8. Instagram's Vishal Shah

Geek Out with Matt Navarra is sponsored by Pinterest. Inspire your audience and grow your company on Pinterest with a free business account. Learn more at business.pinterest.com. It's time to geek out. Hello and welcome to Geek Out with Matt Navarra, sponsored by Pinterest. I am Matt Navarra.

And I'm Martin SFP Bryant. Now, one of the platforms we talk about most on this show is Instagram. So this week we're delighted to be joined by someone who is better placed than most to give us an insider's view.

That is right. I'm very excited. It's Vishal Shah, who's Instagram's head of product, and we've got loads of questions to put to him shortly. And I think there's even some from people who've listened to last week's show knowing he was coming on. So don't forget, you can always get in touch with us on Twitter. You can find me there as @MattNavarra.

And I'm @MartinSFP. So Matt, what have you been up to this week?

It's been a weird a weird week this week. It's a funny, funny one. Um, so I've started off the week with a— my kids wanted me to get an Xbox. They've been pestering me for ages, and I was like resisting because I'm conscious that the Xbox is now at the end of its life cycle and they're going to replace it shortly. And I thought, this is not a good tech investment. I was too geeky about it. I wasn't thinking kids. So I, I gave in and I got myself, uh, one of the Xboxes, and, uh, it's been good. So that's great. I also started watching Mr. Robot finally. It was something that I remember when I was at South by, uh, a good few years ago, and they had an activation going on when they launched the show and I thought it might be my cup of tea, but somehow for 2 years or however long it's been out, I haven't managed to get down to doing it.

Yeah, that was freaky, wasn't it? A few years ago, I think they had like a big Mr. Robot fairground, didn't they? The year before, it might have been, um, when they first were launching the first season, they had these weird guys in black hoodies walking around the streets of Austin with that, with very little explanation. And that was really— that's a bit freaky, that.

It was. Well, I, I keep on meaning to watch it and someone suggested it to me last week that, you know, have you watched it yet? And I thought, oh yes, I'm gonna watch it. And I've watched the first 2 or 3 episodes of season 1. So I'm way behind the world on this, um, and very much enjoying it. So that was good. Uh, and then I did some tweets this week that kind of went nuts because I tweeted about the change in the— or the feature that might be coming soon that we discussed in the last episode of the podcast for Twitter, where they're looking at controlling— you can set controls over who can see your tweets and who can reply— sorry, who can reply to your tweets. Um, and that tweet ended up going out and getting sort of tens of thousands of likes and comments and things. So it's destroyed my Twitter notifications thread. It still doesn't work with the ability to filter verified It didn't help at all.

Oh, the pains of being popular.

I know. Well, I wish I had more of those tweets, because they're fun, but they also destroy your notifications box. But in terms of another weird thing, Mark Zuckerberg replied to me, which was a curious one. So I say Mark Zuckerberg. I think we all in the geek circle know that it's not probably him that's doing this. His team have been responding on behalf of him on his account. But I was asking him about his thread, or post he did last week around the future of Facebook and its responsibilities and his plans for the next year. And things. And I sort of suggested how could he be thinking about the future and dealing with the future stuff that they want to develop and innovate when they've still got a lot of problems that are existing from tech that they've released in the previous 10 years that they've yet to find solutions to, or they're still causing problems. So he responded. And then of course Facebook was then pretty much unusable for notifications anyway for a good 3 or 4 days. But, um, but yeah, it was a busy week. How about you?

Uh, well, um, the couple of things that were probably the most, uh, interesting, uh, and fun were, um, I did a bit of media interview work. So I was on BBC Breakfast talking about Windows 7 and Microsoft ending support for that. So if you've got Windows 7, you're out of luck if you get any bugs or anything. And so I was doing an explainer on that. And normally if you're on breakfast TV, you have to wait in the morning for a taxi at an ungodly hour of the morning. And then you get in there early and they put makeup on and you go and do it live. And then for the rest of the day, you've got this lovely sheen of makeup on your face. And it's actually really, really nice. It helps you feel a bit more confident about the day. I tell you what, on that point, Quick funny story.

I should say I did exactly the same as you did with a BBC Breakfast thing where I was in Manchester, up in your neck of the woods. And I got into the first time I'd ever done it. They did all the whole hair and makeup things. It was all quite fun and exciting, but at the same time a bit kind of weird. And then I got straight out of the studio and I had to get back on the train to come back here to Bristol and Cardiff area. And throughout my train journey, 3 or 4 different people I'd never met just stopped me and just said, 'You've got amazing eyes. You've got really lovely eyes, you know that?' And I was like, 'Oh, thank you very much.' I thought, 'This is a train in the Northern The customers really are very friendly. And then suddenly, um, I went through and I went to the bathroom on the train and I looked in there, I was like, oh, and I looked like I had so much makeup on, but you could still look like my eyes were just popping with the color of the blue against the sheen color of the makeup. So that was my makeup story.

But so it's much more convenient to do what I did this week, which is go in in the afternoon and pre-record an interview, which was really nice and, uh, civilized, except they don't put makeup on. So I, I saw myself on TV. This is very vain, but I saw myself on TV, I look really rough. But, uh, there we go. And I did actually encourage somebody who saw it who was on Windows Vista still, in a Windows Vista computer. I managed to convince them to, to get a Chromebook actually. So there you go. And then the other thing I did was I did a radio interview where I think I probably accidentally set off a load of Amazon Echos by giving an Alexa command as an example on the radio after I said, I'm not going to do this because it will set off all your Alexas. I then completely accidentally set off an Alexa command and who knows what happened, but hopefully nothing bad happened.

You should have gone rogue and done something like, Alexa, find me, and then something really X-rated. And then people with children would then go like, no, stop, Alexa, stop, stop.

We're going to have to edit this because you just said, find me something X-rated. And who knows what people's Echos will do if they're listening to the podcast.

Oh, damn. Sorry about that. So what's been going on in the news this week, Martin? What have you got for us?

Okay, well, our first story might sound familiar because it's a story that is as old as the Oldest social media news story you can imagine. Um, Twitter's Jack Dorsey on the edit button: will probably never do it, he says. Yes, he's done a video Q&A with Wired, and one of the questions he was asked was inevitably about the edit button, and he was talking about it, and he basically said, will never do it. But he was— it will probably never do it. So there's still— if you're an edit button fan, there's still a chance. He said probably, not certainly. But to me, it just feels like, make your mind up, don't you think?

