Stories Instagram Quotes

I think i should get love inked on my skin. Maybe that's the only way i am destined to keep it.

It took thirty-eight years before 50 million people gained access to radios. It took television thirteen years to earn an audience that size. It took Instagram a year and a half.

Words fail to describe what i feel anymore. Let me be numb for a while, let me be sore.

He was her reason for existence, She was his ultimate risk.

I have loved this world in ways it could never love me back.

Love left us long back, we just got better. You at pretending, Me at hiding.

My mind gets stronger everyday, my heart gets weaker with time.

Some of us cover to protect our bodies some of us cover to protect our souls in both cases, respect their choices.

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.

I've spent a life chasing stories to tell when I'm old.

If it stays, then it is love. If it ends, it's a love story.

Don't focus on the words i write, pay attention to the ones i don't. These lines won't tell you much about me, try to read in between these lines.

I feel like girls who drink whisky tell good stories.

There were plenty of fishes in the pond, yet i fell in love with a crocodile.

My selfie my life!

A filter on Instagram was like if Twitter had a button to make you more clever.

In the age of Facebook and Instagram you can observe this myth-making process more clearly than ever before, because some of it has been outsourced from the mind to the computer. It is fascinating and terrifying to behold people who spend countless hours constructing and embellishing a perfect self online, becoming attached to their own creation, and mistaking it for the truth about themselves.20 That’s how a family holiday fraught with traffic jams, petty squabbles and tense silences becomes a collection of beautiful panoramas, perfect dinners and smiling faces; 99 per cent of what we experience never becomes part of the story of the self. It is particularly noteworthy that our fantasy self tends to be very visual, whereas our actual experiences are corporeal. In the fantasy, you observe a scene in your mind’s eye or on the computer screen. You see yourself standing on a tropical beach, the blue sea behind you, a big smile on your face, one hand holding a cocktail, the other arm around your lover’s waist. Paradise. What the picture does not show is the annoying fly that bites your leg, the cramped feeling in your stomach from eating that rotten fish soup, the tension in your jaw as you fake a big smile, and the ugly fight the happy couple had five minutes ago. If we could only feel what the people in the photos felt while taking them! Hence if you really want to understand yourself, you should not identify with your Facebook account or with the inner story of the self. Instead, you should observe the actual flow of body and mind. You will see thoughts, emotions and desires appear and disappear without much reason and without any command from you, just as different winds blow from this or that direction and mess up your hair. And just as you are not the winds, so also you are not the jumble of thoughts, emotions and desires you experience, and you are certainly not the sanitised story you tell about them with hindsight. You experience all of them, but you don’t control them, you don’t own them, and you are not them. People ask ‘Who am I?’ and expect to be told a story. The first thing you need to know about yourself, is that you are not a story.

Don’t be scared to change the prince’s name in your story.

More important was the lesson that just because something is more technically complex doesn’t mean it’s better.

I am a dreamer, neither lost or found. Waiting for a story worth dreaming, forever.

People who don't take risks work for people who do.

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.

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.

A quote is the essence of a story. We all need stories to convey ideas, justice, anger, humanity, hope, laughter, learning, and whatever makes us understand or feel understood

Come close - let our hearts beat like one, we'll be the two that became one. Love is the rhythm of our night.

just because something is more technically complex doesn’t mean it’s better.

Sad eyes, once had happy stories to tell.

Everything breaks at a billion.

leadership philosophy: to ask first what problem they were solving, and then to try and solve it in the simplest way possible.

Vulnerability now gets better engagement, because it’s more relatable.

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.

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.

Follow your dreams, they know the way. Let your own story come out. Put something wonderful in the world that wasn't there before.

Our story is the kind that sets emotions on fire

People live inside the stories they tell themselves. Others see about you the things that you believe.

My life my selfie!

Great stories are not the ones which have great people in them. Great stories are the ones which have ordinary people, willing to do great things.

The fear of missing out. It’s the affliction that drives obsessive checking of Twitter feeds, Facebook updates, Instagram stories, WhatsApp groups, and news apps.

It used to be that the internet reflected humanity, but now humanity is reflecting the internet.

