Is Instagram on steroids?

Syrte

I’m wondering if other people have felt, like I have, that some of their Instagram posts have gotten some unusual levels of attention lately.

I would like to think it’s the beauty of the watch or my talent at photography, but somehow I’m a little suspicious.

There are very good reasons why my Instagram account should not be growing fast, it is hitting «natural « limitations due to what I have chosen to show or not, and to say or not.

But there’s one particular post, a blurry post of a tiny tre tacche, which seems to have caught on fire.

So here is my question:
has Instagram boosted some kind of algorithm to reengage users in the wake of a stream of very bad news about Facebook practices and algorithms? To create excitement and get people to spend more time posting and checking their accounts?

Curious what others are observing and experiencing.

Dan S

I haven't seen anything different on my posts. Did you use any new or different hashtags?

Dan S

I haven't seen anything different on my posts. Did you use any new or different hashtags?

ahartfie

I’m still getting the “investors” following me and trying to engage in conversation. I’ve stopped feeling guilty about deleting their DMs unread.

NT931

same here! The number of likes has increased unexpectedly by about 50-60% without me doing anything majorly different , which puzzled me. The change was about a month ago in mid September. Chalked it down to a tweak in their algorithms.

JimJupiter

dito, something changed in September. I usually had up to 200 likes, suddenly it spiked to 4-600 on some watches. No change in watches or quality of the pics 😁

NT931

the jump in "likes" is bigger for my modern watches than for vintage... 60-70% for modern, 20-30% for vintage.

Syrte

but what if one could pay to inflate the likes generated by everyone around certain hashtags? And thus make it look like a product is universally liked when in fact there’s doping involved in the competition?

Hmmm…. 😗

NT931

One other thing I noticed. Previously, about 50% of the likes would come in within 12h, another 25% in the next 12h, and the last 20% would come in within 48h or so, with very few coming in after 48h.

Now, however, there seems to be a steady low-level trickle of likes coming in 36h to even 4-6 days later, which never used to happen. @Syrte , @MoclovFlop , @JimJupiter : did you notice a similar phenomenon?