Yeah, well, they're just— they're leaving that little door open partly for fun, I guess, but also because, you know, they never want to say anything concrete about something that could change, of course, like that, which, um, you know, they may change their minds on it. But for me, I'm overall, I'm pretty happy with that because I don't particularly like the idea of having a full-scale edit tweet button. I could probably tolerate and understand the value of a typo correction thing, um, but, um, but I did take great glee yesterday when tweeting out that it was basically dead and it is never going to happen. That was one of my favorite moments this week. What else is happening?

So TikTok, uh, has something that might change the feel of the app a little bit. They're exploring the idea of a curated content feed to lure advertisers. So this was a story from the Financial Times. So basically the higher quality stuff from creators, but also stuff from brands would have its own dedicated feed with the idea being that if you're an advertiser, you don't want to be in the main algorithmic feed of TikTok because you don't know what you might end up advertising next to. So if you're in a high quality, this is the handpicked stuff kind of feed, then you're more likely to want to spend big bucks with TikTok. Do you think this is a good idea, Matt?

Um, I think it's a natural progression. I can imagine that's where it would think it would— it would go, or wants to go, and why other people would assume that's the way it would go. And given that, you know, Snapchat has gone through that life cycle and explored that as well, and, and it, it makes sense in so many ways that I can't see it not happening really. Um, and it's just a case really, is it gonna have like little mini shows that they're going to produce? Are they going to outsource it to others? Um, how much, you know, that cut they're gonna give on those. And then all the questions about what sort of content will actually be handpicked and some of it, will it be using the algorithm combined with some curation? Who knows? But, um, but yeah, no, very interesting one, but one that I think is a natural progression that was inevitable.

Yeah. TikTok growing up a little bit, I think there. We, uh, also heard the news this week of a Facebook bug that's exposed the anonymous admins of pages. So this was a bug that was discovered and it was being shared around on a lot on places like 4chan where people had discovered that you could find out who was the admin, the anonymous admin of a page. And so that meant you could see who the admin was for, say, celebrities' pages. But there's also potentially problems around maybe more, you know, where there were maybe admins of groups, of pages where, you know, they didn't want any kind of publicity for maybe safety reasons and they were maybe getting exposed. It was fixed quickly, but what did you make of this, Matt?

Well, I was, when I saw the list of names of accounts that had gone around 4chan and so say revealing some of the page admins, first name that stuck out to me, being from Bristol myself, was, was Banksy. And I was thinking, oh, is there something in there? It's not going to be him, but maybe there's something in there that's kind of like leads us to the mystery of, of Banksy. But, uh, no, it was some guy with a very, um, normal regular name. I have no idea that was in New York, so it doesn't really have much.

If only it was 3D from Massive Attack.

I just think all this old stuff, you know, it could have been worse. It could have been a lot worse given what Facebook's been up to over the years and what they've been accused of and what they have been doing. Um, but at the same time, if In all seriousness, yeah, that could have been a problem for certain people. And I'm sure the people that's had themselves in the news— I think Greta Thunberg was one of them— can't appreciate Facebook's efforts here at all, really.

Yeah, well, I think it's a reminder that anything on the internet is liable to being exposed unexpectedly, and anything private we put up online has that risk attached to it.

Exactly. Good words.

We'll be speaking to Instagram's head of product, Vishal Shah, in just a moment.

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So our guest this week is in charge of a product that is many people's favorite social media tool and product. So it's— his job must be fascinating, full of interesting challenges. And I'm very excited to be able to introduce Vishal Shah, Instagram's Head of Product.

Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

No worries. We've been trying to get somebody from Instagram to come on. We've had so many questions through the Facebook group about it and, uh, and other places. So it's great now to finally be able to chat to you a bit about what you do and, and how you do it. And I think that the first question is probably most useful to our audience is what is a head of product and what does it do at, at Instagram anyway?

Well, that's a, that's a really good question. Uh, cuz I think that, that job has really evolved as the platform has evolved. So I actually joined Instagram about 5 years ago, uh, to help build the ads business, uh, on the product side. So I have a background in, in programmatic advertising. I spent 10 years, uh, at a startup, mostly on the engineering side before coming here. And I, I came to Instagram to think about how to build an ads business that put people first and advertisers second. And to think about if we took a longer-term view and what it meant to value what we're— the value we're creating for advertisers, but really thinking about the experience that people are having, could we build a better, uh, online advertising platform? And by using the infrastructure that we had here at Facebook and thinking about all the leverage we get there, uh, but thinking about how that applies to the Instagram ecosystem was a really interesting opportunity kind of to think about. But At the time, we were less than a couple hundred people at Instagram. The product team was relatively small. And so really, it was about making sure we're making those individual day-to-day decisions. Now, at our scale of a billion-plus people using Instagram, thinking about how we keep the app simple while we build, while we think about how to empower engineers and product designers and researchers and data scientists to think about how best to do their job, my role now is to think about, how to best set the organization up for success to make the decisions that stay true to our values of simplicity and craft and putting people first, uh, but not actually being involved in every single product decision because that, uh, simply wouldn't scale, uh, at the, at the scale we are today.

I can imagine. And I, and I guess what would be interesting for me as well is, is how does that role fit in with where, where Adam, who's, you know, in charge of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, where does that sort of fit and how, what, what's your kind of interaction on a kind of day-to-day, week-to-week basis with him?

Well, we certainly, uh, have to work very closely together. Adam, you know, his responsibility is to think about Instagram as a whole. Now, we are a product-driven organization, so much of what we talk about and discuss are things about product and strategy. But Adam also thinks about the business holistically and our teams internationally and the work we do to support the ecosystem even outside of the product. And so while certainly we have to be very aligned on the type of product strategic investments that we're going to be making, some of our bigger bets and where they might be heading, he He also relies on me to help think about the direction of the product, to execute on it, but also think about the health of the team. Uh, and I think so much of running an organization at scale is, uh, ensuring people are getting the support they need, both from a career and mentorship perspective, but also thinking about new opportunities for people, maybe even in different locations as we expand, you know, outside of just California from a development perspective, which we can, we can certainly talk about. Uh, so it's about thinking about the organization, the health of the organization, in addition to the, the strategy around the product.

