Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are,
we're not just talking about an app. No, not
at all. We are talking about, I think, a cultural
operating system. I was looking at the notes
for this and it really hit me. We're discussing
a piece of software that lightly sits on the
home screen of almost every single person listening
to this right now. Absolutely. But calling it
software, I mean... It feels almost insufficient
at this point. It really does. It's a platform
that didn't just change how we take pictures.
It fundamentally rewired how we communicate,
how we perceive our own bodies, and you could
argue how we process reality itself. Yeah. We
are, of course, talking about Instagram. And
it is, I mean, it's almost impossible to overstate
the magnitude of this platform. If you look at
the sort of... cultural anthropology of the last
15 years, Instagram is the dominant thread. Right.
It shifted the entire internet from a text based
medium, you know, blogs, status updates to a
purely visual one. It created entirely new economies
from scratch. The influencer economy, the creator
economy, these things, they just didn't exist
in this form before. And now sitting here in
2026, it finds itself at the center of these
massive global debates. about mental health,
about censorship, and the very fabric of democracy.
And the sheer scale of it is just, it's mind
-boggling. We are talking about something that
started as a tiny, kind of confused startup in
San Francisco with a handful of people. And now,
under the ownership of Meta, it has billions
of users. I mean, it's influencing elections.
It's dictating beauty standards across continents.
And as we're going to see, it is constantly shape
-shifting to keep our attention. That evolution
is what we really want to focus on today. I mean,
this isn't just a history lesson. Our mission
for this deep dive is to really unpack the trajectory.
Exactly. We're going to look at the history,
yes, but we also want to look under the hood
at the hidden mechanics, you know, the algorithms
and the psychology that keep us scrolling. And
the controversies. We have to look at the controversies
that have plagued the platform from the mental
health crisis to all the allegations of censorship.
And we are going all the way up to the present
day. We're looking at the major updates from
2025. Yeah, we've got a massive stack of source
material here. We're pulling from extensive documentation
of Instagram's history, records of their future
rollouts, legal filings from their many, many
battles. And some very, very revealing internal
research leaks. Yes. It is a really comprehensive
look at how a simple photo app became... for
lack of a better word, a global superpower. So
let's do it. Let's rewind the clock. Let's go
back to the very, very beginning. Okay. Because
before it was the polished billion -dollar giant
we know today, it was actually a clunky little
prototype called Bourbon. Chuckles. Bourbon,
yes. And no, that is not a typo. It was spelled
B -U -R -B -N. Right. This was 2010. Kevin Systrom
and Mike Krieger were the founders, and they
were building this thing as an HTML5 mobile web
app. Okay, so let's break that down. Yeah. For
those who might not remember the tech landscape
of 2010, HTML5 mobile web app is kind of a fancy
way of saying it wasn't a native app. Right.
You didn't download it from the app store and
have it run smoothly on the metal of the phone.
It was basically a website trying to act like
an app. Which is just amazing to think about
now. And the concept, it wasn't even photos,
really. No, not at its core. It was a check -in
app. It was trying to be four square. You would
go to a location, check in, earn points, maybe
post a picture of your whiskey. Hence the name
bourbon. Exactly. But it was complicated. It
was messy. It was incredibly cluttered. And this
brings us to one of the most critical moments
in tech history, the pivot. The famous pivot.
They had this app, Bourbon, and they did something
very, very smart. They didn't just keep adding
features to try and make it work. They looked
at the user behavior data. They asked, what are
the few hundred people actually doing on this
thing? And I love this part of the story because
it just shows the power of observation. It really
does. They realized that the checking in part
was, you know, it was a commodity. Foursquare
had that lockdown. Nobody cared about the points.
No. But. The users on Bourbon were obsessed with
the photo sharing aspect. They were ignoring
all the game mechanics and just posting photos
of their coffees, their dogs, their weekends.
Exactly. The communication wasn't, I am at this
location. The communication was, look at this
thing I am seeing. Yes. So they did the classic
startup pivot, but they did it ruthlessly. They
stripped everything else away. Everything. No
more points, no more complicated check -in mechanics,
just photos, comments, and likes. That was it.
And they needed a new name, so they combined
instant camera and telegram. And you get Instagram.
A portmanteau that perfectly described the utility.
Sending an instant image. And it's an iconic
name. It really is. And we have to mention the
first post. This is a real piece of Internet
history. It wasn't, you know, a celebrity selfie
or some carefully curated brand shot. No, it
was remarkably mundane, which I think fits the
early vibe of the app perfectly. It really does.
