I Hired Someone To Watch All My Friends' Instagram Stories For A Week
Story views have become a relationship currency. If they represent a real interaction, what happens when they're automated?
By Taylor Lorenz
Illustration by Charles Desmarais
Published
User Feedback is a monthly column written by journalist Taylor Lorenz. For each installment, she examines how technology is shaping our lives and our world.
For a week in September, I was your best friend on Instagram.
I viewed all of your Stories, liked every post, and kept tabs on every milestone in your digital life — your weddings, your moves, your job announcements, your baby pics. I consumed thousands of updates, and I engaged with it all.
How? It wasn’t actually me. It was a 23-year-old I’d hired to serve as my 24/7 Instagram Content Consumer.
Why would anyone do this? On Instagram, Story views have become something like relationship currency — a way to digitally tether ourselves to the people we care about. Viewing a friend’s Story sends the message that you value what’s going on in their life.
Lindsey Underwood, a style editor and colleague of mine at The Washington Post, said that she, like many people, notices who watches her stories and when. It can feel like a slight, she says, when a good friend doesn’t consume what she’s posted: “I’m like, ‘Girl, keep up!’ If they don’t even check, it feels kind of weird or rude.”