Got you. And I guess more importantly, who does the best Instagram Stories, you or Adam? Who's winning on that front at the moment?

I mean, you know, it's really not a comparison. Adam tries his best, but I have to say I have the upper hand on that one.

You do? Yeah, you know, Adam's getting good though. His game's going good at the moment, so he's pretty cool. Yeah, it's fine.

It's fine. Yeah, so we're at the start of a new year, and what are your product priorities for the year ahead?

It's a good time to reflect. You know, at the beginning of the year, it's thinking about what happened the previous year. I think it was a big year of change for Instagram. For a variety of reasons, new leadership team, thinking about the, you know, scale at which we're operating, how we think about the responsibilities we have in terms of building for a community of a billion. So we have 4 priority areas, and I'll give you a quick synopsis of each of them, and then we're happy to go into any more detail as it makes sense. So first and foremost, we think about how we can keep the platform a place that is safe for people, where they feel supported, where they feel safe to express themselves, because we believe the heart of Instagram is expression. And if people cannot cannot express themselves in a comfortable, safe way, then the sort of core of the platform is really at risk. And so, so much of the work we do is both on the sort of, let's call it defensive side, which is making sure we keep content that is against our policies, for example, off the platform, but also thinking about the more offensive work that we're doing, for example, to fight online bullying and to think about the mental health of people using our platform. So there's a lot of work there around safety and wellbeing. The second area for us is helping people people connect with the people that they love. And so if the heart of Instagram is expression, you would love— when you come to Instagram, the reason you open the platform on a regular basis is because you want to know what your closest friends are up to, what your family is up to. And, you know, that evolves with your age group. Maybe when you're a little bit younger, it's about your friends at school, it's the people you spend time with at school. Um, but maybe as you get older, it's your, it's your family, it's the people you live with. And so that— there's an evolution there, certainly, in terms of the people that people care the most about. But if you come to Instagram and you aren't able to really deeply understand and, and feel connected to the people you care about, then the product is not as retentive. Um, but once we do have people coming to Instagram for that core use case, they stay, uh, to connect with their interests. And that's really, uh, the third area of priority for us, which is, you know, how do you, uh, connect with that business or that creator, or how do you shop from them, or how do you think about the, the long-form video that they're creating? And so a lot of the more recent experiences that we've built, not just in our, in our new investments, but even in things like Search and Explore, really thinking about going deep with, with your interests across Instagram. And as a platform that's visual in nature and has an asymmetric follow graph, you know, that's a really natural place for interests to live. And we're seeing that not only something that we need to invest in more, but really a cornerstone of how people think of, of the platform. And the last one is really about helping people people turn their passion or their hobby or their interest into a business and to make a living, uh, on the platform. And that, I call that out as a specific priority because it's not just the business that we're building, uh, in terms of what we're doing in, in ads, but helping small businesses, helping creators, you know, really embracing the secular shift that we're seeing from big organizations with lots of, of tools at their disposal to the individual, you know, hobbyist in their garage who has a, a thing that they care about and can turn that passion, turn that excitement, uh, into, into a living for themselves.

It's such a, such a complicated product, not in a bad way, but it's such an evolved product. Now, if you think about back to the days of a simple photo sharing app 10 years ago, and now you've got this, this enormously well-developed platform, and sometimes I think it's, it's, it's easy to forget just how much there is packed into that app.

Yeah, that is, that is a really good observation, but also a bit by design. So I mentioned earlier our values, and I'll come back to them as we talk, because it's so central central to how we build. So one of those values is, um, simplicity. And there's a couple of different ways to look at simplicity. One is we believe very strongly that Instagram should feel like one product, not a series of products stitched together into a container, which means that we will often make product decisions that are actually suboptimal for any one product, but the right decision for Instagram as a whole, because we value how the whole thing feels, uh, whether that's from a design systems perspective or even from a feature perspective. So there's a lot of thought that goes into making sure that the the whole app feels cohesive. But the second is, as we're adding new use cases, new reasons for people to use Instagram, we have to stay true to the core. And as I mentioned before, the core is expression. It's about connecting with the people you care the most about. And we will make sure that that stays front and center in the experience, whether that's in, in feed or in stories or in some of the sharing flows. That has to be at the center of what people do. But then if the additional experience that people then come to Instagram for, whether that's video or shopping or interests, are things that they would like to opt into, We would want to make that easy for them to get to, but we don't want that to dominate the experience if that's not what they want, which I know is a very subtle kind of line that we're trying to weave, but is a really important part of how we think about building the app as a whole.

And how do you make the decision on what stays as part of the app as the main part of the core Instagram experience and what you siphon off into its own separate app? That decision of whether you have a pro— you know, just a messaging app, which I know you've experimented with and withdrawn, and now you're experimenting in direct messages and things on the web. You know, how do you choose to keep in the app or to create a new one?

Well, so I think there's two different— two different considerations. One is inside the main app, how do you think about the core experience, the thing that people spend the majority of their time using because it is what the app opens to, right? The fact that it opens to your home experience, which is feed and stories, sort of sets the tone for what the app is for. And then where do we think about things that go into the Explore tab or into search? You know, there's some considerations there about simplicity and making sure that that feels really easy. But we want to make sure that that core home experience feels, um, really cohesive. Then there's the question of, as you mentioned, separate apps, which I think, um, uh, it's kind of this interesting evolution, I think, for how people think about apps, where, you know, apps are very much like Spaces and people associate jobs, use cases, things that they do with a Space. You know, you go to an office, you go to a restaurant, you go to a bar, and there's a set of norms associated with those Spaces. There's the mental kind of expectation of what you get when you go into that space. Um, and so that's like the, the sort of physical equivalent, but there's also the, the physics of a separate app on a phone. Uh, if you're sending a lot of push notifications, uh, from one app that is now maybe in contrast with how people tend to think about that app, for example, with messaging, you really wanna make sure that you can reach someone. And so push messaging and push notifications are incredibly important. Um, but if you take something like Threads, which is our, our standalone app that, uh, we are, we are testing for messaging. You know that when you get a push notification from Threads, it is going to be from one of your close friends. And so, you know, when you see that push notification, that it is from someone that you have determined is important to you. And it's actually, if you think about it from that perspective, the only messaging app that you get to decide who gets to reach you because it sits on top of the Instagram network. All of the reachability and findability behavior exists on the core app, but the, the sort of siphoned off messaging experience that's limited to your close friends gets to play in this very separate space, which when you go back to the, the space analogy means that when you open it, you kind of know what you're gonna get.

