Instagram’s Existential Bet

As with other social networks that grow, Instagram broadened its formats early on to head off several format-based asymptotes. Non-square photos and videos with gradually lengthening time limits have broadened the use cases and, more importantly, removed some level of production friction.

The move to copy Snapchat's Stories format was the next giant... See more

If we get big enough, there’s a real consideration on how we train the algorithm and what objective function we get or give it, and what content gets produced for it. We need to be very mindful of that because what I’d rather have is a world where we have more original content, more interesting content, and less of this gaming-the-algorithm content

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I’ll give you an example. Just look at Reels, Instagram’s version of TikTok. It seems to be growing much slower than Stories did, and my theory is it’s because the network structure of Instagram is, to some degree, incompatible with the network structure of TikTok.