How Facebook’s umbrella has become a straitjacket for Instagram

Facebook’s strategy was clear from the get go: its founder, aware of the intrinsic volatility of social networks, where adoption processes and popularity are random and unpredictable, decided to avoid the deadly MySpace effect by acquiring enough critical mass to buy any social network that gained traction, using the more than two billion Facebook users as his observation deck.

The idea was to accrue a variety of platforms and different demographics under the same commercial umbrella that would give Facebook lots of baskets for its respective eggs allowing the company to maneuver and avoid sudden income losses if one of those platforms’ popularity waned.

But nobody could have predicted the scale and the speed with which Facebook has been engulfed by its current crisis: this has been the worst year in the company’s short life, made worse by its stubborn denial of reality: while one article after another explains how to close your Facebook and Instagram accounts and others outline the benefits of being a Facebook-free business, a tone-deaf and stubborn Mark Zuckerberg insists he’s proud of how his company has managed the successive scandals that have hit his company this year.

I’ve recently discussed whether Instagram is in a position to become the solution to Facebook’s problems, which is hard to imagine now that Instagram, once a phenomenon with huge potential but that today is increasingly seen as a little more than an extension of Facebook, increasingly mimetic and with similar problems. The departure last September of founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger and their subsequent statements indicating their disquiet with the way Facebook managed the company, together with its drift, leave little doubt that Instagram has changed for the worse.

It’s an interesting exercise to try to identify the moment when a social network begins to lose its essence and becomes something else. Those of us who’ve racked up a few years in the game have had sufficient opportunities to witness those processes of progressive loss of authenticity, wear and tear or evolution toward other values and uses that the original users begin to be less comfortable about, to the point where the site they originally knew and the patterns of use they adopted become the minority. Generally, this process is applauded by the company, which celebrates its creation turning mainstream, reaching a wider demographic and consequently increasing its income. In the case of Instagram, the introduction of advertising in November 2013 was welcomed: everything indicated that the company intended to develop a non-intrusive format, not annoying, in which ads seemed like another publication and did not assault the eyes… until the ratio between content and advertising exceeded a certain limit and we all began to be aware of the nuisance advertising now meant.

In parallel with the spread of advertising, and in fact before it’s appearance, we experienced the phenomenon of instagrammers, the influencers making vast amounts of money from recommending products, from wearing or using sponsored brands, or even simply associating themselves with brands for free to desperately try to fake popularity. A vast garbage patch steadily filling with fake followers, fake Likes, fueled by insane methods to simulate traction and to top recommendation pages, of people obsessed with the idea of a profitable popularity at any price, but completely empty, fake, prostituted to the limit. We’ve now seen the first generation of young people saying they’re tired of these practices, this permanent and exhausting beauty contest rife with bullying and harassment, soon to be joined by those who were initially drawn to Instagram in its early days as a good place to share photographs. Instagram has morphed into something completely different from its origins and although some are still prepared to exploit it to the limit and kill to achieve a certain status, not everyone seems comfortable with all that entails.

Can Instagram save Facebook? Frankly, I doubt it and imagine the opposite: the umbrella that was going to allow the founders of Instagram to speed up their plans for world domination is now a straitjacket restricting the growth of the company; Instagram is being forced to copy the behavior of its owners, which is taking it down the slippery slope toward becoming one of those social networks kept alive only by the inertia of those who still believe in taking advantage of them to make money, while the merchandise they buy and sell leave in droves, muttering Yogi Berra’s celebrated phrase: “Nobody goes there anymore… it’s too crowded”.

It may well be that Instagram is now too crowded. But I’d rather not say what with…

(En español, aquí)