And, and where, how is Threads doing? And what can you tell us about that at the moment? Because I, I think people know, or some people know that it's out there and it's being tested and the basics of how it works. But can you give us any update on that?

It's, it's going well in the sense that, you know, we put apps out there sometimes to learn about how people use them and, and we take different approaches. In some cases we will market them very heavily and, and want to get as many people using it as possible, 'cause that's what matters. With Threads, we actually took a different approach. We haven't done a lot of proactive marketing or even, you know, upsells inside the product to get people to try it. And we're really trying to understand for the people who do find it, who do use it, how they're using it. And so while it's a little bit too early to give any definitive, you know, data on that, we're pleased to see where things are going because it's really focused on these three areas that we were trying to differentiate Threads on. One of which I just talked about, around close friends and having that sense of control over who shows up in that space. The other is around really fast and quick performance and the idea of the app being very simple, that it is very kind of devoid of clutter, not just from an experience perspective, but even from an app performance perspective. We wanted it to open very quickly, to get to the camera very quickly. And the team actually spent a lot of time working on the underlying infrastructure for the camera to make sure that it can open as quickly as possible. And the third is kind of a newer area that we're exploring, which which is, how do you think about— if it's a place for your closest friends, what are the types of things that would inspire a conversation? And that's where you've seen some of the work we've done in status, which is, is it helpful to know that a friend of yours is traveling or even outside of their home or that their phone is charging? And so you might know that they're not reachable right now because they're probably not with their device. There's things like that that we're trying to understand. What are ways in which— again, because it's limited to your closest friends, What are the types of things that are a bit more asynchronous but would inspire a conversation? Those are the types of things that we're, that we're really excited about to learn more about how people use Threads.

I got this vision, or I met the view, guys in a room and having all the data and all the things about what people's been testing and what things you've been trying out to see what works. And having you on one side of the table and a team of other people battling it and saying, that one's dead, we're gonna kill that feature. Does it come to it in the end where you kind of, there is kind of some tough decisions and is about kind of getting a majority consensus? How do you kind of come to that final decision? Decision?

Yeah, I think there's no sort of set rule for that. Certainly, there are conversations around what is in and what's out. And some of it, frankly, is subjective. There is this sense of what it means to make a call on something. And maybe you don't have perfect data. If you have perfect data, then maybe you waited too long to make a decision. But also just where strategically we're heading. Here's the fun thing. I feel like you sort of started the podcast with how interesting could this job be, thinking about Instagram as a whole. And I feel very lucky to have surrounded myself with really incredible product thinkers who get to explore in these spaces and ensure that we are building towards value for people. And we might make decisions to, you know, shut something down, not because it wasn't useful, but actually is detracting from a value perspective. So, you know, we've been really diligent in this last year about kicking off something that I call unship, which is very counterintuitive, especially especially for, for people who, who are, you know, used to technology companies just always shipping new things. It's very easy for an engineer or for a product manager or for designer to celebrate shipping a product into a, into the world. It is not very common to celebrate unshipping something and knowing that by removing a feature or a product, you're actually making the overall experience better. And we're trying to set a culture where that is celebrated just as much as shipping the thing in the first place. Um, and again, back to the idea of keeping Instagram really simple and, and we've done a few of those, you know, this year, but I wanted to sort of make sure that that was clear as the And the reason we do that is because we value the simplicity of the product so much that we want to celebrate unshipped just as much as shipping in the first place.

And does it make any difference if there's millions of your users that are out there saying that they really want something changed on Instagram? It's driving them nuts. And they're really fed up with it and stuff. Does that kind of sway on any of your decision-making in this process?

Well, I mean, I'd be— I think I'd be lying if I said that we don't listen to all kinds of feedback, whether that's individual research that we do with people. I mean, we certainly read the media. I've listened to your podcast. And I know you guys have chatted about Instagram a fair amount. That's important input into the process, but, uh, that's just one of the factors that we think about. So as an example, uh, we recently unshipped, uh, the following tab inside the activity feed. I know you guys actually discussed this on the podcast a couple of months ago. Um, and we did that for a few reasons. One, uh, it was, while it was used by, you know, an, it was not an insignificant percentage of, of our pop, of the, of the user base. The, the research we had done and the reason people were using it was for two reasons. One was to discover new accounts and to find new places, uh, of Instagram that they maybe didn't know about. And given that the Following tab was launched almost 9 years ago, there's a lot of work that we've done to improve that use case in places like Search and Explore and in some of our recommendation surfaces that we think are far more personalized and do a better job of account discovery. But the second is that people were using it to sort of see what their friends were up to or doing, or even with people they didn't know directly, but the, you know, the creators and the public figures that they followed. And lots of people didn't know that their consumption behavior, their likes, their comments, their follows were being surfaced in this way. And so it was both a simplicity win to remove something that was not used by a lot of people, but also aligned with the safety and kind of comfort that we want to make sure that people on Instagram have, where it doesn't feel like your behavior is always on display and that you have to worry about liking something and that someone coming and figuring out what you've liked. And so there's a lot of different drivers here. You know, we try to keep a balance between what we hear, but also know that sometimes what you hear is what people want you to hear, not necessarily what their underlying kind of core motivation is. And I'm sure you have some examples of questions like that that we can also talk about.

Yeah, I will do. I've got a couple of things at the end I'll come back to. We've got some audience listeners have wanted to ask you some things. So we'll jump into some of those. But talking about removing things, it's one of the things that everyone's been talking about in the last few months with Instagram or about Instagram is the removal of the like counter and and how that's been played out in terms of it's been tested in various countries and it's still being tested. And I think I saw an Instagram story from Adam saying something along the lines of you're hoping later this year to roll it out, or something along those lines, which suggested maybe that it seems likely that it will be rolled out permanently globally. Can you give us an update on where it is and what's it changed about how people are using the app?

