Every Few Years Someone Builds a Better Instagram and Nothing Changes

The pattern is regular enough by now that you can set your watch to it. A new platform appears, backed by the promise of everything the old ones got wrong—no algorithm, no ads, real connections, chronological feeds, your content actually reaching the people who followed you. In early 2018 the app was Vero, a New York-based social network that wanted to replace Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Snapchat simultaneously by being, as they framed it, more social and less media.

The feature set was coherent enough. Share music, films, books, photos, links, restaurants. An audience selector lets you choose who sees each post—close friends, acquaintances, everyone. Charli XCX was on it. Zack Snyder was posting. Max Joseph. The early-adopter free-forever offer crashed the servers from the sudden load. For about a week, it felt like something might actually be happening.

It wasn’t. Vero is still technically alive, which already puts it ahead of Peach, Vine, and Yo—three other apps that were going to change everything and quietly didn’t. The problem is never the feature set. The problem is that the network is the product, and the network was already somewhere else. You can build a better room, but if everyone you know is still in the old one, you’ll just be standing alone in a nicer space, wondering why nobody came.