Here's How the Algorithm ACTUALLY Works (allegedly...)

[aduseia]

So there's always been a big fuss about Instagram's algorithm in the social media marketing world and recently they sat down with TechCrunch, to actually explain how it works. This artcle came out June 1st, 2018, so it's quite recent. (full article link at the end of this post).

"Instagram has never explained exactly how the algorithm chooses what to show you until today. The Facebook -owned company assembled a group of reporters at its under-construction new San Francisco office to take the lid off the Instagram feed ranking algorithm"

These particular points were the big takeaway for me;

• Instagram does not hide posts in the feed, and you’ll see everything posted by everyone you follow if you keep scrolling.
• Instagram doesn’t downrank users for posting too frequently or for other specific behaviors, but it might swap in other content in between someone’s if they rapid-fire separate posts.
• Instagram doesn’t give extra feed presence to personal accounts or business accounts, so switching won’t help your reach.
• Shadowbanning is not a real thing, and Instagram says it doesn’t hide people’s content for posting too many hashtags or taking other actions.

Personally, i'm a bit skeptical about IG shrugging off shadowbanning. The symptoms of what we perceive as shadowbanning are quite known in our community, so it's kind of hard to believe that nothing of that sort exists.

What do you guys think ?

You can check out the full article at https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/01/how-instagram-feed-works/.

 

[longerestcat]

I wouldnt believe any PR talk that they say... there's tons of evidence of shadowbanning just in these forums alone.

 

[kantaenos]

Fuck what they say. Its clear if you start doing ads they will destroy your organic reach to earn more money

 

[MaryannFloyd]

This is certainly an interesting opinion, but it does not seem truthful to me. I sincerely hope that Instagram is still a good system. After all, you can promote everything absolutely and very easily.

 

[Aulig]

Well shadowbanning is definitely real. If a post of you gets removed your posts wont show up in hashtags for the next 2 weeks or longer. The rest sounds reasonable imo.

 

[aduseia]

I agree guys.

But then again, what reason would they have to lie? I'm just playing devil's advocate here.

If they (they being Facebook) truly want Instagram to be the best platform it can be, why would they do these things. It just makes you think. It could also be an inadvertent effort performed by the algorithm and not the engineers consciously. But then again, we know Facebook is in actuality an ad company, so there's that as well. Who knows..

 

[kantaenos]

I agree guys.

But then again, what reason would they have to lie? I'm just playing devil's advocate here.

If they (they being Facebook) truly want Instagram to be the best platform it can be, why would they do these things. It just makes you think. It could also be an inadvertent effort performed by the algorithm and not the engineers consciously. But then again, we know Facebook is in actuality an ad company, so there's that as well. Who knows..

Obvious reaosn is that as soon as people know how the algo works, we can exploit it and then it becomes useless = less money from sponsors!

If you can trace something back to money, then they have already thought about it 10 times more than you have.

 

[DeanFieldz]

have some accounts that are deffinantly shadowbanned from some hashtags, I call BS

 

[red333]

Shadowbanning is definitely a thing..

One pic was removed: boom, instantly -25k profile views; -10k likes on average, etc. (only 1-5% trend)

 

[u2u2u2]

Every platform has some kind of shadow restriction and its not written anywhere or accepted by them . Youtube has it, though its not stated anywhere. Here we are talking about platform owned by someone whose #1 priority is to make money by selling anything so don't believe anything they say most of it is BS

 

[Gianniscy]

I believe that the 2 last points are false.
Instagram does have shadowban but they prefer calling it different/hiding it from us(according to other users experience).
And switching to business account does limit your reach like facebook does with pages. It shows your posts to a certain amount of users, so you will have to advertise if you want more people to see your posts/account

 

[tc01]

shadowbanning is obviously a thing. If i use a certain set of hashtags i know for certain the post will get shadowbanned because i have overused that set of hashtags.