We can reframe and recast our lives -- not with lies, not with deceptions, but with the truth of who we are and of who we are choosing to become.

Once Facebook purchased the VPN company, they could look at all the traffic flowing through the service and extrapolate data from it.

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.

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.

The world is getting noisier. We've gone from boomboxes to Walkmen to portable CD players to iPods to any song we want, whenever we want it. We've gone from the four television channels of my childhood to the seeming infinity of cable and streaming. As technology moves us faster and faster through time and space, it seems to feel like story is getting pushed out of the way, I mean, literally pushed out of the narrative. But even as our engagement with stories change, or the trappings around it morph from book to audio to Instagram to Snapchat, we must remember our finger beneath the words. Remember that story, regardless of the format, has always taken us to places we never thought we'd go, introduced us to people we never thought we'd meet and shown us worlds that we might have missed. So as technology keeps moving faster and faster, I am good with something slower. My finger beneath the words has led me to a life of writing books for people of all ages, books meant to be read slowly, to be savored.

The way to get filthy rich is by aggressively copying others and then adding your own twist. Facebook very publicly copied Snapchat. When Snapchat released Snapchat Stories, Facebook rolled out Facebook Stories and Instagram Stories.

But that, right there, is why embracing our dirty dessert secrets matters so much. On the surface, they are just hilarious indulgences, but dig down a little deeper than the whipped cream and cherry on top and you'll see that they are powerful reminders to cultivate and celebrate our inner selves as fiercely as we do our LinkedIn profiles and Instagram feeds. Because what good, really, is all that public success and admiration without the private joy at the center?

Did they choose to go to one party over another because it would look better on Instagram? Did they decide to read a story just so they could tweet about it? Have we all become so desperate to share everything that we’ve stopped enjoying our lives?

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.

I wouldn’t be able to write about this for my blog or instagram stories. Not anytime soon at least. Not while it was still so raw. It hurt. And nobody wanted unvarnished pain omg their feed unless it was served up with a side dish of uplift or some kind of lesson.

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.

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.

Democrats need to catch up and leapfrog ahead. And this isn’t just about data. We need an “always-on” content distribution network that can match what the right-wing has built. That means an array of loosely connected Facebook pages, Instagram accounts, Twitter feeds, Snapchat stories, and Reddit communities churning out memes, graphics, and videos. More sophisticated data collection and analysis can support and feed this network. I’m no expert in these matters, but I know enough to understand that most people get their news from screens, so we have to be there 24/7.

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.

In the age of Facebook and Instagram you can observe this myth-making process more clearly than ever before, because some of it has been outsourced from the mind to the computer. It is fascinating and terrifying to behold people spending countless hours constructing and embellishing a perfect self online, becoming attached to their own creation, and mistaking it for the truth about themselves.20 That’s how a family holiday fraught with traffic jams, petty squabbles, and tense silences becomes a collection of beautiful panoramas, perfect dinners, and smiling faces; 99 percent of what we experience never becomes part of the story of the self.

No child is an island. They come from families. They are the newest braids in that cord of humanity, and it is right and beautiful that they should know something of what their parents and grandparents value, while at the same time having access to the classic works of human imagination that we all own in common. Contemporary culture will take care of itself. It's lively and loud and most children's lives are full of it. When parents read long-beloved classics with them and share stories that convey what we want them to know about the world, we can help them discover powerful narratives and pictures they will never find on PBS Kids or Instagram.

victory, he told me that I deserved the credit for what had happened. He said that by giving my testimony, I’d freed myself and probably also helped other people in unfair conservatorships. After having my father take credit for everything I did for so long, it meant everything to have this man tell me that I’d made the difference in my own life. And now, finally, it was my own life. Being controlled made me so angry on behalf of anyone who doesn’t have the right to determine their own fate. “I’m just grateful, honestly, for each day… I’m not here to be a victim,” I said on Instagram after the conservatorship was terminated. “I lived with victims my whole life as a child. That’s why I got out of my house. And worked for twenty years and worked my ass off… Hopefully, my story will make an impact and make some changes in the corrupt system.

