That shadowban

karlx117

karlx117

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I am pretty sure I have been shadowbanned for two weeks now. Was using Mass Planner before this and things were fine until recently. My likes per post dropped about 50% and although I still get likes and comments from people who don't follow me, these likes are coming in alot slower than before, and seem to be capped at ~50% of what I used to receive.

I've switched my account from business back to personal, deleted a whole bunch of hashtags from recent posts, and even tried new hashtags. Nothing seems to really work right now and Instagram hasn't responded to any of my messages. I even uninstalled and reinstalled Instagram, but to no avail.

My account has ~ 1,000 followers and the engagement before was between 15 to 20% per post. Now I will get 7% engagement if I am lucky..

What else can I do to fix this?
 
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Also, my Instagram notifications for likes and comments sometimes comes to my phone instantly, and sometimes very slowly (~6 or more hours after). Is this a cause for concern too?

I have switched off Mass Planner at the moment.
 
Is it considered a shadowban if your posts are still being interacted with to some degree? The algorithms involved in deciding which posts to display to users are very sophisticated. It's possible they found something wrong with your posts and made it so they don't get as many impressions as they used to. Is there anything particularly spammy about your content?
 
yourmotherishot said:
Is it considered a shadowban if your posts are still being interacted with to some degree? The algorithms involved in deciding which posts to display to users are very sophisticated. It's possible they found something wrong with your posts and made it so they don't get as many impressions as they used to. Is there anything particularly spammy about your content?
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Not at all. I run a photography account and also a photography feature account. The content is all original on my account, and specially curated by me on the other account.

One thing to note is that I bumped up the likes and follows on Massplanner recently (around the time that the lower engagement came). Also, I always post my content at around 12am to 2am everyday or every few days, with similar tags (hasn't been a problem before though).
 
I too run an original photography account. Engagement went last year and never recovered.
I have checked that my hashtags are working and they are, but I have experimented and posted an image with and without hashtags and they get around the same amount of likes. IG is finding some way to throttle me.
 
willteasle said:
I too run an original photography account. Engagement went last year and never recovered.
I have checked that my hashtags are working and they are, but I have experimented and posted an image with and without hashtags and they get around the same amount of likes. IG is finding some way to throttle me.
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Do you think it was bot related? Have you tried to contact Instagram? This really frustrates me and I hope to get to the bottom of it.
 
karlx117 said:
Do you think it was bot related? Have you tried to contact Instagram? This really frustrates me and I hope to get to the bottom of it.
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Dunno what I could say! haha "hey I'm not getting half the likes I used to get!"
Yeah I botted on it, but I've stopped for a few months hoping that given enough time it I will get of the blacklist. :)
 
willteasle said:
Dunno what I could say! haha "hey I'm not getting half the likes I used to get!"
Yeah I botted on it, but I've stopped for a few months hoping that given enough time it I will get of the blacklist. :)
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I can't stop using it for months because my models and other photographers will just stop following me :\
 
Interesting, about 2 weeks I experienced the same thing ~50% drop in engagement. I've looked at my account via other accounts and it doesn't look like I've been shadow banned, posts are showing in hashtag pages.

The only two things I can think of are:

1. I was getting a lot of bot likes and with the recent clean up of bots I'm not seeing the extra likes I would be getting.
2. I was doing some follow/unfollow and the insta algo is punishing me. Maybe it's not showing my posts in followers feeds or it is but after a lot of scrolling.

Any tips would be welcome....
 
Guys, what type of botting activity did you use prior to the 50% drop started to creep in? For me, I know that I bumped up the number of follows per day as well as number of likes per day a few days prior.

I am not sure if this is related to the Instagress shutdown, but I can say that I signed up for a trial on their site before.

Maybe we could try some different techniques here and report the results to help each other out.

