Sorry, I just made this post in the forums about this, I would like your opinion, so I'm copying it here:
I have a personal Cosplay Instagram where I post all my work.
The account was made back in 2012, but I only started to get consistent with use about two years ago.
In about two years, with decent content, related hashtagging, and consistent posts, I've only managed to grow organically about 1500 followers (total followers is 2100)
I'm curious on if Instagram takes a shit on old accounts?
Here are some of the shady symptoms of my account:
•Per post, I only get maybe 4 or 5 followers
•My overall likes on a set of pics recently dip up and down like a roller coaster. From 250 - 500
•Post likes roll in slow, like the algorithm purposely throttled traffic
•My content never goes viral, (I realize there a lot of factors, but I've seen accounts with similar to more inferior content go viral, while mine struggles)
•the post notifications for people I follow sometimes is delayed
I did use an instagress bot last October for about a month, just had it on slow liking. And way around the time I started the account back in 2012, I used one of those apps to get followers and had about 400 fake Arabic accounts follow me.
I did clean then out when I got serious using a mass block method, and then unblocked all the fake accounts to clean out my block list. And my stuff doesn't seem to be shadowbanned.
Could the account be flagged in some way?
I'm set on staying organic, but I'm contemplating on starting over if Instagram is going to keep fucking me over. But I've put so much time into this one it's frustrating.
Any thoughts or advice are welcome!