Because it's full of them out there...
If you're thinking about starting and developing your Instagram account as a hobbyist photographer, looking to also increase your followers base, slow but organic, you're in for the Triple D pathway:
Denial stage
I really didn't want to get into Insta. For years and years, I postponed and denied the moment that I would extend my Facebook profile with this mother fucker. Inside my mind there was always the impression that Instagram is a shallow's people network, that it is driven by desire and lust and that it's not Facebook, only in order to be much worse than Facebook in creating the feeling of lack of accomplishment and uselessness in people when compared to each and EDITED photo of the ones they follow.
I still haven't changed my opinion about that but more likely I have backed it up with experience on the app and an attempt to build audience.
Discovery stage
I had an epiphany when I discovered, what I thought it was "the power of the hashtag". With very well and precise (to my mind) targeted hashtags added to my photographic composition, I started gathering followers. After my first, real use of these little symbols, followers kept pouring. Sometimes even 10/photo.
"What da' fuck!" I thought to myself. "This is way too easy. If I keep this pace I'll touch 1000 in a month. I'll be a fucking influencer, I'll walk dandy through my town, everybody knowing me and shit... yeah! That will happen!".
The first time I realized I was bleeding followers was around the milestone of 130 (I'm inside the 150 followers right now so I guess I haven't really got out of there).
Disappointment stage
The thing went on like it was a bad dream. I was still trying to grasp the meaning of it until I decided to google it and there it was.
Whatever followers I got during the day, some of them even likeing and commenting on the post, I was loosing during the night. I was going to sleep happy because I got another 10 during the day and I was waking up realizing I lost even more while I slept.
At first it's weird you know?!
You start thinking that maybe the new post that you've written contained something offensive. Did I go to far?! Far with what? It's not like I'm having some debatable content, I'm not going into deep politics on my Insta and for sure I'm not posting NSFW things. It's photography orientated anyway.
It's a thing it seems...
There's tons of info of the www about this sort of behaviour.
Bots! Fucking bots again! I was just getting accustomed with the ones over here (oh, how they were frustrating me at first!!!) when I discover that there's absolutely no problem to have bots also on Instagram. Programming your account behavior.
As I'm writing now, I realize there's a new type of behavior I'm experiencing on Insta:
- loosing followers by not posting: I have posted my last photo two days ago and I'm planning to post again today. Meanwhile, I've posted a short video in the "Story". I don't think that's a very long span of time to post, for an audience that followed because (I considered) they liked "the style".
WRONG!!!!
In this amount of time, I've lost something like 15 followers. You see them dripping away practically. AT ALL TIMES your followers base will have a clear tendency to shrink, if you're not very constant in posting and bringing in new ones. Practically you don't KEEP followers by posting constantly but rather compensate the constant loss by bringing in new followers. JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!
- loosing followes by not following back: in order to boost you can pay for it or find alternative methods to do it. The war and run for followers on Instagram is real. You can loose followers by not following back because a lot of the people that will follow you, are there for a follow back. When they check you up, in a few days after the follow and notice that you haven't followed back, then they unfollow you. Hey man, maybe I don't like your content!
- loosing followers as a victim: you just stay there, minding your own business, getting followers as they come without knowing that you are the victim of a scheme. This scheme sounds like this: "I can use the follow action to advertise myself, for free. Everybody checks the people who followed and on top of that Instagram provides each account with push notifications by default when somebody followed you. A part of the people checking my account out will also like my work so they'll stay, and follow. From time to time I'll unfollow quite randomly. At the end, I'll make sure that the balance between followers and the ones I follow will be in my favor, keeping relevant.".
I guess all of the above point to bot programming, repetitive tasks so that's what they are. Private, individual bots. I refuse to believe that somebody sit behind the phone all this time, doing this manually when they manage 20 something thousand followers. When do they get the time to go out and photograph anymore? And isn't that a little scammy?
Yeah! That really exists! It's a fucking plague in my opinion. The game in fact, is about getting new content on the network so that it is always full and traffic is being made, so Instagram can only benefit from this...
In reality though, the fact that it generates traffic is irrelevant. This is fake traffic. I have also seen the type of article teaching people how to do this with 10 stolen memes from 9GAG so the question of authenticity of photos, even for the accounts that look like they would belong to a photographer, arise.