On July 16th, 2010, Mike Krieger posted a photo
of South Beach Harbor at Pier 38. It was just
a test, essentially. A picture of a boat and
a dog's foot, I think. Something like that. But
that was the SMARC. That was the first gram.
And then came launch day, October 6, 2010. They
released the app on iOS. And it wasn't a slow
burn. No, it just. It exploded. Completely. They
had 25 ,000 registrations on day one. I mean,
that is virtually unheard of for a social app
without a massive pre -existing network like
Facebook to leverage. And a lot of that initial
appeal came down to a very specific constraint
that they introduced, which I think is really
the secret sauce of early Instagram. The square.
The square. Oh, the square. I honestly miss the
square sometimes. Me too. For the younger listeners
or anyone who joined later, Instagram used to
force you to crop everything. into a perfect
1 .1 square, and the resolution was tiny. It
was 640 pixels by 640 pixels. That seems incredibly
low -res by today's standards. It's nothing.
Your smartwatch probably has a better screen
now, but there was a technical reason for it.
That matched the display width of the iPhone
4 at the time. Right, so it fit perfectly on
the screen. But aesthetically, it did something
very, very interesting. It mimicked the look
of old Kodak Instamatic cameras or Polaroids.
It gave everything a nostalgic sort of artistic
feel instantly. It turned everyone into an amateur
photographer. That was the genius of it. Yes.
You didn't need to worry about the rule of thirds
or landscape versus portrait. You just centered
your subject in the square, slapped a filter
on it. maybe expo 2 or valencia valencia and
suddenly your average lunch looked like art It
just it lowered the barrier to entry for content
creation so dramatically. And that aesthetic
defined the platform for years. It wasn't until
August 2015 that they finally eased those restrictions
and allowed portrait and landscape orientations.
Five whole years of the square. But by then,
the Instagram aesthetic was already established.
That constraint, the square, it actually forced
people to be more creative. So the growth numbers
here are just they're wild. They hit one million
users in two months. Two months. They hit 10
million. year. And then came the Android release
in April 2012. The Android launch was a damn
breaking. It was downloaded a million times in
less than 24 hours. Wow. The demand was just,
it was pent up. But almost immediately after
that Android launch, I mean, literally days later,
came the news that just shook the tech world.
The acquisition, April 2012, Facebook, now Meta,
swoops in and buys Instagram. for approximately
$1 billion in cash and stock. A billion dollars.
To understand why this was so shocking, you have
to look at the context of 2012. A billion dollars
for a mobile app with 13 employees. 13. And zero
revenue. Zero. It seemed completely insane. People
were comparing it to Yahoo buying Flinger years
earlier for just, what, $35 million? Right. The
jump from $35 million to a billion felt like
a bubble bursting. I remember the headlines so
clearly. Mark Zuckerberg is crazy. What is he
buying? People thought it was just vanity. They
really did. But in hindsight. Looking at it from
2026, it might be one of the greatest bargains
in business history. It's not even a question.
It absolutely is. If Instagram were a standalone
company today, it would be worth hundreds and
hundreds of billions. Easily. It secured Facebook's
dominance on mobile for the next decade. At the
time, Facebook was actually struggling with the
shift to mobile. Their app was clunky. It was
terrible. And Instagram was mobile native. Zuckerberg
wasn't just buying an app. He was buying a future.
A foothold in the new world. Exactly. And initially,
he promised that Instagram would be independently
managed. He wanted to keep the culture distinct.
And for a while, that seemed to be true. I mean,
the founders, Systrom and Krieger, they stayed
on board. But that independence, it didn't last
forever. Tensions eventually rose. mostly about
autonomy and Facebook encroaching on the app.
And just, you know, integrating it more into
the mothership. Right. And both founders left
in September 2018. That's when Adam Mosseri took
over. And we really saw the app start to integrate
more and more deeply into the meta ecosystem.
But before we get to the modern era, we have
to talk about the feature wars. Oh, yes. Because
Instagram didn't just grow by inventing new things.
They grew by being absolutely ruthless about
competition. This is a defining characteristic
of Instagram's strategy. Innovation versus borrowing.
Borrowing is a very polite way to put it. And
the most famous example is, of course, stories.
2016. Snapchat is the cool new kid on the block.
Untouchable, it seems. Yeah. Teenagers are flocking
to it because of the ephemeral nature of it.
Photos that disappear. It felt raw and authentic,
unlike the curated perfection of the Instagram
feed. And Instagram was scared. Parified. They
were terrified. Snapchat was eating into their
engagement with the younger demographic. So Instagram
launched Stories. And they didn't even try to
hide that it was a clone. Not even a little bit.
