Founder of the Rookie mag reflects on being an early influencer and the effect that Instagram had on her life and career as Instagram's aesthetic keeps evolving
My senior year of high school, I had three Instagram accounts: a public one, a private one for friends and internet friends, and a private one that was just for me. Tweets: @hamishmckenzie , @mosseri , @brodielancaster , @kelseyjbarnes , @hexpositive , @boygirlparty , @dada_drummer , @thisaintanika , and @designsponge Tweets: Hamish McKenzie / @hamishmckenzie : I think the ills of Instagram may ultimately come to be seen as worse than the ills of Facebook News Feed, but it will take a while to dawn on us. This by @tavitulle... https://www.thecut.com/... https://twitter.com/... Adam Mosseri / @mosseri : Wow, a really powerful essay by @tavitulle. Her experience and others' are so important for us to understand so that we can effectively question and revisit some of the core parts of what we do. https://twitter.com/... Brodie Lancaster / @brodielancaster : I love getting a peek inside Tavi's brain like this. People's consumption of her work/life/self has been so inextricably linked to the internet for the past decade that reading of her experiences behind it all is like a director's commentary. https://twitter.com/... Kelsey J Barnes / @kelseyjbarnes : Reading this just made me miss Rookie all over again but I'm thankful Tavi is still blessing us with her insightful thoughts & words. This is very, very good. https://twitter.com/... Suzy Exposito / @hexpositive : This dovetails nicely with recent conversations on writers as influencers. Props to @tavitulle for cutting through the simulation. https://twitter.com/... Susie Ghahremani / @boygirlparty : relating to the black hole described in this @tavitulle's essay about Instagram. yesterday i noticed i hadn't posted to my IG in over a month. sometimes it feels like the world (even friends) have stopped caring about me. in other ways, it feels better. https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/... Damon K / @dada_drummer : don't settle for social media quotations read the whole thing so you get the ending with all its irony what a great resident critic of this absurd digital house we have built ourselves https://twitter.com/... Anika Meier / @thisaintanika : “I would keep scrolling as though the cure for how I felt was at the bottom of my feed. I'd feel like I was crawling out of my skin, heartbeat first, for minutes and hours.” https://www.thecut.com/... Grace Bonney / @designsponge : This sums up the feeling I've had for years that I can't trust myself or my instincts anymore: “I think I am a writer and an actor and an artist. But I haven't believed the purity of my own intentions ever since I became my own salesperson.” @tavitulle https://www.thecut.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Tavi Gevinson built [[a:/entity/rookie-mag|Rookie]] out of being a teenage voice online before 'influencer' was a job title, so her essay is less a memoir than an audit by the person the template was built around. Her account of running three separate Instagram accounts — public, private for friends, private for herself alone — maps exactly onto the curation culture the platform was then selling, and the same-day coverage of Instagram's Close Friends feature shows the platform monetizing precisely the intimacy-versus-performance split she is describing.
The timing matters because this is 2019, with Adam Mosseri among the people circulating the piece on Twitter, and Hamish McKenzie framing Instagram's harms as potentially worse than the News Feed's once they dawn on us. What followed — creator revolt over the Reels pivot and artists chafing against forced personal branding — reads now as the argument she started getting mainstream attention.
First-order effects
- Gevinson puts a first-person cost estimate on the early-influencer experience, giving platform leadership — Mosseri included — a named, credible critic rather than an abstract wellbeing debate.
Second-order effects
- Her critique lands inside a broader creator backlash: within two years, creatives were openly angry about Instagram's pivot to Reels and video, arguing the aesthetic she helped define no longer served the people making it.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the influencer generation keeps producing retrospectives of regret — parallel to the Tumblr call-out blogger looking back with shame — while the platform's aesthetic drifts toward realism, as seen in Instagram's more realistic food photography, leaving writers and artists squeezed between authenticity and the personal-brand demands of social media.
The trend: The first generation raised on Instagram curation is publicly auditing the model just as the platform trades aesthetics for engagement mechanics, widening the gap between what creators built and what the algorithm now rewards.