Yeah, absolutely. I'm personally very excited about this work. And I know Adam is too. Actually, interestingly, the origin story of this entire effort is also great because a lot of times these efforts are a more tops-down decision, a decision that Adam has made or something that I've made. But actually, this one came from the team that works on interactions in feed. So this team is incentivized to try to drive more likes, more comments. But in all of their user research, they heard so loud and clear that people felt like the public like count was a very high area of pressure for them when they produced content on Instagram. And if you think of the core of the platform being about expression and getting people to share with the people they care the most about, the art or the sort of the act of expression itself is what we cared about, not the validation or perceived validation that a public like count gets people. Now, in 2010, when we launched, it made made sense from a norms perspective to say when you put something out there, the way you know that people are seeing it is through something like a, like a like count. Uh, that was sort of the norm at the time. But what we've seen since 2016 with, with Stories is that these public, uh, kind of engagement metrics that are shared are, are not the things that drive behavior. It's about, you know, private interactions. It's about conversations in direct. It's about the act of sharing in and of itself. And so we learned a lot from that, uh, inside of Stories. And then also said, if people were deleting the stuff that they posted to feed because they felt like they were competing with themselves, they were competing with public figures and celebrities and influencers that they felt they could never be on an even playing field. We thought this was one of the most effective ways to even that playing field and to remove some of that pressure of performing. And the reason that this is taking us some time to ship broadly is this is a big change. It's probably the biggest sort of, uh, you know, smallest number of pixels to biggest ecosystem change that I think you could, you could probably think about. And so we want to make sure we're doing it right and we understand the, the not just the short-term but the long-term implications, understanding, uh, the sentiment that people have as they, as they use this product. And we have it out in, in many countries to, to really do that, um, but to also make sure we're doing, we're doing it responsibly. But I, I want to end that section by saying we know, we knew going into this that we would likely have to trade off some amount of engagement engagement to do this work. And we are very comfortable doing that if, in the end, it makes people more comfortable expressing themselves and sharing on Instagram.

And can we expect to see that rolling out globally? Or is that still not really a decision that's been made yet, do you think?

It's not a decision that's explicitly been made yet. But we are working very hard to get this out and to really understand the implications. And as I mentioned, Adam and I are both very excited about what this could mean for the platform. And the research and the anecdotes that we've heard sort of support why the motivations behind why we built it. So I wish I could commit to you today on a timeframe, but know that we're excited about it. Know that we continue to push on it because we think it's really important.

Martin?

Yeah, how do you— if we look at something like hiding like counts, how do you significantly change a platform like that without killing the soul of the platform, if you get what I mean? Because users are very sensitive to changes. And if the feel of the app is changed, even just slightly, it can really have an impact on how people use the app, how they really enjoy it. How do you go about that?

Look, I would argue that the soul of Instagram is about expression and sharing, not about the public validation that a like might give you. That being said, the reason we are taking our time to understand the implications of this is you don't run a test for a month and figure out what the effects of something like this are. You do have to run this for a longer period of time to really understand not just what happens in the short term. Like most product changes that you make, you'll get some change in behavior in the very short term. Sometimes it will regress back to where it was before. Sometimes it will actually reverse. Um, but oftentimes you really won't understand the, the long-term implications for some time. And so it takes a while for an individual to have this, uh, you know, feature in their hand for that, for their behaviors to actually change, um, in, in one way or the other. So that's one of the reasons it just takes that amount of time to, to do it. Um, but I think the, the, the deeper question that you've asked there is just because a product has worked a certain way for a period of time doesn't mean we we shouldn't ask ourselves whether that's the right behavior now. And, you know, there's been a series of those things over the course of Instagram's history. You know, when I first got here in 2015, one of the very first things we worked on was changing the restriction on square photos. And if you ask someone in 2000, even in early 2015, if you can imagine Instagram without square photos, they would say, that's so core to the identity of what the platform is, how could you change that? But in reality, more than 20% of media uploaded to Instagram Instagram had some form of manual letterboxing that people were doing. And so they were already getting around this, this constraint when really they wanted to express a moment. And if they had something that they wanted to share that was wider or taller, they were figuring out a way to make that fit in the square. That didn't feel like it was staying true to the soul of the platform, which was about expression. And so there's a series of things I think over the course of our history that is maybe some would call sacred cows that we've gone back and revisited and we're not afraid. I'm very proud of the fact that we're not afraid to revisit some of those really what feel like core things if they're the right decisions going forward.

So DMs coming to the web. So this is something that's come out this week that Instagram is going to be testing with a small subset of users, the ability to use the messaging features and functionality on desktop version of Instagram. Why now?

This is one of those— I wish we could do everything as quickly as we wanted to. But we have— we had to prioritize some of the work that we do. And this is something that's been on our radar for for a little while. I think two things to say here. One is I don't consider the desktop version of Instagram to be the primary way that people will use Instagram. I think the primary job of Instagram is about expression. It's about personal expression, which means it's, it's mobile. It's very personal. It's about when you're out and about, but also when you're home and you have something to share. Um, and so I think of the desktop experience as a secondary interface for Instagram, which is sometimes there are something there are things that are just easier done on a desktop, which, for example, when you're messaging and you're typing a decent amount, and I know for those of us that use the product a lot, it's sometimes a difficult thing to have to switch to your phone when you're typing quite a bit. And so we think of this as it's not necessarily going to be the primary way that everyone uses direct messaging, but there's enough, whether it's you call it a power user behavior or people who use direct messaging a lot, where I think this could be very helpful for people who use the platform. And our desktop experience over time Instagram has gotten, gotten more feature-rich. And by no means do I expect it to be a replacement for mobile, but I do think it solves some needs for reporters, for journalists, for businesses, for creators. And I think it can be very, very valuable when you have the volume of messaging that you do on a platform like ours.

So Mark Zuckerberg has stated his aim of integrating the backend of all of Facebook's own messaging and products, and it wants to make it possible for users to message a friend on WhatsApp from within Instagram and vice versa, and many other benefits is outlined, and it enables enables Facebook also, I guess, to compete more with rivals such as iMessages as well, which is much more kind of like that. And so how is that project progressing? And what can users expect to see visually when they're using these messaging apps in the year ahead when this is completed?

