Why doesn't Instagram have a retweet button?
One of the biggest social networks lacks an essential element of virality. So why does it work?
Twitter began in 2006, with Jack Dorsey’s famous tweet “just setting up my twttr” being its first public manifestation. (There were earlier ones, but not public, which is why his is number 20.) People started using it with some alacrity, and soon invented a method to address each other using “@username”, a carryover from IRC. Twitter’s engineers picked up on this, and incorporated it into the normal workings, so that tweets mentioning you would get a special status in the app.
People also liked to pass on what other people had said to their network: in the first three years, this had to be done by laboriously copying the text into a tweet and then putting “RT @username: [copied text]”. This was quite a struggle sometimes, given that this was back in the days of 140 characters.
But people did stick with it, even so, because retweeting stuff was really useful in a network where people were trying to pass information around. So useful, in fact, that almost exactly 13 years ago, on 13 August 2009, then-CEO Biz Stone published a blogpost explaining how the forthcoming Retweet function would work. As he explained:
“Retweeting is a great example of Twitter teaching us what it wants to be. The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact and the more efficient dissemination of information across the entire Twitter ecosystem is something we very much want to support. That’s why we’re planning to formalize retweeting by officially adding it to our platform and Twitter.com.”
Early in November 2009, it introduced the fully-fledged Retweet function, exactly as you see now. People hated it, of course. But it was so convenient and easy that resistance quickly dwindled. By 2018, a quarter of all tweets were retweets. The power law effect that I wrote about last week was visible too:
Twitter exhibits a strong bias towards a small number of users accounting for a disproportionate amount of total tweet volume. The top 1% most prolific users sent 28% of all tweets in the sample during the period, with the top 5% accounting for 57% of tweets, the top 10% accounting for 71% of tweets and the top 15% of users accounting for 80% of all tweets.
So much for Twitter. What’s that got to do with Instagram?
A picture is worth 140 characters, or more
Instagram showed its face in October 2010: a social network built around photos you uploaded. Initially these were only square, and it was only on the iPhone (and, 12 years on, it still doesn’t have a native iPad app, despite having launched seven months after the latter). You could follow people (but they didn’t have to follow you back - an asymmetrical network, like Twitter, unlike Facebook). You could “Like” photos. You could comment on photos, if the person allowed comments.
You could not, however, “regram” them.
Why not?
In 2017 Kevin Systrom, one of the founders, talked to Wired about his thoughts. The question of re-sharing content had come up multiple times in internal discussions, he said:
We debate the re-share thing a lot. Because obviously people love the idea of re-sharing content that they find. Instagram is full of awesome stuff. In fact, one of the main ways people communicate over Instagram Direct now is actually they share content that they find on Instagram. So that's been a debate over and over again. But really that decision is about keeping your feed focused on the people you know rather than the people you know finding other stuff for you to see. And I think that is more of a testament of our focus on authenticity and on the connections you actually have than about anything else.
The remarkable thing is that Instagram grew so big without resharing capability. For that, we can probably thank/blame Facebook, which bought it for a billion dollars in 2012 and began aggressively pushing its benefits to the older network’s users.
Seriously: I think that if Facebook hadn’t bought Instagram, then without a “regram” facility, the network would probably have fizzled. That’s quite apart from the challenge of building an advertising network. (All that stuff you see comes from Facebook.) You need some way to create virality because the reality of all social networks is in that extract a little way above: the power law means that a tiny number of people get most of the attention, and they keep people interested in the network. Without that, attention wanes, and with it user numbers.
But, you say, Instagram has its “Explore” tab, where you can find content that you might be interested in. The reality is that people don’t poke around in apps to find things. They use what they use, and in particular what’s there in front of them, and that’s about it.
The sharing economy
One way in which Instagram did implement resharing content was through Stories, its answer to Snapchat: you can opt to include any photo from another account into a Story of your own, and comment on it (shades of Twitter’s quote tweet). Stories saved Instagram from being outcompeted by Snapchat, but Instagram feels now that they’ve served their time, and so it’s pushing video as hard as it possibly can. It’s also pushing algorithmically chosen recommendations for accounts to follow as hard as it can, which is driving people mad. Money quote:
One viral tweet from popular Twitch streamer Nadeshot read: “Spiritually, Instagram is dead. I now have 2 Tik Tok apps on my phone. And to top it all off, Tik Tok’s algorithm is far superior at serving me content that I actually want to see which basically renders Instagram useless.”
(Notice, by the way, that I’m essentially resharing content from these other web pages when I blockquote them. It’s how the web likes to work; Instagram, in that sense, is anti-web. It’s a closed space that mostly rejects one of the most basic functions of the world wide web.)
The attempt by Meta to make Instagram behave more like TikTok has felt, for many, like the dying gasps of the 12-year-old network. Om Malik is blunt: “Instagram is dead”, he wrote last month:
What’s left is a constantly mutating product that copies features from “whomever is popular now” service — Snapchat, TikTok, or whatever. It is all about marketing and selling substandard products and mediocre services by influencers with less depth than a sheet of paper.
It has become QVC 2.0. About four years ago, I postulated as much. I was hopeful that, with the launch of IGTV (remember that), Instagram could become an excellent way for brands to tell their stories. — much like QVC did in its early days.
Of course, I forgot that QVC might have started well but eventually turned to shit.
One feels obliged to point out that plenty of people have declared Instagram dead (here’s a piece from December 2020). It’s rather like the economists who have predicted 12 of the last two recessions.
But the disquiet here feels different. Facebook/Meta isn’t backing down, and is going to push Instagram to become more like its latest, most lethal competitor, TikTok. That is going to annoy people who don’t want to use TikTok (because if they did, they’d use TikTok), but want to use Instagram as it used to be. There’s no meeting point.
There is one thing that Instagram could do that would please people and let them find new people to follow: institute a resharing function. I think it’ll be the next thing that Instagram introduces.
And after that… an iPad app? Please?
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