There were absolutely amazing photographs everywhere, on everyone's Facebook page and everyone's iPhone and Instagram, just floating around in cyberspace for eternity. People took hundreds and thousands of digital pictures; one or two, even twenty or a hundred, were bound to be great. All anyone had to do was click through them all and post the ones they liked, deleting the rest. But using film meant you never knew what was going to be a good picture, let alone a great one, until you were standing there looking at a contact sheet with a magnifying glass and deciding which to print. Maybe nobody cared anymore, but then again, writers probably felt the same way when word processors were invented. Anyone with a story and a keyboard could write their memoir now, write the great American novel, or tweet a 140-character trope that gets retweeted and it read by hundreds of people every hour of every day.

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.

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.

She longed for the days when everyone’s eyes weren’t glued to a small screen; when you walked into an elevator and smiled at a stranger, or had a conversation with a cabdriver; when your dinner companion didn’t spend the meal art-directing an Instagram shoot of the peony centerpiece. Imogen sometimes wondered if people weren’t letting social media dictate their entire lives. Did they choose to go to one party over another because it would look better on Instagram? Did they decide to read a story just so they could tweet about it? Have we all become so desperate to share everything that we’ve stopped enjoying our lives?

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.

God was dead: to begin with. And romance was dead. Chivalry was dead. Poetry, the novel, painting, they were all dead, and art was dead. Theatre and cinema were both dead. Literature was dead. The book was dead. Modernism, postmodernism, realism and surrealism were all dead. Jazz was dead, pop music, disco, rap, classical music, dead. Culture was dead. Decency, society, family values were dead. The past was dead. History was dead. The welfare state was dead. Politics was dead. Democracy was dead. Communism, fascism, neoliberalism, capitalism, all dead, and marxism, dead, feminism, also dead. Political correctness, dead. Racism was dead. Religion was dead. Thought was dead. Hope was dead. Truth and fiction were both dead. The media was dead. The internet was dead. Twitter, instagram, facebook, google, dead. Love was dead. Death was dead. A great many things were dead. Some, though, weren’t, or weren’t dead yet. Life wasn’t yet dead. Revolution wasn’t dead. Racial equality wasn’t dead. Hatred wasn’t dead. But the computer? Dead. TV? Dead. Radio? Dead. Mobiles were dead. Batteries were dead. Marriages were dead, sex lives were dead, conversation was dead. Leaves were dead. Flowers were dead, dead in their water. Imagine being haunted by the ghosts of all these dead things. Imagine being haunted by the ghost of a flower. No, imagine being haunted (if there were such a thing as being haunted, rather than just neurosis or psychosis) by the ghost (if there were such a thing as ghosts, rather than just imagination) of a flower. Ghosts themselves weren’t dead, not exactly. Instead, the following questions came up: “are ghosts dead are ghosts dead or alive are ghosts deadly” but in any case forget ghosts, put them out of your mind because this isn’t a ghost story, though it’s the dead of winter when it happens, a bright sunny post-millennial global-warming Christmas Eve morning (Christmas, too, dead), and it’s about real things really happening in the real world involving real people in real time on the real earth (uh huh, earth, also dead):

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.

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[…]

Cue thousands of Instagram posts encouraging the no-contact rule and implicitly shaming anyone who continues a relationship with their ex. But the story of relationships and their endings is far too complex for us to apply solution-focused changes aimed at reducing pain. Still, every one of my friends and every therapist on Instagram advises against talking to an ex. No contact, cold turkey, zero—a crazy idea to me. In my work, I’ve noticed that more than half of my clients will continue to communicate with their former partner, maintaining some form of connection. Even a friendship. This happens despite the discouraging advice recommending a complete cutoff. But we, as a society, might be better off trying to understand our need to continue a connection with an ex than condemning or strongly advising against it. Maybe it’s time we reconsidered our attitude toward post-breakup connections. Instead of dismissing them as unhealthy, we could try to understand the motives behind our choice to stay in touch. After all, each relationship and breakup is unique, and the two (or more) people involved in a ruptured relationship are in the best position to judge what serves their emotional needs and personal growth. The idea of cutting an ex out of your life completely is also extremely heteronormative. Many queer people (like me) don’t have their family of origin to fall back on. Our “families” are therefore sometimes our friends, partners, and ex-partners, the people we form deep connections with. Alex was my family for ten years. So, for me, cutting him out of my life entirely wasn’t so simple.

