Instagram Turned a User’s Tweet Into a Feature Overnight
It moved fast and didn’t break anything
At 8:09 on Wednesday evening, Musa Tariq of San Francisco tweeted at Instagram with an idea for a product tweak. Platforms as big as Instagram get unsolicited feature requests all the time, from all kinds of people. But this time, it worked.
Instagram has a feature called Questions that lets users post a sticker to their Instagram Story. Though users can change the sticker’s text, it reads “Ask me a question” by default, inviting your followers to do just that. While the feature has caught on in some circles, it has also encouraged users to spam their followers’ feeds with unimaginative posts like,“How tall are you?”
Tariq, a brand strategist who now works at Airbnb, has long used the Questions feature to ask people, “How can I help you?” Back in 2018, before he took the Airbnb job, he tweeted a suggestion to Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, and Kevin Weil, Instagram’s CEO, CTO, and product chief at the time: Why not make “How can I help you?” the default text, just for a day, to see what happens? The tweet got some likes, but no response.
At 8:40 p.m., Adam Mosseri tweeted back simply, “I like it.”
