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It's been amusing to see fake follower buying explode on Instagram this last few years in the photography / modeling space. Photographers buy 50-100k fake foll

It's been amusing to see fake follower buying explode on Instagram this last few years in the photography / modeling space. Photographers buy 50-100k fake followers, which you can easily see because each one of their posts barely gets 200 likes, but people who don't check or don't know how the game is played think you're a big deal. With your 100k followers you can now reach out to models, who also bought a ton of followers themselves, and you can work together because now you're at a similar level of perceived clout, neither one of you is stepping down to collaborate with a "nobody". When you work together, you think you will get exposure to each other's fan base, but in reality 95% of your followers are artificial, nobody wins in the end. Maybe you get some insta-fame from regular people casually using IG who have no idea how this stuff works. You'll notice that brands rarely ever sponsor the type of people above because every time they let them run a promotion nobody ends up buying their products as a result of the shoutout. And that's because these people purchased their digital fame, and fake followers don't have credit cards to buy flat tummy tea or hair gummies or whatever they're peddling that day. It's reminiscent of steroids, you probably wish you didn't have to take them, but if you're going to be playing that specific game, you have to take them or you'll be left out by those who do cheat. Growing your instagram following organically these days is crazy hard. Both I and people I know with all sorts of numbers are mostly seeing constant loss of followers (fake accounts being taken down?) despite constant posting schedules of quality content. Discoverability through hashtags is dead as far as I can tell. It's reminiscent of trying to get big an an iOS app developer through the App Store alone, it's just not going to happen anymore, it's not 2007. People (specifically photographers) are looking for an alternative to IG, but there's not one in sight. Ello is OK, but it's an artist circlejerk. 500px is a botfest. Steemit seems interesting but it's also being overrun by garbage content.

nradov 9y ago
Why don't the fake followers automatically like those posts?
- BadassFractal 9y ago
  It's actually a service that these companies offer, but it's significantly more expensive over time since it's a continuous activity vs. a one time thing. I imagine it's a lot more maintenance on their end. It's one thing to have x fake accounts follow you once, but it's another thing altogether to script the same x accounts to like every one of your posts every time. It's actually a downward spiral for people playing this game: you buy 100k followers, not cheap, but you can take that hit once. However if you want to look legit, you have to constantly pay for those accounts to like your posts, which over months can add up to a really unpleasant bill. It's especially unpleasant because none of those followers are monetizable, since they're not real, and you're now on the hook to keep paying for likes in perpetuity, or people might call you out. It's a reason why often you will see the nouveau-famous influencers claim that "IG shut down my account because my content was too saucy" as a way to save face and stop paying for likes. In reality they closed the account themselves and started from scratch because they could no longer afford the bill. Again, most have no idea, watching this from the outside.
  - nradov 9y ago
    Thanks for clarifying. I had assumed it was all a big scam but didn't know exactly how it worked.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

nradov 9y ago

Why don't the fake followers automatically like those posts?

BadassFractal 9y ago
It's actually a service that these companies offer, but it's significantly more expensive over time since it's a continuous activity vs. a one time thing. I imagine it's a lot more maintenance on their end. It's one thing to have x fake accounts follow you once, but it's another thing altogether to script the same x accounts to like every one of your posts every time. It's actually a downward spiral for people playing this game: you buy 100k followers, not cheap, but you can take that hit once. However if you want to look legit, you have to constantly pay for those accounts to like your posts, which over months can add up to a really unpleasant bill. It's especially unpleasant because none of those followers are monetizable, since they're not real, and you're now on the hook to keep paying for likes in perpetuity, or people might call you out. It's a reason why often you will see the nouveau-famous influencers claim that "IG shut down my account because my content was too saucy" as a way to save face and stop paying for likes. In reality they closed the account themselves and started from scratch because they could no longer afford the bill. Again, most have no idea, watching this from the outside.
- nradov 9y ago
  Thanks for clarifying. I had assumed it was all a big scam but didn't know exactly how it worked.
deleted 9y ago
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