The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 36 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Evans: Facebook Has Not Created New User Behavior Since News Feed
“Well, they haven't actually created any new behavior since the newsfeed. What they'done is they bought Instagram, and they bought it very early at what at the time everyone said was a ludicrously high price. At the time, it was, actually, it was a very good pr…”
Adam D'Angelo: Feed recommendation algorithms are already superhuman at predicting interest
“Recommender systems, the system that ranks your Facebook or Instagram or Quora feed, those recommender systems are already superhuman at predicting what you're gonna be interested in, in reading.”
Roy Lee: Tech workers on X and LinkedIn misunderstand video algorithms
“I think it's growing increasingly clear that people on ex-LinkedIn are behind, and there's such a very, extremely small intersection of people who understand how developed the algorithm is on, like, Instagram, TikTok, and people on tech, like, Twitter, LinkedI…”
Piff Marti: Streaming platforms dilute music quality by demanding constant content
“And the goal of all of these platforms, like Instagram, TikTok, Spotify Apple Music, is to have users use their app as long as possible. And what they encourage the creators to do is give them a bunch of things that these users can consume. But because of that…”
Balaji Srinivasan: Consumer tech startups scale by exploiting the seven deadly sins
“Tinder is lust. Twitter is wrath. Instagram is pride and so on and so forth, right? Uber eats is like gluttony, right? And many things, productivity apps are arguably sloth or whatever, right? Because that it is hard to build a company and you do want to align…”
Wiener: iPhone sports footage outperforms professional camera clips on Instagram
“There are some plays that we have that are shot both with an iPhone and a real camera, and we've tested this on Instagram, and it actually performs better when you shoot it with an iPhone.”
Russell: Public metrics turn Instagram and Facebook feeds into happiness theater
“So a little bit of a counterpoint or pushback against that is, you know, if you look at Instagram or Facebook, the nature of having metrics publicly exposed to people and comment counts and things like that means that content typically can devolve into somethi…”
Evans: Apple, Google, and Facebook won the smartphone and messaging wars
“The sort of, the feeling you have in mobile right now is we're kind of at the end of one wave, and we haven't got another wave coming up yet, so we've kind of had the smartphone wars, and Apple and Google both kind of won, and we've had the messaging wars, and…”
Evans: Global annual photos taken likely reaches 10 to 100 trillion
“Even if you just add up the numbers from Facebook and Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and so on, you get to about eight or nine hundred billion photographs taken last year. And that's just, sorry, shared. So if there were eight or nine hundred bi…”
George: ChatGPT daily users average 30 minutes per day
“Active daily active users of chat GPT are ready today. Spend like 30 minutes at 20, 28, 29 minutes a day on the product. And, you know, to put that into context, I think Instagram's like 50 minutes a day and, you know, tick tock like Sadly, it's like 70 minute…”
Plagemann: Legacy brands like Vogue made Instagram and TikTok cool
“Brands like Vogue and other brands, like really, really great brands actually helped make Instagram as cool and as great as it is. And the same thing with Tik Tok.”
Postma: Social media will integrate AI clothing try-ons within years
“And I wouldn't be surprised if any social media is going to do this soon, because Instagram already has photos of your face, right? They could already train a model on your face in that kind of sense. And you could put the clothing on it that they put in their…”
Jordan: OfferUp user engagement rivals social platforms like Instagram and Snapchat
“OfferUp has engagement that's similar to social sites like Instagram and Snap.”
Early Instagram relied on suggested users for creator discovery, says Bailey Richardson
“Working at Instagram really early on, one of the things that we did was we put people on suggested users, we wrote about them, and if you weren't already famous, if you weren't Kim Kardashian or Justin Bieber, that was sort of the only way for you to get expos…”
Instagram intentionally targeted photographers and designers at launch, says Bailey Richardson
“From my perspective of at least how we grew Instagram, we started out with this core audience of people that were photographers and designers, and that's actually who we went and spoke to when we released the app, and who we promoted right away, because we fel…”
Neistat outlines the rigid content expectations across major social media platforms
“If it's on Snapchat, it needs to be funny or cool or make me look cool. If it's on Instagram, it's gotta be beautiful. If it's on YouTube, it's gotta be meaningful. If it's on Facebook, it has to be something that my friends and peers really want to engage wit…”
Early social media use forces young athletes to brand themselves prematurely
“It's good and bad for the game, because I'm seeing high school kids, and I'm seeing elementary kids with Twitters and Instagrams, and it's like they're branding themselves already, and it's like, you're not quite there yet, you know. So it's putting a little b…”
Markoff: Kodak failed due to strategic errors, not Instagram's disruption
“13 programmers at Instagram take out a 140,000 workers at Kodak. You know, great story, except it's not true. I mean, first, you know, the guys at Kodak made a series of strategic mistakes, and they shot themselves in the head repeatedly until they were dead. …”
Acharya: Major Social Networks Prevent Startups from Piggybacking for Distribution
“All of the sort of existing networks have been so trained on the methodology of building new networks that they're very careful to ensure no one does it on their networks. So Instagram, TikTok, X, it's very hard to build a new sort of distribution channel off …”
Masad: Twitter reaches tech elites while YouTube and Meta reach early majority
“Twitter's influence is amazing, but it tends to be elite kind of inside group influence. I think Instagram, Facebook still, YouTube, Is where you get to the early majority.”
