On the evening of Sept. 26, Bailey Richardson logged in to Instagram for the last time.
"The time has come for me to delete my Instagram," she wrote to her 20,000 followers, using her white pants as a canvas. "Thanks for all the kindnesses over the years."
Richardson's decision isn't novel: 68 percent of Americans have either quit or taken a break from social media this year, according to the Pew Research Center.
But Richardson isn't a bystander reckoning with the ills of technology: She was one of the 13 original employees working at Instagram in 2012 when Facebook bought the viral photo-sharing app for $1 billion. She and four others from that small group now say the sense of intimacy, artistry and discovery that defined early Instagram and led to its success has given way to a celebrity-driven marketplace that is engineered to sap users' time and attention at the cost of their well-being.
"In the early days, you felt your post was seen by people who cared about you and that you cared about," said Richardson, who left Instagram in 2014 and later founded a start-up. "That feeling is completely gone for me now."
The catalyst for Richardson's decision to quit Instagram came when its co-founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, unexpectedly announced that they were leaving the company. With their exit, Richardson and other former Instagram employees worried Facebook would squash whatever independent identity the company had managed to retain.
She sent her goodbye to Instagram the next day.
Even in Silicon Valley, where it's common to hear start-up workers become frustrated with management after an acquisition, the disillusionment of the early Instagram employees is striking: People seldom swear off or criticize the product they built, particularly when it has enjoyed such remarkable success. Instagram reached 1 billion users this year.
The people who worked at social networks long saw the connection and free expression they facilitated as a powerful force for good and evidence of the contribution they were making to society. For them, the public questioning of the role social networks play in democracy and in individual lives, sparked by concerns over privacy and health, is deeply personal.
Three of the early Instagram employees, including Richardson, have deleted it - permanently or periodically, comparing it to a drug that produces a diminishing high. One of the people said he felt a little embarrassed to tell people that he worked there. Two of the other early employees said they used it far less than before.
This shift is part of an existential crisis for Facebook, which has seen a slew of top executives resign this year, including the leaders of its major acquisitions: Oculus, WhatsApp and Instagram. Some people are also abandoning Facebook: It lost 4 million users in Europe in the last six months and growth has plateaued in the United States.
The Instagram employees, including Richardson, said they hoped their concerns would not be dismissed as nostalgia and would be seen as a call to future entrepreneurs to recognize these pitfalls and build something better.
"There was so much pressure to do things that 'scaled,' to use the Silicon Valley buzzword," said Josh Riedel, the third employee after Systrom and Krieger. "But when you have over a billion users, something gets lost along the way."
Ian Spalter, Instagram's head of design, said in an interview that experiences on Instagram are subjective - one person's frustration may be another person's pleasure - and that the app was not designed to be a time-suck. "We're not in the game to have you leave Instagram feeling worse off than when you went in," he said.
One of the departed founders of a company Facebook acquired, WhatsApp's Brian Acton, has actively encouraged people to delete Facebook, though he is still a proponent and a user of WhatsApp. (He is also funding a rival messaging app.) Other former Facebook executives have expressed regrets about the products they built. Instagram's Systrom continues to champion the service but recently said of his departure: "You don't leave a job because everything is awesome, right?"
- - -
When Richardson joined Instagram in February 2012, at age 26, the former art history major was drawn to what was then a fast-growing indie platform for photographers, hipsters and artistic-types who wanted to share interesting or beautiful things they discovered about the world. At that time, Instagram was "a camera that looked out into the world," said one of the company's first engineers, "versus a camera that was all about myself, my friends, who I'm with."
Richardson ran the start-up's blog as well as the official @instagram account from the company's offices in San Francisco's South Park neighborhood. Before there were software algorithms suggesting accounts to follow, Richardson selected featured Instagrammers by hand. For the most devoted users, she organized in-person "Insta-meets" in places as far-flung as Moscow and North Korea.
"We felt like stewards of that passion," Richardson said.