They kept in touch for years and years. Momma believed in the goodness of people and she believed in the prayer of protection, that wherever she was, God was, too. Mom had a way of taking people under her wing and making you feel special when you were talking to her. Your story mattered. And whenever she thought I was getting a little too full of myself, she’d remind me: “Robin, your story is no more important than anybody else’s story. When you strut, you stumble.” Meaning: When you think that you’re all that and a bag of chips, you’re gonna fall flat on your face. Thank you, Momma, for that invaluable lesson. We were overwhelmed with the outpouring of love for our mother. President and Michelle Obama sent a beautiful flower arrangement to our house. It was the first time I had seen Mom’s grandchildren smile in days. It was a proud moment for them. The president of the United States. They asked if they could take pictures of the flowers and Instagram them to their friends. It was painful to make the final arrangements for Mom. The owners of the Bradford-O’Keefe Funeral Home were incredibly kind and gentle. Our families have known each other for decades, and they also handled my father’s homegoing service. Mom had always said she wanted to be laid to rest in a simple pine box. We were discussing what to put on her tombstone. I had been quiet up to that point, just numb. Mom and Dad were both gone. I was left with such an empty feeling. Grandma Sally had passed when Mom was in her seventies, and I remember Mom saying she now felt like an orphan. I thought that was strange. But now I knew exactly what Mom meant. There was a lot of chatter about what words to use on Mom’s tombstone. I whispered it should simply read: A CHILD OF GOD. Everyone agreed.

She tilts her head to the side after taking a sip of her tea, studying us. “You know, I can’t get over how beautiful you two are together. One of those couples you love to follow on Instagram, you know, the really cute ones that are so sickening in love that you can’t get enough of them.” Way to drop the love bomb, Mom. Jesus. Thankfully Emory doesn’t show any kind of hatred for the term but instead says, “Like Jennifer Lopez and A-Rod?” “Yes,” my mom answers with excitement. “Oh my gosh, I’m obsessed with watching their stories. The little videos they do together, I just can’t get enough of them. J-Rod,” my mom says dreamily. “Oh gosh, what would your couple name be?” She thinks about it for a second. “Emox . . . or Knemory. Oh I love Knemory. Sounds so poetic.” “Knemory does have a nice ring to it,” I add. “I don’t know, what about Emorox?” “Ohhh, that sounds like a name that belongs in The Game of Thrones.” Taking on a more masculine voice, my mom says, “Look out, Jon, Emorox is coming over the hill, with her fire-spitting dragons, Knemory and George.” “George?” Emory laughs out loud, covering her mouth. “Why George?” “Well, look at the names they have in that show? They’re all exotic names you’ve never heard before—Cersei, Gregor, Arya—and then in waltzes good old Jon Snow. It’s only fair that the dragons have a lemon in the bunch as well.” “Uh, Jon is anything but a lemon, Mom,” I defend. “He was raised from the dead.” My mom’s mouth drops, pure and utter shock in her face. “Jon Snow dies?” Shit. Emory elbows my stomach. “Where the hell is your GOT etiquette? You never talk about the facts of the show until the air is cleared about how far someone is in watching. You are one of those people who spoils everything for someone just catching up to the trend.” *Ahem* “I mean . . . uh . . . he doesn’t die.” “You just said he is raised from the dead,” my mom says. Feeling guilty, I reply, “Well, at least he’s still alive, right?” She slumps against the cushion of the couch and mutters, “Unbelievable.” “I’m sorry, Mrs. Gentry, that your son is a barbarian and broke your GOT trust.” Pressing her hand against her forehead, my mom says, “You know, I blame myself. I thought I taught him a shred of decorum, I guess not.” “Don’t blame yourself,” Emory coos. “You did everything right. It comes down to the hooligans he hangs out with. There’s only so much you can control after they leave the nest.” “You’re absolutely right,” my mom agrees and leans across the couch to smack me in the back of the head. “Hey,” I complain while rubbing the sore spot. I look between the two women in my life and I say, “I don’t like this ganging up on me shit.” “You wanted us to get along, right?” Emory asks. “Well, I happen to like your mom, especially since she complimented my bosom.” “Ah, I see.” I continue to look between the two of them. “You’re okay with my mom catching you with your shirt off now, moved past the embarrassment?” Emory’s eyes narrow. “With that kind of attitude, it might be the very last time you see me topless.” My mom raises her fist to the air, as if to say, “Girl Power.” And then she says, “You tell him, Emory. Don’t let him push you around.” “I wasn’t pushing her around—” “You keep that beautiful bosom under lock and key, and if you have a temptation to show anyone, just flash me.” “Mom, do you realize how wrong that is?” “Want to go to the bathroom right now, Mrs. Gentry?” “I would be delighted to.” They both stand but before they can make a move, I pull on Emory’s hand, bringing her back down to my lap. “No way in hell is that happening. Jesus, what is wrong with you?