Hayes: Users are fleeing public feeds for private group chats
“The move from public posting to group chat is, I think, a hundred percent driven by that, right? So like, You know, more and more of all the traffic and Instagram talks about this all the time is happening in private messaging. Things are happening in private …”
García Martínez: At least 97% of Instagram ad viewers do not engage
“You know, the CTR, the click through rate, like how often a user engages on a thing like Instagram, at least 97% of people who looked at it. We're just completely indifferent to the thing.”
Roy Lee: Instagram requires more controversy for virality than X
“And this is something that I've said before, but I guarantee, like, my videos do not go as viral on Instagram, like, Instagram TikTok. And the sole reason is because on those platforms, they are not controversial enough.”
Moore: Deepfake celebrity math tutorials by OnLock Learning get millions of views
“Every video they post gets millions of views, and it's, like, explanations delivered by, like, deep fake AI celebrities of, like, math and physics content.”
Moore: Instagram and Snapchat missed top app charts due to US saturation
“To me, the fact that Instagram and Snapchat didn't appear at the top doesn't necessarily mean they're kind of dead as products. I think part of what it means is they've saturated the US user base, so they aren't getting a ton of new downloads every day.”
Karen X Cheng Predicts AI Platform Consolidation via Startup Acquisitions
“Most companies will have different strengths, and then they'll continue to be able to differentiate by sort of specializing in that, but I do imagine that some of these companies are gonna buy other companies, and then so they'll like, you know, kind of have m…”
Finzer: Instagram and ad platforms capture most value from creators
“So if you think about Instagram today, you're creating all of this interesting content, but much, most of the value is being captured by the platform itself, kind of due to how the business models work, right? Advertising based business models don't typically …”
Sivak: Game word-of-mouth happens via social media GIFs, not office chatter
“The water cooler moments that people used to share in the office, where they would say like, hey, you know, I was playing this cool game, or I fought this cool boss, no longer exist. They're all getting shared as animated GIFs now, whether it be through TikTok…”
Sinofsky: Facebook operates WhatsApp, Instagram, and Oculus as independent entities
“You know, between WhatsApp and Instagram, Oculus, and so on, that are run as very distinct entities, and they don't overlay some grand strategy about what's going to go where, and who's going to do what, when, and tie all the pieces together.”
Markoff: The mature internet created at least 2.5 million jobs
“Instagram, as a company, couldn't exist until there was a mature internet. How many jobs did the mature internet create? Probably two and a half million, at least, good jobs.”
Pierce: Social networks force users to play curated, performative personas
“Social networks kind of necessarily become performant, right? Like, you're playing some sort of character, whether it's business character on LinkedIn, or you want to seem like you have a really fun life on Instagram, or, you know, your kid is adorable on Face…”
Instagram and YouTube Adoption Curves Are Nearly Vertical
“If we were to add Instagram, if we were to add YouTube onto here, you would just see straight lines straight up because of how fast these things get adopted.”
Evans: Facebook bought Instagram for 1% and WhatsApp for 10% of valuation
“They bought Instagram for whatever it was, one percent of the value of the company, and then they bought Facebook for, so then they bought WhatsApp for, say, 10% of the value of the company.”
a16z's Nicira investment exited for more than Instagram
“We, as our firm, we were investors in Instagram. We were also investors in Nicera. Both those companies sold around the same point for actually Nicera sold for more, I think it was 1.4 billion Instagram, depending on Facebook stock price of 700 to a billion.”
Smith: Instagram had 13 employees when acquired for $1 billion in 2012
“Instagram, for example, had 13 employees when it was sold for a billion dollars, and that was in 2012.”
Foundation requires social media verification and artist invite trees for creators
“So on foundation, you were, we require social verification. So we actually require you to attach both your Twitter and Instagram to prove your identity. And we also ask that you come and be invited by another artist on the platform.”