Kevin Systrom, one of the founders Instagram In a new episode of the On with Kara Swisher podcast, he said the app had “lost its soul.” He said on the show that Instagram was originally designed for family and friends to share their photos, but now it’s being used to make money.
As Insider reports, Systrom said on the show that she used to go to Instagram to see what her friends and family were up to, but since then, the app has become a commercial machine where content creators and brands are making money. . In this program, he mentioned the commercialization of Instagram as his biggest regret.
Instagram’s problem: commercialization
According to the founder of Instagram, the problem is that the motivations of this social network are moving towards more commercialization, more content producers, more deals and more advertising dollars, which can have unwanted social consequences.
This, he said, “focuses Instagram’s core energy on people who live seemingly amazing lives, do the coolest things, look the best, and wear the coolest clothes.” According to him, this creates a “terrible dynamic” where Instagram users think the shots they see on the app are people’s real lives.
He has even come across these Instagram changes in his personal feed. According to Systrom, she has friends who used to upload pictures of their daily lives and now just post ads. “To me, this Instagram is not the same Instagram that we started,” Systrom said.
Finally, he mentioned the BeReal app as a suitable alternative where users can be themselves and share their real moments with others.
Systrom made his comments about Instagram nearly five years after he left the company in 2018. He left the company due to tensions with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and sold it to Meta (then Facebook) in 2012 for $1 billion. Systrom is now the co-founder of Artifact, an AI-powered news app that launched earlier this year.