Yeah, I think it's important here to start in the motivations and what we're trying to achieve and why we kicked this off in the first place. So maybe think to your own experience. And so I can describe a bit of mine as an example, but, you know, I have, you know, the exact same kind of group messaging thread, uh, with a couple of friends on Instagram Direct, on WhatsApp, on Messenger. And we sometimes have the conversations in individual places based on, you know, piece of content that we found, and so the message might go there. Uh, but then I think back to the, the, you know, one-on-one thread that I have with my wife. And while we predominantly use a, a given, you know, space, recently when she traveled to to India, uh, all of those conversations kind of moved to WhatsApp and then she came back and then we were back on Instagram. And if I ever wanted to go back and reference any of that conversation, it was splintered and we didn't exactly know where to go back and look at it. And if you think about that use case of talking to an individual, the fact that that's splintered across multiple apps is actually quite challenging. Um, that being said, there are other use cases that maybe don't make as much sense. So if you are running, you know, multiple accounts, uh, for Instagram and you have a very a specific account that is an Instagram account that is not on Facebook or not on WhatsApp, we think that you can continue and should continue to use the messaging app of choice, especially when you aren't feeling the sort of splintering of the conversation where it's not about the individual across multiple surfaces, but really about kind of the app experience in and of itself. So as you can imagine, a project like this is incredibly complicated, both from a technical infrastructure perspective, but also from a product experience perspective. And so we're working through both of those in parallel to understand, you know, A, for whom would this be most useful, and how do we make sure that they find value in it and they can opt into it? How does that experience then feel cohesive for them when they have opted into it? How does the backend work? How do we transition people from the current world into this world? And there have been some open questions even on encryption that we're working through. And the reason we announced this product as early as we did is to make sure we could have some of that public dialogue about how we would solve some of these issues. Normally, I think our product development process is much more— we do a lot of this behind the scenes and then talk about it when it's ready. But knowing how important of a change this was, it was a different philosophy in terms of talking about it earlier and getting feedback and engaging with not just consumers, but advocacy groups and safety groups and thinking about the implications, not just of the interoperability between the platforms, but what it means to move to an interrupted space.

And one last question on that one, really, is it on track in terms of what you set yourself to achieve by this point? Is it kind of where you want it to be, or has it become more challenging than you thought? Where is that?

These things are— these kinds of projects are always fun because the things that you thought were really complicated up front sometimes are less complicated than you thought, and the things that you thought were really simple and straightforward are sometimes much more complicated than you realized. And so I think we have a bit of both. And so generally, I feel like we're making good progress, but it's such a kind of complicated set of systems that we're working through that But I think it's going to take us some time to make sure we really feel confident in any kind of dates or any kind of announcements. But I'm excited about the teams working on some of the hardest problems. And again, back to the point of not shying away from the core of the product or from the hardest problems, I think as a company, we're very good at when we decide that this is the right experience and we think it's important for people, that we will take the time to get that work right.

Martin?

We talked about safety and privacy earlier. And this is something that's become such a hot product topic around Silicon Valley in, in recent times. You just look this week at Google removing third-party cookies from Chrome. You know, it would have sounded unthinkable a couple of years ago. If we look at Threads, for example, you were talking about the contextual things that happen there in the background. It tells your friends when you're moving or charging your phone, things like that. And one thing that struck me when I used Threads for the first time was I had to share my real-time location with Instagram, ergo Facebook, in order to get that to work. So there's obviously a clear ad tech benefit for Facebook there, which is understandable. Facebook is an advertising company. But there's also the benefit for me as a user in that kind of contextual information being shared. And we get something from that. Do you think that this kind of— there's a sort of give and take there? Do you think that give and take, that kind of we give you this, but you have to give up that, that kind of transaction, it's going to have to become a bit more transparent in this more privacy-minded age?

No question. I think there are a bunch of factors here. One is sort of general awareness from a consumer perspective of how platforms work and how the systems that they use, use data, use algorithms and information to help make decisions, make recommendations. But I think it hasn't always been clear to people exactly what data is being used and how it's being used and why it's helpful or, in their minds, not helpful for the way they use the platform. Platform. So I think as an industry, we have to get to a place where we have to be super transparent about what data we're using, uh, why, why it's being used and, and what it could be used for. But people also need to know the benefit that they get by sharing that information. And if they opt out of it, what the implications of opting out may actually be. And I think that is not really well established yet in terms of— I mean, you can make a statement that, okay, if you opt out of, of tracking for ads targeting, your ads might become less relevant, uh, which I think is actually a real— people really have a negative reaction to that when they actually live with it. But we don't do a very good job of explaining that to people in the moment when they're making that decision, or, you know, how good the recommendations would be even outside of ads, just for content they might see, for example, in Explore on Instagram, and what their experience might, might do and might change if the data was being used differently. And so I think the, you know, you guys have talked on this podcast a lot about sort of patterns for, for products and for design. I think we'll see a lot in the next, let's call it, 5 to 10 years about how best we can not not only be transparent about what data is being collected and how it's being used, but how that information then affects the experience that people are having. And some of it comes down to the business model in terms of a free product being advertising supported. Some of it comes down to the level of personalization that people can get with using a product like ours. But then also being clear that if you don't want to provide that, then maybe you have an experience that you're not as excited about. But people just need to know what they're getting or what they're not when they're making some of these choices.

So how do you see Instagram looking 3 to 5 years from now? So that's kind of not too far way, it's unrealistic and crazy. But also, separate to that, what do you think it might look like in 10 years from now? So really kind of blue sky thinking, especially with the concepts of things to do with Oculus and what they're doing with AR and AR stuff, AR glasses have been talked about at many different places. Uh, what's your thoughts there?