Follow your dreams, they know the way. Let your own story come out. Put something wonderful in the world that wasn't there before.

I will love you in my own way. I won’t always tell you I love you, but I will always try and show you. I will be there for you whenever you need me. I will gladly lose sleep when you have the urge to talk to me. I want you to talk to me about anything, even if you think it’s silly. Even when you think I wouldn’t care. I will always be there when you need me! I will write you poetry, I will write you little stories. I will tag you on Facebook and Instagram until you get sick of me. I will dream about our future together, distant or near. I will tell everyone about us, everyone who wants to know. I will lift you up when you’re down. I will pick up even the tiniest pieces when you’ve broken down. We will always be having our differences, but all I ask for in return, is for you to love me. Love me on my good days, but on my dark days , too. Pick me up when I’m down. Let me talk to you when I feel the need. Let me cry on your shoulder. Gladly lose sleep when I feel the need to talk to you about anything, because I need to. All you do for me, is what I will do for you. Accept that I don’t have much money. Accept that I’m messy, don’t like cleaning, and we will have the most wonderful life together.

Tell the story of your life with grace and candor. Sharing your wisdom helps others and delivers deep satisfaction.

I have to use my finsta, my fake Instagram account, to see their stories and go unnoticed. I created the extra account for this exact purpose: when I want to thoroughly stalk someone but don’t want to be found out.

You agree that a business may pay Instagram to display your photos in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions without any compensation to you. It certainly sounded like Instagram was going to try to profit off the budding prominence of its photographers and artists. But Krieger and Systrom were just as shocked as the users were.

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.

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.

But Zuckerberg’s word was final. He was working off data that proved that more connections rendered a network exponentially more useful. He chose to prioritize that data, as opposed to the data that showed people in larger networks share less.

He could choose not to be a part of it, but he couldn’t prevent it from happening. “At the end of the day, I sold my company,” Acton underscored. “I sold my users’ privacy to a larger benefit. I made a choice and a compromise. And I live with that every day.

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.

You couldn’t know what someone else saw when logged onto Facebook, what shaped their reality. Some people were selling illegal drugs; some people were getting radicalized by the Islamic State; some people were not people at all, but bots trying to manipulate public conversations. Only Facebook had the power to understand and police it all—and they weren’t. And yet, there was not much legislators could do.

He and Systrom had spoken extensively about using Harvard professor Clayton Christensen’s “jobs to be done” theory of product development, which states that consumers “hire” a product to do a certain task, and that its builders should be thinking about that clear purpose when they build. Facebook was for text, news, and links, for example, and Instagram was for posting visual moments and following interests.

Is Threads a threat to Twitter? Threads on Twitter refer to the ability to connect multiple tweets together in a continuous conversation. By simply replying to one's own tweets, users can create a chain of related messages, providing a coherent and concise narrative. The feature was rolled out to enable users to share longer stories, thoughts, or discussions without having to break them down into individual tweets. Threads also allows longer videos and does not use hashtags, unlike Twitter. The app requires an Instagram account and has gained immense popularity, with millions of users joining within hours of its launch. As Threads continues to evolve, it remains to be seen how Twitter, under Elon Musk’s ownership, will respond to this competition.

