Instagram changing and Top Post problems

Hi Everyone! I'm relatively new to this so forgive me if I sound stupid. But I have been noticing in the last couple months, and especially randomly over the last few days that my Instagram accounts are performing poorly. I have several personal and portfolio type accounts with good original content, and with botting and posting nice photos saw 100 to 200 follows per day, which seemed pretty good for the type of accounts. But over the last few months it's become a struggle to get even 100 followers a day, and in the botting my follow back ratio is around 1%. And some days I get almost not followbacks at all.

I started working to get my posts to appear at the top posts for hashtags thinking that would bring in a lot more followers based on what I have read in this forum. But it's been bad! Like really bad!

I can get posts to sit at the top of top posts for hours for quite popular hashtags, like #photography with 182 million posts. But I hardly saw any likes or follows come from that even though they my posts are higher quality photos that whats already in there. And on other hashtags with double or single digit millions of followers my posts will sit at the very top for days and days. Still hardly any followers and likes. We are talking like 20, and I can't even be sure how much of that is coming from there or just general follows.

So, is this a new phenomenon? Or is this typical? What are people doing that are getting thousands of likes and follows from appearing in top posts? Or does it really only help when you are in the general explore page?

And has anyone else noticed a big decrease in follow backs? If that doesn't work anymore for personal and portfolio accounts, what does? Please keep in mind I am not in super viral niches, so I can't rely on posting the hottest latest viral post...

I have avoided pods because that seemed like it's too easily spotted by Instagram.

i am botting and my follow back is getting much lower in the last 2-3 weeks as well.
no clue ..

Instagram has been trying to implement new features and messing around with its algorithm a lot lately, the likes on my pictures have been fluctuating a lot too but with a little bit of experimentation, changing your post timings, type of content, change in hashtags - you still can achieve results like before or even better! You just need to understand what's working and what's not.

Algorithms and features will change at some point of time and what worked in the past might not keep working forever.

If your targeting other accounts' followers, then they aren't growing/adding new followers fast enough themselves = low followers for you

Hey Chris ,
i have the same problem. They changed something with the Algorithm but nobody can tell what exactly ... ;(
I m searching for an answer too.

So I’ve done all sorts of experimentation with timing and how my bots were working and who I was following, etc. Results are the same, really low follow back, low engagement in new posts. Now I can no longer get My posts in the top posts page either. It feels like somehow Instagram knows I am running bots no matter how randomized they are, and throttling back my outgoing engagement, and blocking Who is seeing my new posts. It’s really disconcerting.

At least I’m not getting stuck with other problems that are going around right now like the verification loop.