Facebook did a nice job rolling out Instagram stories earlier this month. The timing was excellent for sparking engagement (right ahead of the Olympics). The rhetoric was great (not trying to claim Facebook invented the product). The product execution was solid.
The launch got me to re-download the app and post my first photo in months. But after consuming lots of stories over the past few weeks, I am finished with the feature for now. It is like social network whack-a-mole. Instagram solved a content creation problem, only to create a content consumption one.
There are two product issues with Instagram stories. One I expect Facebook to solve in first-world markets over time; the other will be a much tougher nut to crack.
The first is loading speed. Even on a fast LTE connection or Wi-Fi, I click through stories far faster than the app can load images and video. After the third time I hit a blank “loading” screen, I leave the app.
This is not a trivial issue. Preparing content for people to dynamically cruise through—skipping rapidly from image to image and story to story—is much more challenging than producing a linearly loaded News Feed where content loads as you scroll. The jumping behavior is critical for the stories format, which encourages the creation of a higher volume of lower-quality and uncurated moments each of which individually can be pretty boring. Skipping is the crucial product escape valve to low-quality content.
Snapchat stories face this problem as well. I highly suspect that Snapchat’s reputation as a data hog has a lot to do with how it tries to pre-cache stories to make skipping through boring images as fast as possible.
That said, Facebook’s speed challenge is far more serious because of its global focus. Snapchat isn’t currently interested in expanding to markets like India, where connections are slower and people are more data consumption-conscious. Not so with Facebook and Instagram, which have international missions and strategies. Figuring out how to compress, cache, and optimize stories globally is going to be far harder for Facebook than it will be for Snapchat locally in their first-world strategy.
The good news for Facebook is that this precisely the type of problem that the Facebook engineering corps has a track record of solving.
Distinct Networks
Aside from the speed of loading images and consuming stories, Instagram stories face a more fundamental network topology issue.
The people I follow on Instagram aren’t the same people I want to receive stories from. I follow several surfers for the occasional surfing pic, but I don’t want 30 or 40 shots from them in a row, every day. I enjoy humor accounts like “Jerry of the Day” occasionally, but I don’t need a constant stream of them on my private stories TV channel.
Contrast this to my Snapchat network. It is much smaller, but I only connect with people I explicitly want stories from. Snapchat grew up around specific content formats, and I chose whom to follow with those formats in mind. The same is true of Facebook itself, whose ranked News Feed encouraged me to accept people I don’t know as well as friends since I am only likely to see occasional items from them.
When you introduce a new content creation and consumption behavior to an existing graph, you necessarily cause some disruption. This can fix itself over time as people modify how they express themselves and change who they decide to connect to.
But I think it is going to be an especially hard one to evolve in the case of Instagram. The people I want highly curated infrequent content from aren’t the people I want to see streams of casual photos from. Ranking stories could ease some of this pain, but not all of it. Coming up with a secondary model where you follow certain people for stories—as opposed to the current default where you get stories of everyone you follow on Instagram—could work, but would be clunky. And it would deprive Instagram of one of its current advantages over Snapchat, which is that it already knows a group of people to connect you to.
The net of all of this for me personally is that Instagram stories disrupted my standard content consumption behavior for a period. My general pattern was to flip through Facebook for a bit and check on the highest-ranked stories in my world. Then I would flip back and catch up on Instagram. Finally, when I ran out of content in those two places, I would flip to Snapchat and effectively watch personal TV in the form of stories until I was done.
Giving Up
Instagram stories got on my rotation of things to look at and catch up on, but I have dropped it personally.
I recently opened Instagram to see that 44 people in my graph had posted a story. Some of those people posted up to 34 images and videos. Even before considering the time waiting for images to load, around 44 posters multiplied by 10 or 12 images and videos per person is more than 500 items a day.
Assuming an average of one second per piece of media, consuming stories on Instagram is going to run me 10 minutes a day. Given the average quality of the content, it just isn’t worth the time, and I can’t see it becoming worthwhile anytime soon.
Net of everything, I still think launching stories was a great move from Instagram. Even if the product ultimately fails, it will allow Facebook to introduce millions of people to the Stories format before Snapchat gets the chance. That will make Snapchat feel like less of a must-try for the next wave. It will probably slow Snapchat’s growth. It will probably also steal advertising dollars from Snapchat. So, defensively it is a good move.
As a product, eventually, it might work. I do think that the stories format, when properly constrained, can be pretty fun and great. But, to get there, Facebook needs to solve some technical challenges and get stories to a manageable scale where people are connected to no more than 10 active contributors at a time. It isn’t there yet.