FOMO is one of the main reasons why people join other social media platforms. You’ll constantly be prompted to get on Instagram and that can happen with a few clicks once you’re on Facebook. You’ll be notified when your friends are there, and when they post their first story or photo. All that makes you feel like you’re left behind. So you join. You post. You then want more followers. Start using hashtags. Start receiving messages on yet another channel. And add that to your social media rituals that happen a few times daily, which makes the time spent in such activities even longer. So, less attention for anything else, such as spending time with family, learning things, being outside, having hobbies, reading, planning your future, or just enjoying the silence and relaxing.

In 2016, pop icon and actor Selena Gomez posted a photo on Instagram of herself in a dressing room watching The Big Bang Theory on her computer with the caption that read “The one thing that gets me going before anything… Sheldon Cooper—Big Bang Theory.” Molaro saw the post, which sparked an idea. Steve Molaro: After I had heard she liked the show, we approached Selena’s team a couple of times to have her on, but it never worked out due to scheduling reasons, etc. I’m a fan of hers and would have loved to have had her on. I never even got to pitch it to them, but I had kicked around an idea that Amy had been complaining about her awful stepsister and what a bitch she was. Which would be news because we didn’t even know she had one. This, of course, was before we established Amy’s dad and mom were still together. When we meet this stepsister, played by Selena, she’s beautiful and great and everyone loves her and Amy was just being jealous. It never got further than that. It would have been fun if it could have worked

Life gave me its hand, and I grasped it. We’d wasted too many years being estranged.

For years I found it annoying to walk my dog. All she ever wanted to do was sniff the grass and trees upon which other dogs had left their scent. Neither of us got much exercise. It was like tug-of-war to get Snickers to move at all. One day, I saw an Instagram video in which a self-designated dog expert explained that dogs might need the sniffing more than the walking. Their brains light up when they sniff, and it can tire them out when they engage in vigorous sniffing. I had noticed how happy Snickers looked when sniffing, but my brain couldn’t connect the dots because sniffing dog urine sounds inherently unpleasant to my human brain. But to the dog, it was the equivalent of checking her social media. I started naming the trees and shrubs in the park accordingly: Muta (formerly known as Facebark), Twigger, LeafedIn, Instabush, and Treemail. Obviously, the garbage receptacle into which people flung their dog poop bags was TikTok.  Once I understood the importance of sniffing, I reframed my experience this way. Usual Frame: Taking the dog for a walk and failing. Reframe: Taking the dog for a sniff and succeeding. That reframe completely changed my subjective experience. Instead of failing at walking, I was succeeding at being a sniff-assistant. Snickers loved the new arrangement, and sure enough, twenty minutes of outdoor sniffing set her attitude right for the rest of the day.  But then I had a new problem. Standing around holding a leash is boring compared to walking. It’s boring compared to most things. But then I reframed my boredom this way. Usual Frame: I have nothing to do. I am just standing here. Reframe: Perfect time to practice proper breathing and posture. Now I spend twenty minutes a day enjoying the outdoors while breathing properly and practicing my posture. It feels good, which is enough to lock in the new habit. Now I am delighted to take my dog to the park. The only thing that changed was how I thought about the point of it all. If you’re like most people, you spend a lot of time standing in line or waiting for one thing or another. It feels like a gigantic waste of time. Maybe you check your phone, but that probably isn’t as useful as it is anxiety-making. As you can tell from the Snickers story, I found a way to turn all mindless waiting time into one of the most productive parts of my day using the good-time-to-breathe reframe.