Things I tried so far:
1) Reverted from business to personal account
2) Deleted all tags from 6 recent posts
3) Deleted all spammy followers that I was following via Massplanner's algorithm
4) Moved all hashtags from comments into description area for new posts
5) Using new hashtags in new posts

I haven't posted any new content in two days. I am going to try to keep at this for a week.


willteasle said:
Dunno what I could say! haha "hey I'm not getting half the likes I used to get!"
Yeah I botted on it, but I've stopped for a few months hoping that given enough time it I will get of the blacklist. :)
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markopolo187 said:
Interesting, about 2 weeks I experienced the same thing ~50% drop in engagement. I've looked at my account via other accounts and it doesn't look like I've been shadow banned, posts are showing in hashtag pages.

The only two things I can think of are:

1. I was getting a lot of bot likes and with the recent clean up of bots I'm not seeing the extra likes I would be getting.
2. I was doing some follow/unfollow and the insta algo is punishing me. Maybe it's not showing my posts in followers feeds or it is but after a lot of scrolling.

Any tips would be welcome....
Click to expand...
 
I was botting for a couple of years liking around 1000-2000 pics a day. I never did follow/unfollow or spam.
I used to get on average 1000 likes per post, but this year it has dropped to 200. This is on an account that has 30k followers. It looks embarrassing haha

I have tried deleting all hashtags, didn't work.
tried moving hastags to description, no luck so I've gone back to using the comments.
I know I'm not shadowbanned. I have used tor browser and anonymously looked on a hashtag feed and seen my post. However, I seem to be geotag banned. I dont show up on location pages.
This is why I think my accounts been flagged.

I reported a problem last night to instagram saying since switching back to personal account my engagement and likes have severely diminished and I think my reach is being throttled.
I got a message saying thanks for your feedback but no fix.

I'm going to wait a few more months of not botting and manual liking to see if I get out of the black hole, if not I might have to cut my losses and start again.
 
Sorry to bust in w.o any help, but what is the difference of turning your IG account to BIZ from Personal? I've not touched any option as such and what does that bring me as a benefit? I suppose it is about running ads or?
 
CreativeCit said:
Sorry to bust in w.o any help, but what is the difference of turning your IG account to BIZ from Personal? I've not touched any option as such and what does that bring me as a benefit? I suppose it is about running ads or?
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Yeah you can run ads, it also gives you insights to your post. Like tells you how many people have seen it compared to the likes you receive.
 
That's fascinating. My account does not have that many followers, but yes that's a massive drop indeed.

I contacted Instagram at least 5 times, about the loss of engagement and likes over the last two weeks, yet not a single response so far. I am surprised that you heard back from them so quickly! Here, I wonder if I could get quicker response by switching to a business account to get an answer quicker..

Today I posted at around noon, which is historically the best time to receive the most likes. The results were not what I expected at all.

1) The likes came in very slowly (this has been a trend as of late)
2) My overall likes for the photo dipped to 40, instead of an average of 130 to 150 likes.
3) Some notifications of likes came in immediately, while other notifications of likes came in hours later.

Question for you - does location tag give a big bonus in reach?
Also, when you switched off your bots, did you do it slowly, or all at once? - I did it all at once...


willteasle said:
I was botting for a couple of years liking around 1000-2000 pics a day. I never did follow/unfollow or spam.
I used to get on average 1000 likes per post, but this year it has dropped to 200. This is on an account that has 30k followers. It looks embarrassing haha

I have tried deleting all hashtags, didn't work.
tried moving hastags to description, no luck so I've gone back to using the comments.
I know I'm not shadowbanned. I have used tor browser and anonymously looked on a hashtag feed and seen my post. However, I seem to be geotag banned. I dont show up on location pages.
This is why I think my accounts been flagged.

I reported a problem last night to instagram saying since switching back to personal account my engagement and likes have severely diminished and I think my reach is being throttled.
I got a message saying thanks for your feedback but no fix.

I'm going to wait a few more months of not botting and manual liking to see if I get out of the black hole, if not I might have to cut my losses and start again.
Click to expand...
 
When I send out a single image in DM conversations, it appears that two of the same images get sent out instead. This seems to be a consistent issue.

Any ideas?
 
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