It was the exact same mechanic. Disappearing
photos and videos in a sequential feed, accessible
for 24 hours. The circles at the top of the app,
everything. I love the quote from Kevin Systrom
when he was pressed on this. He didn't deny it.
He basically said, look, everyone has wheels.
Right. He was referencing the auto industry.
His argument was that the format, the ephemeral
story, was like the wheel. Okay. Just because
someone invented the wheel doesn't mean you can't
put wheels on your car. He admitted Snapchat
deserved all the credit for the invention. Look.
But he argued that execution is what matters.
And their execution was lethal. Completely. By
2017, just a year later, Instagram stories had
200 million daily users. And how many did Snapchat
have? That was more than Snapchat's entire user
base at the time. Wow. They took the feature,
put it in front of a much larger audience, and
essentially won the war. It was a master class
in platform power. But not every copycat move
worked out so well for them. Oh, no. Remember
IGTV? IGTV. 2018. Little orange button. That
feels like a fever dream now. It really does.
This was their big attempt to kill YouTube. They
wanted to capture the long form video market,
but they insisted on it being vertical video
only. They thought they could train users to
watch 20 minute videos on our phones vertically.
And the user said, no, thanks. Uncomfortable
is awkward. Watching a documentary vertically
just does not work. It doesn't. It was a ghost
town. They eventually just shut it down in March
2022. It's a really rare example of Instagram
completely misreading the room. A rare miss.
A rare miss. They realized that if people want
long form, they go to YouTube. If they want short
form, they go to, well, at the time, musical
.ly, which became TikTok. Which brings us to
Reels. 2020. TikTok has taken over the world
and Instagram does the stories play all over
again. They launched Reels globally in August
2020. It's the same playbook. short form vertical
looping video remix capabilities but this transition
was much much rockier than stories was why do
you think that was with stories it felt like
an add -on it sat at the top of your app you
could engage or not with reels instagram started
forcing it into the main feed oh yeah this was
the infamous pivot to video of 2022 that made
everyone so angry i remember the petition tati
brinning a photographer started a petition called
make instagram instagram again It was huge. And
all she wanted was to see photos of her friends.
And it went viral. Even the Kardashians shared
it. Kylie Jenner posted, stop trying to be TikTok.
And when the Kardashians speak, the stock market
listens. It really does. Instagram had to walk
it back slightly. Adam Mosseri put out a video
saying they heard the feedback. But did they
really? Not really. They never abandoned the
strategy. They just became smoother about integrating
it. And looking at our notes on the 2025 updates,
they are just doubling down. Doubling, tripling
down. In January 2025, they increased the Reels
duration to three minutes. Right, which is a
direct response to TikTok increasing their length.
Of course. And the algorithm now is so heavily
weighted toward video. If you are a static photo
account in 2025 or 2026, you are fighting. an
uphill battle against the machine. The system
just wants motion. And we can't forget threads
launched in 2023. That was their answer to Twitter
or X. That was a fascinating launch. They leveraged
the Instagram social graph, which was the genius
part. You didn't have to build a following from
scratch. You could just import your Instagram
followers. Which allowed for instant adoption.
100 million users in record time. Record time.
Although retention has been a different battle.
But it just, it shows the strategy. If a competitor
exists, Meta will build a clone inside the Instagram
ecosystem. Okay, so we've talked about the features,
but let's talk about what drives them. Let's
go under the hood. The algorithm. This is the
thing everyone loves to hate. The big shift happened
in 2016. Before that, Instagram was strictly
chronological. You saw posts in the order they
were published. If you scrolled far enough, you
saw everything. You could finish Instagram for
the day. I remember that feeling. It was so satisfying.
It was. So why did they change it? Well, their
official line was that as the user base grew,
people were following too many accounts. Their
internal data showed that users were missing
70 % of the posts in their feeds. 70%. Including
the ones they actually cared about. their best
friends, their family. So they introduced algorithmic
sorting to show you what they thought you wanted
to see first. And people have been asking for
the chronological feedback ever since. Nonstop.
And to be fair, Instagram has reintroduced options.
You have favorites or following feeds where you
can get a chronological view. But the default
is always the algorithm. Always. Why? Because
the algorithm is better at keeping you on the
app longer. And time on app equals ad revenue.
It prioritizes engagement over recency. It's
as simple as that. It really is. Okay, let's
talk about the psychology of the like. This is
something Instagram has really struggled with.
