Instagram cofounder says the app has 'lost the soul'

• Instagram cofounder Kevin Systrom said the app has "lost the soul" on an episode of "On with Kara Swisher."
• The app, he said, used to be for family and friends to share photos. Now, it's used to make money.

Social media platform Instagram has turned into a marketplace for influencers — and its cofounder Kevin Systrom is not happy about it.

"I think we've lost the soul of what made Instagram Instagram," Systrom said during a podcast interview with tech reporter Kara Swisher.

Systrom said he used to go on Instagram to see what his friends and family were doing, but that it has since turned into a business apparatus as creators and brands use the platform to make money.

"My biggest regret, I think, at Instagram is how commercial it got," he said.

The problem, he said, is that Instagram's "incentives are to go to more commercial, more creators, more deals, more ad dollars," which can have unintended social consequences.

This has "focused the energy on people living apparently amazing lives with no bounds, doing the fanciest things, looking the best, wearing the fanciest clothes," he said.

That creates a "terrifying" dynamic, he said, where Instagram users believe that the curated facades they see on the app are people's real lives.

"Life is really hard, and whatever people post on Instagram is the tip of the iceberg," he said. "It's this race to the bottom of who can be the most perfect."

In fact, the cofounder has seen Instagram's transformation play out on his own feed. He said he has friends who used to upload pictures of their daily lives and now just post "#ads."

"That, to me, is not the Instagram we started," Systrom said.

He called out BeReal as an alternative app where people can be themselves and catch themselves in real moments.

Systrom's thoughts on Instagram come nearly five years after he left the company in 2018 in response to growing tensions with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He sold Instagram to Facebook, now Meta, in 2012 for $1 billion. He is now one of the cofounders of Artifact, an AI-powered news app that was launched at the beginning of the year.