Yeah, I think in the 3 to 5 year time frame, you know, we'll continue to be focused in, in, I believe, in the 4 areas that I mentioned. Maybe specifics within them might, might evolve over time. So I as an example, I don't believe we will ever go away from the core of people expressing and sharing. Now, how they share and to whom they share, I think will continuously evolve. We've seen a shift from broadcast sharing into a feed, evolving into stories. We're seeing more communication, more sharing happening in private groups, whether it's a group of people or even individually. So I think that the audience and what people are comfortable sharing and to whom is changing. The way in which they capture and they share is also evolving. The cameras certainly on phones have gotten gotten much better. Technology from an augmented reality kind of effects perspective have continuously gotten better. I've been incredibly proud of the work that we've been seeing out of the platform work that we've done on AR on Instagram where, over the holidays, I don't know if this was as big in the UK, but we had a lot of filters, face effects on what Disney character are you or what celebrity are you that didn't come from Instagram. It came from the community. And that was incredibly inspiring to see some of those things really find traction. And so the ways in which ways in which those things evolve will— or the ways in which people share will evolve. And we need to make sure we're setting the right guardrails. And so as we open up that platform early last year, one of the things that we were looking at really actively was what kinds of effects we would allow versus not allow from a policy perspective. And we made a decision last year to say things that were explicitly about plastic surgery or facial— things that made it look like you were having explicit plastic surgery were things we did not want on the platform. And that's a call that we'd have to make along way. And I think we as platforms need to think about those things as we're making calls. What is allowed or not allowed in, in live? What is allowed or not allowed in, in things like effects? And this is a challenging question when you talk about a global platform because norms are, are certainly quite different, you know, country by country and region by region. And so I think those are challenges that we're gonna have to continue to, to face and think through as, as we launch them. But the core of the product, I think, will really will stay, uh, you know, centered on, on sharing and expression. But I do think you'll see— start to see more from us, um, on these these different interest verticals. So you've seen some of that already with IGTV as a place for Instagram creators to tell a longer, deeper story than what they could do on feed or in stories, pun intended. Or in shopping where people are opting in to follow brands, to follow stylists and bloggers and to see the latest trends and to understand what a product might be that they could purchase. So I think we have some ideas like that in other verticals, things like travel and music and gaming that I think you'll start to see us, you know, work on more in the years to come. We do try to be very deliberate about how many of those things we're doing at any one point in time, back to the point on simplicity.

So we're gonna have to wrap up. I think our time is coming close to an end with you, 'cause I know you're busy and you've got some more meetings you've gotta jump into. So we had a ton of people ask us questions that they wanted me to ask you about various things. They're all pretty decently interesting questions that I would've wanted to get answers to myself. So if you don't mind, we're gonna jump through, and probably like 30 seconds on each is fine, and see what we can come up with. So, uh, can you give us a teaser about what cool new Instagram stickers for stories you are testing or thinking about developing? And that's from me. That's the first one. And then the rest of them, everyone else can have.

Well, so I, let me, instead of a specific sticker, I'll tell you sort of thematically how we're thinking about the creative tools in a place like stories. So we're looking at two different things. One is what are the types of stickers or effects that give you a reason to share, not just about augmenting something you've already decided to share. So it's a reason to share in the first place. That's one. And the second is how to make stories even more interactive. And so you saw that with the polling sticker, you saw that with the questions and answer sticker and the emoji slider. There's something about making the space really interactive, which I think is amazing for people, but also really amazing for businesses to be able to connect with their fans and their audiences in ways that we're exploring.

Got you. Right, well, we've got a bunch of questions about one particular topic, which is, when will IGTV get monetization features, says David Origo. And also someone else, any plans for improving IGTV IGTV search features, says @notnap. And there was also a question about just generally where it is at with IGTV. Have you got anything you can share with us today?

Yeah, you know, there's a few things on IGTV that are worth calling out. I'll try to keep things brief so we can get to some more questions. So one is, you know, we've really seen the adoption of the core creator segment that we're going after, which is the Instagram-native creator who has built an audience, who is telling stories in feed and in stories,, but really needed a place to tell a longer-form story that today they had to go to a different platform to do. Now, we understand that creating longer-form video is more expensive from a time and resource perspective for creators. And so we set the expectation that we wanted to bring monetization to IGTV even outside of some of the branded content and work that we've done to date. So no specific plans to announce, but know that that is still an important priority for us. And you will certainly hear more from us about that. Now, the second thing I wanted to mention is that that, you know, like any product organization, we're constantly evolving and learning. And so one of the things that we learned about how IGTV was being used were people were confused about how they should best upload video on Instagram. Should they first go to the IGTV tab? Should they first go to, you know, kind of the plus icon in the bottom of the main screen to upload something? And so for the purpose of simplifying the way people upload video, we're actually going to allow people to upload video for both feed and for IGTV from that main kind of feed upload plus icon. Inside of the platform. And for the purpose of simplification and to make sure that there is not a lot of competing attention for when people get to the platform, we're actually going to be removing the IGTV icon from the home screen. I think back to our very early point on having the diligence and feeling like you can unship and celebrating that just as much as shipping something in the first place, I'm proud of the team for really thinking about the simplicity of Instagram Instagram as a whole and simplifying the video upload flow when they're making a change like this.

Got you. I'm gonna rattle through some of these now 'cause I've got 3 minutes, I think. So let's go for it. So are there any plans to allow people to edit published stories? Says Vasilina Philippidi. I think I got that right.

No, no, there are no plans for that. We believe once the story's out there and people have seen it and responded, we wanna make sure that that stays consistent in the same way that, you know, in a feed post, you know, we keep the image pretty much consistent. So people can certainly delete them and re-upload them if they've made a mistake. But we think it's important for once that thing has been published for it to stay pretty consistent.

Adding links to feed posts, is it ever going to happen? Says Pavy Kalska.

No, it is, it is not. And I know there was a question that you had, we had talked about earlier about even reshares in feed. That is also not coming. And those two changes are really important. The reason we don't do links or reshares in feed is it would change the incentive for why people post. If you have a link to share and that's why you post versus just sharing a moment, that changes why you post. And if you can reshare, when you come across content from someone that you follow and it's not something they originally created. It changes the reason why you see something in your feed. So for simplicity and for the sense of control, we explicitly are not going to make those changes.

Is Instagram Checkout going to allow you to buy services as well as physical goods within Instagram, says Jonathan Pollinger.

It's possible over time, although our area of focus is very much on specific products and launching that more broadly in the US where we are now, but then thinking about how we scale that internationally.

