Shadowbanned Yes / No? Hashtaglists behave weird

Hey guys, i need to vent.


As one or two here might know, i am growing an instagram page in the gaming niche (started on the 1st on june) , and doing this completely manually. I'm not using follow/unfollow, i don't bulk like pictures blindly, and do not use bots or bought likes / folllows. I just try to engage with the community a lot, write genuine DM's, post funny stories and post really good content, that brings value to my audience. So 100% fair play on my side.

Still i was noticing a huge drop in user engagement a few days ago. Now it's almost 10 days that engagement is not picking up again and i get 98% of engagement only from my followers.

Here's my posting tactic:

3 posts a day
30 hashtags on every picture
20 of those hastags are always the same, the other 10 tailored to the the image
5 very big hashtag (1 - 10 million)
the rest from 1500 - 500.000 mentions, all *perfectly* tailored to my niche

Before that happened my account grew on a fantastic rate (up to 50+ follower per day - for me thats some nice organic growth). I hit a few big toppost's and got from 30 - 40 likes on average to 100. My most successful post had 300 likes with maybe 200 follower at that time (got toppost in 10 - 15 hashtags).

Then from day to another, it all went to shit. I noticed it right away when my posts didn't get at least 15 - 20 likes within the first 20 minutes. And i could tell that all those likes came from followers. Only here and there i got "external" likes and the rate of new follower dropped a lot as well.

I tested the following:

- I went to the explore/tags/ page of Instagram (logged in), and saw my post / toppost
- I did the same on the same computer, with TOR browser (logged off), saw my post / toppost
- i went to shadowbann tester page which said NOT SHADOWBANNED
- i asked a friend who isn't following us to go to the page with his browser (logged off) - NO POST

So in the end it seems that my page is shadowbanned even though the tester page says it isn't. For no fucking reason. Maybe it just grew too fast? But others grow way faster than me with no restrictions! The only thing i changed was to switch to a business account, wich i switched back two days later. But that didn't help.

Now i'm so close to deactivating my account and let it rest for a few days. But that whole thing is making so so angry. What the hell is going on with Instagram? Why do they punish people like me and others can use bots and foul play and grow hundreds of followers a day?

Thanks for reading.. i'll keep you posted about my account.

I'd appreciate any tips.

X

I have some clients that are complaining about hashtags not working correctly. I found this graphic not sure it will help but something has been very odd with instagram lately. One of my other clients saw that her account was deleted only to find it reactivated the next morning... weird stuff.

Trust me Instagram is just too weird.
I swear I've seen this same pattern myself.

I check on my PC (logged-in and logged-out) and on my Phone and even on a proxy to check my posts on Top Post page and it looks fine.
But then I ask a friend to check it on his phone and its not there.

I can only assume that Top post page is different for different users?
I cannot wrap my head around this! Too weird.

So, i figured out why we got shadowbanned and got it lifted. Because of that, and because i talked to a whole bunch of people who were complaining about being showbanned as well on the offcial instagram facebook page, i learned a lot about this shadowban and the many ways to resolve it.

Our reason: The domain. As soon as i deleted the URL from our bio, the ban was lifted. Too f****n' easy.

The many other reasons of people i talked to:

- Missing citation of sponsorship. One fashionblogger told me her ban was lifted right the moment she added "*SPONSORED*" into the first 3 lines of captions.

- SPAM. Some people told me they just had to wait for a few days.

- Bot behaviour: The algorithm thought they were a bot and they needed to cut back on their follows and likes.

- Unknown. Some poeple just had to report a problem and the ban was lifted soon after.


Hope i could help.