For a while, the like was the currency of self
-worth. It was. It absolutely was. And they knew
it was toxic. They knew. Starting around 2019,
they ran a massive experiment. It started in
Canada first. They hid the like counts. I remember
this. You could see who liked your post, but
the public number, the 1 ,500 likes was hidden.
And the goal was to depressurize the experience.
Right. To stop people from deleting a photo just
because they didn't get enough traction in the
first hour. Exactly. They wanted people to post
for expression, not for the score. Yeah. The
result was... Influencers hated it because likes
were their metrics for brand deals. Of course.
Regular users, I think, felt a bit of relief.
Eventually, they just made it optional. You can
now choose to hide or unhide your accounts. Which
was sort of a tacit admission, wasn't it? It
was. It was an admission that the core mechanic
of their platform social validation was causing
psychological distress. Speaking of distress,
let's... Let's move into the darker side of this
deep dive. We have to talk about the Facebook
files. This was a massive leak in 2021 that really
exposed what Meta knew about its own platform.
This was a watershed moment. The Wall Street
Journal obtained a huge trove of internal research
from within Meta. And the findings were damning.
They weren't good. The company knew definitively
that Instagram was harmful to a significant portion
of its users, particularly teenage girls. The
statistics from that leak are just, they're chilling
to read even now. They are. They found that Instagram
makes body image issues worse for one in three
teen girls. One in three. They also found that
13 % of British teens who reported having suicidal
thoughts traced the origin of those thoughts
directly to Instagram. That is a staggering number.
And the research highlighted a specific concept
called social comparison. Right. And this is
where Instagram differs from, say, TikTok or
Snapchat. Snapchat is about communication with
your friends, making silly faces, being goofy.
TikTok is about entertainment and performance.
But Instagram? Instagram is so often about lifestyle
and body perfection. The curated life. And the
internal research admitted that social comparison
is worse on Instagram than on the... those other
platforms because it is so focused on the visual
presentation of an idealized self. It's the highlight
reel effect, right? You're comparing your behind
the scenes mess to everyone else's polished,
perfect highlight reel. Exactly. And this leads
directly to the Instagram face, this sort of
homogenized beauty standard created by filters
and editing tools. Everyone starts to look the
same. And it's not just the static images anymore,
is it? The move to reels has introduced a whole
new. addiction mechanism the dopamine loop right
short form video is designed to trigger these
short bursts of thrills in your brain it's like
a slot machine swipe up maybe you get a laugh
yeah swipe up maybe you'll learn a recipe swipe
up maybe you see a cute puppy you never know
what's coming next so you keep pulling the lever
that is literally the psychological term for
it a variable reward schedule. And neurochemically,
that is incredibly potent. And what does that
do to our brains long term? Well, researchers
have linked this to lower attention spans. It's
becoming demonstrably more difficult for heavy
users to engage in deep focus activities, like
reading a book. Because your brain is trained
to expect a new stimulus every 15 seconds. Exactly.
Another aspect of the dark side that I found
really disturbing in the notes is this concept
of sharenting. This is a huge and growing privacy
crisis. It's parents posting their children online.
There was an analysis of the hashtag, hashtag,
let a thumb belittle. It found millions and millions
of images where children's faces, names, and
even their locations were exposed. So these kids
are creating a digital footprint before they
can even speak. And they have no say in it, no
consent. It's a massive vulnerability. And speaking
of vulnerability, Instagram itself hasn't exactly
been a fortress when it comes to security. No,
far from it. In September 2024, Meta was hit
with a $101 million fine for storing hundreds
of millions of user passwords in plain text.
Plain text. That's security 101. You don't do
that. You don't do that. Normally, passwords
should be hashed and salted, basically encrypted,
so even the company can't read them. But this
had been going on since 2012. Since 2012. It
means that any employee with access to those
databases could just read your password. It wasn't
encrypted. That's unbelievable. And that's on
top of the massive GDPR fine. they got in Ireland
in 2022. How much was that? $402 million, specifically
regarding the mishandling of miners' data. It's
a pattern of negligence that is just, it's hard
to ignore. It is. But it's not just about what
they let slip through. It's also about what they
actively take down. Yeah. Let's talk about censorship
and moderation. This is a minefield. Instagram's
community guidelines have been criticized for
being incredibly inconsistent, particularly when
it comes to women's bodies. The Free the Nipple
campaign comes to mind immediately. Exactly.
Male toplessness is perfectly fine on the platform.