Tons of questions on why doesn't my country have Music Sticker yet? When will those countries get it if they haven't Got it yet?

So music stickers, we would love to take it everywhere, but we have to work with the music rights holders in all the different markets. And so the reason they're not everywhere is because we don't have rights for music in those markets. And it's really important to us to abide by the rights that these rights holders have.

Got you. And then finally, I mean, one that I was just curious about, just does it affect you hearing criticism from people about a specific product? And what somebody said to me a few months back, and I remember saying, that IGTV was the recycle bin for YouTube right now. And I thought about that, and I thought it made me smile and laugh. But then at the same time, I was thinking, what would happen with the people in the product teams who are developing these products and they hear some of these things? How does that affect you?

Oh, it certainly affects you. I think as a human, you are affected by the things that you hear, and you think about people's perceptions. At the same time, I think we have the discipline as a product organization to know that that's one perspective and doesn't really think about the longer-term implications of what we're trying to achieve. But also the things that we might be working on that people don't know about. And so I think it's, uh, I think it would be impossible to say you, you don't hear those things, but also it wouldn't be the only reason to act on something or to make a change. And it's just part of the discipline of, of being a product owner and product thinker to think even, even beyond the, the short-term criticism.

Got you. Well, I think we've made it exactly to the time, so I just wanna wrap it up and say that we've had a great time chatting to you, and I think there's a lot of questions and answers that are in there that people Paul will enjoy listening back to. And so thank you, Vishal, for joining us, and I hope you had a good time as well.

Thanks to both of you. Really enjoyed the chat, and, uh, and best of luck on the rest of the season.

Thank you.

It's time now for Quick Hits. Here's Matt with tests and updates from social media companies that amaze your eyes, electrify your ears, and bedazzle your brain.

They get cheesier every week. They seriously do. What is going on with you? Okay, so yes, there's a kind of— there's about 5 or 6 this week, so we'll rattle through them. Let's start with the one that I just spotted before recording today, and that is LinkedIn has got 3 new features. Features that it's going to be rolling out to company pages. Now I say new because lots of people have already come back to me, said this is not new, this has been around for ages. These are ones that have been out for some people for a little while, probably being tested. Others haven't had them. So this is a global rollout, I believe. And that is LinkedIn Live. So the live streaming video stuff is going to come out to more company pages, or all of them, in due course, uh, in the next few weeks, I think. And there's also Act as a Page or a Profile. So if you're familiar with Facebook, where you can choose whether you want to respond to comments as your page or as your profile, that being brought to LinkedIn as well, something that they're playing catch-up with there. And the invite connections to follow your page, so you can choose some of your first-order connections on LinkedIn to invite them to your page. But there is a 50 limit, a limit of 50 profiles that you can invite to follow your page. And also they've got some control settings that you can set, say you don't want to receive such invitations from other people if it gets a bit spammy. The next thing was Bing Pages. Now I saw Bing Pages and I just thought Google+ 2.0, you know, it just ringed a company that's not really sure what it's doing but wants to have some sort of socially type feature. And Bing Pages seems to be Microsoft's version of that, which is basically a profile page which pulls together all of your kind of feeds and streams and the posts you put out. And you can have a kind of page profile there within Bing as well. So those who get excited by Google+, this may be one for you to check out. Twitter tipping feature. So this generated a lot of interest, a lot of talk, um, in the last few days when I tweeted about it. And it was in, uh, within a video or another article which was talking about other things that Twitter is doing. So it's the idea of you being able to say that people can tip you some money for whatever reason. I guess you justify they should tip you or people just choose organically to. So this is something that I think is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how it will work in practical terms. And there's plenty of ways it could probably be abused or it could change the kind of vibe of Twitter. But they did say that although it was, it was in an article for The Information, this, this story, they did say that afterwards that they're not actively working on it at this time, which is one of those, it's kind there, but we might not get to it.

So many people begging for money through Twitter then, wouldn't you?

Uh, yeah, it could be. So we'll see if that one ever comes to fruition. Also, Instagram Boomerang has got an update for stories. So Boomerang, you know, you're playing around with video, nice kind of jumpy kind of repeat video stuff you can do. Um, they've got some new features. Um, so Slo-Mo, uh, which is self-explanatory. Echo, which gives it kind of like a double kind of vision, kind of echoey effect. And then you've got Duo, which kind of adds a slow and fast speed at the same time to give it a bit more texture in the, in the video. And there's also a new trimming feature for, for your boomerangs, which is something that you should have had at the beginning, to be honest. Uh, Twitter lists. So they're becoming a popular thing again, and I'm glad they are because they're very useful. And Twitter lists now, I noticed the other day, suggest to me what other accounts I should add to my existing list or a new list I was creating. So it was, I had a list for new tech news and it started suggesting some really useful accounts to add, in fact. So that's going to be a great addition to lists. And finally, a small one, really a small one that's a big one. LinkedIn has kind of supersized its buttons. So now along when you kind of tap the button to like a post or whatever, it's got a real bigger size kind of selection of buttons at the bottom to choose from. And one of them has got repost, which is a nice kind of prompt to kind of reshare something. It's kind of cool that it's done it because before it was a bit plain and small, but now it's, yeah, supersized buttons on LinkedIn.

Good stuff. And that's it for today. Now, last week, you might remember Taylor Lorenz told us how influencers are shifting away from advertising and endorsements to wider forms of content creation. And next week, we'll be talking to an influencer who is all about content. She's a creator, blogging mentor, and podcast host, and she'll be great to speak to. That's Vix Meldrew.

Yes, I'm really looking forward to that one as well. So make sure you do hit subscribe in your podcast app of choice so that you're notified as soon as the next episode is available.

Geek Out with Matt Navarra is a Big Revolution production. Find out more at bigrevolution.net/podcasts. You can find me on Twitter as @martinsfp, and I'm @mattnavarra on Twitter.

So don't forget to tell all your friends about the podcast and also join the Facebook group. We have a Facebook group called The Social Media Geek Out. You can find it by searching exactly for that within Facebook, and you'll find us there for more of the same same as what's in this podcast and even other weird and wonderful things to do with social.

Indeed. We'll see you soon.

Goodbye, geeks.