to test the theory. Sure enough, BarkBox, which made a subscription box for pet items, was willing to sponsor Dasher and her friend on an eight-city tour with Tuna. People in various cities came up to her, crying, telling her they were struggling with depression or anxiety and that Tuna was bringing them joy. “That was the first time that I realized how much weight these posts had for people,” Dasher later recalled. “And that’s also when I realized I wanted to do this full-time.” Her life became about managing Tuna’s fame. Berkley, part of Penguin Random House, signed her up to write a book titled Tuna Melts My Heart: The Underdog with the Overbite. That led to more brand deals, plus merchandising to put Tuna’s likeness on stuffed animals and mugs. In her book’s acknowledgments, she thanks Tuna most of all, but also Toffey for sharing the post that changed her life. The tastes of one Instagram employee directly affected her financial success, but also the habits of the two million people who now follow that dog—including Ariana Grande.”
― Sarah Frier, No Filter: The inside story of Instagram