Sure. Female toplessness is banned as sexually
suggestive. But the line is so blurry. We've
seen high profile artists like Petra Collins
have their accounts deleted for photos that didn't
violate the letter of the law, but maybe violated
the vibe. the moderators were looking for. Right.
And Rupi Kaur, the poet, had that photo of menstrual
blood on clothing removed. She fought back and
Instagram eventually apologized and restored
it. But it just showed how the platform polices
female bodies so much more strictly than male
ones. And then there's political censorship.
This is where it gets really geopolitical. We've
seen these repeated instances where political
speech just disappears and Instagram attributes
it to glitches. The glitch excuse. During the
Sheikh Jarrah evictions in 2021 and again in
2023 regarding Palestine, users reported massive
deletions of stories and posts. And there was
that auto -translate issue, wasn't there? A huge
one. The auto -translate feature inserted the
word terrorist into user bios that contained
the Palestinian flag and the phrase praise. Wow.
And Instagram apologized for that, calling it
a translation error. They did. But when these
errors consistently happen in one direction,
it raises serious questions for users about algorithmic
bias. Of course. We saw similar things with Iran
in 2020. Instagram removed posts mourning General
Soleimani because they said they had to comply
with U .S. sanctions. So an American social media
company effectively becomes an enforcer of U
.S. foreign policy on a global scale. That's
exactly what it is. And because of that power,
entire countries are... now banning Instagram.
It's a splintering of the Internet, a splinter
net. China has blocked it since 2014. They have
their own ecosystem with WeChat. Russia banned
it in March 2022 after the invasion of Ukraine,
labeling Meta an extremist organization. Which
is a very serious designation. It is. In fact,
as of July 2025, new legislation in Russia made
it illegal to even access Instagram via VPN.
Wow. So it's not just blocked. It's actually
criminalized. Correct. Turkey even had a brief
ban in August 2024 over deleted condolences for
a Hamas leader. It just shows that Instagram
is no longer a fun app. It's a political battleground
where nations are asserting their digital sovereignty.
OK, let's bring it home. Let's talk about the
present day. We're looking at the landscape of
late 2025 and early 2026. What does Instagram
look like now? Well, for one, the iPad users
finally got their wish. It only took 15 years.
I honestly thought it was never going to happen.
Chuckles. I think we all did. In September 2025,
they finally launched a native iPadOS app. Before
that, you had to use the blown up iPhone version
with the black bars on the side. It was ridiculous,
but they finally fixed it. And they've launched
some new standalone apps too, haven't they? They
have. They released edits in April 2025. This
is a standalone video editing app. Okay, so a
competitor to CapCut. A direct response to CapCut,
which is owned by ByteDance, the parent company
of TikTok. Instagram realized that people were
editing their videos on CapCut. using their tools
and templates, and then posting the final product
to Reels. And they want to own the whole process.
They want to own the creation tools, not just
the distribution. And the interface itself is
changing. This is the most controversial change
on the horizon, I think. In late 2025, they began
testing a Reels -first UI in markets like India
and Korea. And what does that mean, Reels -first?
In this version, the Home tab IS Reels, the standard...
photo feed the thing instagram was literally
built on gets demoted even further so the transformation
is complete it is officially a video app essentially
yes and we're seeing them try to reclaim some
of that social aspect with features like close
friends they actually launched a podcast feature
a series under the close friends only brand with
celebrities trying to capitalize on that feeling
of intimacy but the main feed that is now a broadcast
channel It's just amazing to think about the
journey. We started with a square photo of a
harbor in 2010. And now we have a global video
marketplace driven by AI, regulated by governments,
and fighting for our attention every single second
of the day. It changed the definition of memory.
We don't just experience moments anymore. We
curate them for an audience. We live life in
order to create content about it. That is a profound
thought. And as we wrap up this deep dive, I
want to leave our listeners with one final provocation.
With this 2025 push toward a Reels -first interface,
Instagram is effectively abandoning the social
network model, you know, connecting with your
friends for a media broadcast model, entertainment
from strangers. Right. It's moving from the social
graph to the interest graph. Exactly. So my question
is this. If we aren't seeing our friends anymore
and we aren't the ones creating the high quality
video content that gets rewarded by the algorithm,
are we still users or have we just become the
audience for the algorithm? Yeah, that's the
question, isn't it? Are you the customer or are
you the product being sold to advertisers while
you watch videos made by strangers? I think the
answer is becoming increasingly clear. Little
existential dread to end your commute. Thank
you for joining us on this deep dive into Instagram.
We will catch you on the next one. Thanks for
having me.