I Hired Someone To Watch All My Friends' Instagram Stories For A Week

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.

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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.”

Viewing an Instagram Story is “a barometer of how you feel about the person,” says Rebecca Rranza, a graduate student and teacher in Detroit. “I put all this meaning on it, so I tap, tap, tap. These rules get so ingrained.”

“First comes an Instagram Story view, then comes marriage, then comes a baby in a baby carriage,” one Twitter user posted in August.

Instagram Stories launched in 2016, but this shift toward Story posting and consumption accelerated during the pandemic. Daily usage of Stories has risen to over 500 million users, and as people move away from static feed posts, the Stories format has become many people's primary experience of Instagram. The platform incentivizes more frequent posting in order to maintain visibility. As a result, the quantity of content we’re compelled to digest can feel untenable.

I feel this acutely. I want my friends to know I care about them and their lives. I want to communicate interest in their most important life moments. But lately, I just don’t have the time.

Enter Franck Germain, a Gen Z publishing assistant and freelance “content consumer.” For a weekly rate of $200, he logged into my Instagram account and viewed thousands of Stories from my friends and connections (minus any Close Friends content, for privacy reasons). He sporadically liked posts to signal interest, and sent me screenshots of notable moments in a personally curated highlight reel, filled with engagements and parties and various scenes from everyday life. I knew who was at the Beyoncé concert, who visited the Times Square Margaritaville, and who got married.

Some snippets felt a little strange to receive. I got a few video stills from people I’d lost touch with — friendships fallen victim to Instagram’s algorithm, which tries to predict who you actually know and like. Viewing people's stories seemed to help me reconnect. A friend wrote to say she saw “me” watching her stories, and it reminded her to reach out. We made plans to connect when I’m back in NYC.

And, of course, my own engagement stats spiked. It could have been a coincidence, but when I checked my own Story views the day after my Content Consumer's final shift, I saw they'd nearly doubled from what they normally were. Perhaps people were just more interested in my Story that day, but my hunch is that at least some people were reciprocating my views.

At the end of the week, when my content consumer logged out of my account, I felt overwhelmed. I worried what would happen when I suddenly stopped watching, that certain friends might notice when I randomly went dark again. Would I alienate them all when I published this story? I wanted to give all my friends a boost of validation, and I never wanted to miss a pivotal moment again. I began to wish I could afford Germain full-time.

I’m not alone. The social media marketing industry has created roles to fulfill nearly every other facet of social media. On Fiverr, you can browse thousands of marketers willing to create custom content, schedule posts, revamp your profile, and market your account. As the pace of the internet accelerates, will hiring a content consumer one day be considered as commonplace as having a social media manager or personal assistant?

After all, someone is going to profit off our social media anxiety, and right now, it’s Instagram itself. Instagram's parent company Meta, whose virtual reality initiative is floundering, is laser focused on maximizing engagement and boosting ad revenue. While Facebook's core app becomes increasingly irrelevant, Instagram is a glimmer of hope for Zuckerberg and Co. No wonder users are incentivized to tap and tap and tap until they’re miserable.

Many people I spoke with hope Instagram creates tools to help us all chill out before we burn out. Jack, a nonprofit worker in Washington, D.C., who asked to stay anonymous, would love to see a “mark all as read” function for engaging with a friend’s content. He also pitched a Spotify Wrapped–style roundup of all the Stories he missed this week. (Get on that, Zuck!).

In the meantime, Germain hopes professional content consumption becomes a viable career path for Gen Z and other young people, and he said he's open to more new clients.

“Scrolling through Instagram is a skill we have,” he said. “It would be nice to be able to monetize that.”