Rich Kids of Instagram Epitomize Everything Wrong with Instagram
While the Internet has had a good time making fun of these rich kid Instagram photos, haters should be careful. These postings are emblematic of the entire medium we all use. To be certain, these wealthy kid pix are particularly funny …
Context & Ripple Effects
Instagram enters July 2012 as the undisputed center of mobile photo sharing: the service passed 50 million users in May and was adding roughly five million a week, while rival PicPlz shut down in June with its demise framed as the 'Instagram Effect.' Version 2.5 added an Explore tab and Facebook Likes integration, tightening the loop between what people post and how widely it travels.
Against that backdrop, The Atlantic Wire's argument lands on a fast-growing target: the Rich Kids of Instagram account is funny, but the piece contends the flaunting is emblematic of the medium itself, not an outlier within it. The take traveled quickly the same day — GigaOM picked it up and tech commentators including Farhad Manjoo and Sarah Perez amplified it — making this less a story about one account than a referendum on what Instagram rewards.
First-order effects
- Instagram's own growth mechanics amplify the phenomenon being mocked: with an Explore tab and Facebook Likes baked into version 2.5, conspicuously aspirational posts get distribution far beyond a teen's follower list.
- The commentary reframes the joke — users laughing at rich kids are, by the piece's logic, laughing at the display behavior the platform's design encourages in everyone.
Second-order effects
- Facebook's integration deepens the stakes: every Instagram post now feeds the News Feed of the world's largest social graph, so status-signaling content becomes a driver of cross-platform engagement for both companies.
- Competitors and would-be rivals face a bar set by network effects rather than features — PicPlz's shutdown shows that in photo sharing, the audience, not the filter set, decides the winner.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, photo-sharing networks will increasingly be judged not by what they document but by what they incentivize people to perform — pushing product design toward whatever maximizes aspirational, envy-generating content.
- A generation whose formative social platform rewards curated display is building a searchable archive of that performance, raising unresolved questions about identity and permanence that regulators and parents have barely begun to examine.
The trend: Social photo sharing is shifting from documenting life to performing status, with platform design — feeds, likes, explore tabs — doing more to shape that behavior than any single user community.