Instagram built Stories as a separate space with no likes or public comments

In a Fast Company piece from December 2016, Cliff Kuang describes how Instagram's team, led on design by Robby Stein, studied why people posted less. Instagram had been meant for instant sharing, but over time it became more like a museum catalogue. Users told the team they feared spamming people and felt pressure to post something popular. Stein says likes made them more self-conscious while better cameras and Instagram stars kept raising the bar for a good post.

The answer was Instagram Stories, photos and video that disappear after 24 hours. Early on the team considered putting them directly in the feed, but concluded that people would not act more freely if Stories felt like the same permanent, curated place. So it got its own space on top of the feed, a tappable row of profile icons, under what Stein called different rules.

Those rules removed the public feedback loop. Likes were out, and so were public comments, which Stein's team saw as working the same way. Viewers can only message the poster directly or skip on. Posters can choose their audience and see who looked. Camera-roll access is hidden behind a swipe and shows only the last 24 hours, so the easiest path is to open the camera and shoot something in the moment.

Fix self-consciousness by removing the feedback, not by asking people to relax: new space, new rules.

Likes and public comments created a burden to please and perform, so they were removed.

A separate row at the top of the feed signalled different rules from the permanent photo grid.

Disappearing posts lowered the stakes of any single post.

Hiding the camera roll steered people toward shooting in the moment rather than curating.

If a metric changes how people behave, build the new behaviour somewhere the metric does not exist rather than trying to talk users out of it.

The article reports that within a couple of weeks of launch over 100 million Instagram users were using Stories every day. Instagram declined to say whether engagement had fallen before. Almost everyone called Stories a Snapchat copy, but the article argues the two differ deeply, because Stories was added to an audience that had not asked for it and had to work without explanation.