While pulling clean drafts together took thousands of hours of work, the stories had all but revealed themselves. Facebook had allowed human trafficking to take place in the Persian Gulf on its platform as long as it occurred through brick-and-mortar businesses. In trying to improve the platform and boost user numbers, it had actually made the site, and the people who used it, angrier. Mental health researchers had concluded “we make body issues worse” and that Instagram was a toxic place for many teen girls, in particular. We divided up the stories among ourselves. Georgia Wells began interviewing young women who had developed eating disorders or body image issues of the sort that Instagram’s researchers worried their product might aggravate. The story she led would cite company documents that found “comparisons on Instagram can change how young women view and describe themselves,” citing research that found 32 percent of teen girls said that “when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.

For a story on Facebook’s failings in developing countries, Newley Purnell and Justin Scheck found a woman who had been trafficked from Kenya to Saudi Arabia, and they were looking into the role Facebook had played in recruiting hit men for Mexican drug lords. That story would reveal that Facebook had failed to effectively shut down the presence of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel on Facebook and Instagram, allowing it to repeatedly post photos of extreme gore, including severed hands and beheadings. Looking into how the platform encouraged anger, Keach Hagey relied on documents showing that political parties in Poland had complained to Facebook that the changes it had made around engagement made them embrace more negative positions. The documents didn’t name the parties; she was trying to figure out which ones. Deepa Seetharaman was working to understand how Facebook’s vaunted AI managed to take down such a tiny percentage—a low single-digit percent, according to the documents Haugen had given me—of hate speech on the platform, including constant failures to identify first-person shooting videos and racist rants.

I would watch an Instagram story

What kind of experience do you want to deliver to your customers? Starbucks wanted to bring the Italian coffee-drinking ritual to customers in the USA and around the world. How do you want to stand out by offering a better experience to your customers? What’s the experience they want to have in every interaction with your brand? Can you craft an experience around how your customers want to feel? Do they want to be delighted, nurtured, listened to, pampered, or something else? How are you going to get them there? How does your customer experience differentiate you from your competitors? Instagram’s simplicity and the fact that social sharing was built into the user interface offered users a different level of engagement with the app than that provided by other photo-sharing apps. How does experiencing your brand, from the first point of contact to the last, make your customers feel? How could you make that experience something that your customers can’t wait to share? Dollar Shave Club customers feel savvy and they want to share the discovery of the secret with their friends.

They are looking for a shortcut. Information, more time, easy payments, or something else. PayPal, lawn mowing, TripAdvisor. They want to feel more connected to the group, to belong. Instagram, live events, Startup weekend, book clubs. It works. Think Dropbox, WordPress, Amazon, FedEx. It makes their lives easier. Fruit smoothies, online groceries, Thermomix. It gives them a story to tell. A Tiffany & Co. bracelet, dinner at Jamie’s Italian restaurant, Christian Louboutin red-soled shoes. They need a solution to a problem. Online dating, personal training, gluten-free bread. It helps them get from where they are to where they want to be. Gym membership, consulting services, design. They like what you stand for. Whole Foods Markets, Method cleaning products, Patagonia outdoor wear. Their friends are doing it, too. Facebook, dinner at a new restaurant, Jägerbomb cocktails. This is why great brands become a part of the customer’s story, and customers in turn help to shape the brand’s story.

Way up in the mountains Sea level too far to be seen The clouds mask civilization below People replaced by a sea of green. Peace falls down from heaven In the form of a cleansing rain The trees could tell endless stories If you knew how to hear what they’re saying. An ocean of gray spills out below Walk on it if you dare to drown Its tendrils reach out and the waves crash But it all happens without a sound. Above the clouds, below the stars No money here, but endless wealth Inward is the hardest adventure of all Come above the clouds and find yourself.

It took thirty-eight years before 50 million people gained access to radios. It took television thirteen years to earn an audience that size. It took Instagram a year and a half. With

Snapchat has a lot less social pressure attached to it compared to every other popular social media network out there. This is what makes it so addicting and liberating. If I don’t get any likes on my Instagram photo or Facebook post within 15 minutes you can sure bet I'll delete it. Snapchat isn't like that at all and really focuses on creating the Story of a day in your life, not some filtered/altered/handpicked highlight. It’s the real you.

long before reality TV and Facebook or Instagram — media analyst Neil Postman ominously warned, “When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; [and] culture-death is a clear possibility.

