I went through a bit of a phase for a week or two of trying to get more followers on my photography insta. It didn't take me long at all to realise that the va

I went through a bit of a phase for a week or two of trying to get more followers on my photography insta. It didn't take me long at all to realise that the vast majority of new followers were either just straight up spambots, or were using bots to fish for followers. Botting to fish for followers in Insta isn't the worst, usually it's just automating what a person would do: search for a hashtag; like photos; and drop some comments. But it really kills engagement when most comments are something like "Nice! :thumbs:", or "Love this! :heart:", and you know that 90% of accounts that follow you will automatically unfollow you in a week. Instagrams social discovery aspect has been ruined. It has been taken over by bots and groups of people on whatsapp/$messaging_service that schedule when to post and all like the photo the moment it gets posted to boost it to the discover page. It has become all about gaming the algorithm.