In past few weeks I’ve noticed that my posts on instagram had less likes, comments or views. I got a bit worried because even my worst photos were having more likes, more everything. I googled to see what is a problem and at first few links couldn’t find solution. After few articles that I’ve read I realized instagram changed it’s algorithm.
In past year I’ve been sticking to one process of uploading photos. First I would download the photo from my google drive (I edit all my photos on computer). After looking at the photo I would come up with some caption or even a story how it was made, while thinking about name all sort of hashtaghs would come to my mind so I would write them down in my notes. I now have hashtags for each photography genre (I only adjust them to fit the photo). I would upload photo to instagram, add the caption, location, tag feature accounts. I would put hashtags in the comment section because I wanted my feed and my posts to look neat. Or I would put dots in each line so people have to click ‘see more’ to see the actual hashtags. And everything worked fine until 2018. First change is that you can’t put hashtags in comments, they won’t work. You have to have unique hashtags, if you use same hashtags all the time instagram will address you as a bot/spammer (and they have to be inside caption). Also, if your photo didn’t recieve enough likes in first few minutes after uploading, it won’t be shown to the rest of the followers (on their feed). It’s like instagram is filtering out the bad photos and only wants people to see your best work (which is not good in my opinion because I think likes don’t prove if a photo is high quality content). Short comments like: “Beautiful photo” etc. are marked as bots. If you want your comment to be valid it has to have more than five words. Something in the comment section also changed; the reply system...You can only reply to your comments within 60 minutes (starting from when that person commented). And knowing that stuff really made me happy because now I know what the problem was. But it also made me angry because If I didn’t notice it earlier. I hope this helps to anyone with similar problems.