The Internet has allowed for a kind of closeness without intimacy, a way of claiming a friendship without really knowing much about a person at all. Do you still know someone because you like each other’s posts? It’s the Internet’s magic word: connect. Any social media megalodon cites connection as the single best outcome of the digital age. And yeah, I love that I can talk to anyone at any time. I like that I know where my elementary school best friend is working these days, that I can see what my cousin wore to her junior prom. But social media lets you take for granted the people you see every day. It permits a newfound laziness in friendships. I saw your pic on Instagram, liked it. Task complete.

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.

The iPhone untethered the internet from the desktop. The energy of the blogosphere was redirected toward faster, mobile mediums. Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram facilitated the transition to mobile. These sites had learned from Facebook’s streamlined profiles and easy feeds. But they diverged from Facebook’s friend-focused model, favoring an open network that allowed users to “follow” anyone they found interesting. This mirrored the subscriber-based model of YouTube as well as the open architecture of the blogosphere. Instead of trying to re-create real-world friend networks online, this new generation of social apps sought to build an audience of friends and strangers alike. At the same time, they took the lessons of the blog era—chiefly, that anyone could build a following online—and expanded upon them.

I did this partially because Matthew is the kind of person for whom the internet is simply a utility: a font of information and nothing more. He has the supernatural ability to look at his phone only when he needs to, and the idea of posting something about his life on the internet in a way that strangers can view is a concept he cannot grasp. So yes, I was partially trying to respect his privacy, but I was mostly trying to protect myself. From the judgment of others, which was primarily just a projection of my own self-judgment. There was a version of me that thought loving another person would somehow diminish the love I still felt for Aaron. A version of me that thought that if I was happy, I must not be sad anymore, and if I wasn’t sad anymore, then I guess I didn’t love Aaron as much as I said I did. Or maybe that my new happiness was ill-gotten, a well-made fake, something I swiped off the back of a truck when nobody was looking. This is what life looks like when you water the seeds of joy with guilt and shame. It feels as good as it sounds. When bad things happen to you—a death, an illness, a divorce, a job loss—you quickly go from being a person to being just a sad story. I know from experience that nobody wants to be a sad story, and that no matter what you’ve been through, your story is always so much more than just sad. And your happy stories are more than just happy. Obviously, everything is more complicated than it appears on Instagram. But it is incredibly difficult to live with complicated. It is even more difficult for other people to deal with complicated.

I thought you didn’t want to be a wallflower,” he says. And that’s it. I explode into a million embarrassed pieces. I bury myself underneath the vineyard to be remembered forever, I— “I like your list,” he says, breaking me out of my thoughts of complete and utter mortification. “Don’t—don’t you dare tell anyone about it!” He frowns as if I’ve said something stupid. No way. Is it too late? Has he posted an Instagram Story about my list, laughing about the weird things his once-childhood best friend does? Then he says, “Why would I do that?” As if it’s simple. As if he hasn’t spent the last five years ignoring my existence. As if he has some sort of loyalty to me, though I know he never did. We were friends once upon a time, like a twisted fairy tale, until it was more convenient to drop me and focus on CharmWorks instead. To be liked and popular, to become somebody who people remember at school, to no longer be invisible.

In other words, not all networked products experience context collapse as rapidly as others. When users are able to group themselves, they prove particularly resilient. Facebook Groups provide separate smaller and more disjointed spaces away from the main newsfeed, as do Snap Stories as a complement to the app’s 1:1 photo messaging features—both provide a network within a network that can hold its own context. Instagram’s usage patterns include “finstas”—secondary and tertiary accounts—where different content can be shared. Each has different sets of followers attached to them, so that photos can be posted away from the prying eyes of parents and bosses.

Today, Facebook is still the most dominant social network in the world, with more than 2.8 billion users across several social and messaging apps, and the primary driver of its revenue growth is Instagram. Analysts would later say that approving the acquisition was the greatest regulatory failure of the decade.10 Even Chris Hughes, one of the cofounders of Facebook, would in 2019 call for the deal to be undone. “Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American,”11 he wrote in the New York Times.