Today, at 9:18 am, [email protected] wrote:
Why did you forward me this
RE: Yesterday, at 5:31 pm, [email protected] wrote:
Dear Ryan,
We’d like to acknowledge your sustained and passionate support of the Instagram platform since you started your account on February 14, 2014. However, your actions over the past few months—actually, let's be honest, eight years—have been irreversibly damaging to the community, and to the values that motivate our business.
While we realize it’s extremely atypical to ban someone who hasn’t actually violated our Terms of Service, we strongly believe that your personality and general vibe justify making an exception.
Firstly, we need to directly address your one-way interactions with Quigley. Although you’ve never used our Messaging feature to directly interact with Quigley or watched her Stories, your IP address logs indicate to our technicians that you've been consistently checking Quigley’s feed for new content approximately once an hour every single day for the past six months. (Omitting, of course, your time spent asleep, which is apparently 1 AM to 9 AM—but we don't intend to litigate that issue here.)
When our internal-warning threshold for abnormal behavior was triggered, we initially made a good-faith assumption that this was due to Quigley being a new romantic partner of yours, or an extremely co-dependent friend you were interacting with outside the app. However, our algorithmic data has proved to our internal research team that you have no substantive relationship outside the app with Quigley to justify the constant refreshing of her feed and Liking every single thing she posts.
We’ve been led to believe that you are, by our own statistical proof, devastatingly lonely—and, like a vagrant trapped in the desert, you’re methodically sifting through Quigley’s feed as if it were a mountain of sand, checking every individual grain one by one to make sure they aren't water.
Whatever you’re looking for, every time you check Quigley’s feed: I can personally guarantee that you will never find it.
Your behavior has become public knowledge internally, and made our technicians and even some of our marketing staff extremely sad. We've now had to have several meetings solely to discuss suppressing leaks to the media about your account. We cannot afford to allow for the perception, accurately or otherwise, that someone so devastatingly sad could be considered a typical user of our app.
Twice during our general end-week roundups, we've had a lengthy group commiseration about your behavior. Once, we showed an intern your browsing metrics to demonstrate to them what a “worst-case” user-interaction scenario looked like, and he immediately resigned. Also, whilst I cannot actually prove this, I strongly suspect based on anecdotal evidence that you have become a topic of much concern among our team of in-house mental health professionals.
You may suspect that you are receiving unfair scrutiny or treatment in this matter. That's correct. The dynamic is this: Quigley is what we’d refer to internally as a “power user.” She gives other users a compelling reason to sign up for the app or remain on it instead of abandoning us for a competitor, or a blue-ocean alternative (e.g., having no online profile at all). Her presence on our platform literally pays for itself.
You, however, exist on the platform as Quigley’s direct inverse: what we’d describe as a “bottom feeder.” Not only does your uncharismatic online profile actively repel other users from the platform, the sheer volume of the uploads and personal data you’ve elected to store on our service will, in the long run, require us to make vast and expensive infrastructural additions solely to accommodate you.
So, of course, we are kicking you off of the platform permanently, as well as any future accounts you start. We’re assuming based on your noxious personality that you’ll file a Ban Appeal, so please consider any Appeal you’d like to file pre-emptively denied.
Although conflict resolution guides such as the book Getting to Yes! suggest that I should attempt, at a threshold like this one, to personally relate to the aggrieved (that’s you), or illuminate a larger perspective regarding this issue, I’m genuinely worried that doing so will make me a character in some weird storyline in your head.
Instead, I offer you these parting words: goodbye, forever—and also, we’d really appreciate it if you voluntarily deleted the app off your phone of your own volition instead of forcing us to do it remotely through App Store license management. Which, to be honest, would be very easy for us to do, but if you could just go ahead and help us out a bit here it would save us a lot of time.
Yours,
The Instagram Team