I’ve been following the recent topics around here with an observant eye and it is apparent that the vast majority of accounts that experience follow blocks are accounts that have been botting for a long time.
Many people suggested that Instagram could’ve implemented a lifetime follow limit, a statement that I highly disagree with. Namely, even though an absolute limit could be an easy solution when seen from some platform’s perspective, that solution at the same time is quite narrow-sighted and limited and you wouldn’t have to use any AI to implement this. Also, if that was the case, then accounts with a higher number of lifetime follows would necessarily experience throttle, but there are currently cases where accounts with a huge number of total follows, that have stopped botting for some time now, can follow without a problem. If there was an upper limit, then those accounts should’ve been affected as well. Another argument why this couldn’t be the case is that there are many accounts which have only up to 5000 total follows that were affected as well. Those certainly wouldn’t hit any upper lifetime limit but were affected nonetheless.
Now, on to the thing that I personally think affects how the follow blocks happen:
So, it is commonly known that Instagram loves to use AI for its algorithm in every direction of its platform - from hashtags, explore page, user behavior and so on. And for those unfamiliar with AI, it is only important to know that AI is solely based on huge data from which it derives patterns which ultimately bring some insight for the decision makers and the algorithm itself.
One of the most constant patterns that could be seen in the botting accounts when it comes to followings isn’t the high number of total follows, but rather the constant high number of daily (as well as hourly) follows
What almost all of us do (myself included) is set up a follow range that is not that wide, which results in similar daily follows through a longer time interval.
For example - if an account is comfortable with 400 daily follows (I don’t want to discuss if this is a conservative or liberal number, this is not a point of the thread, it is just a presupposed number), then most of us will set a range that isn’t wider than 100 (meaning the bot will follow between 350 - 450 followers daily). And even this range, I suspect, is quite liberal for most people, as many people’s range is even less than 50, some even going without a range at all.
A normal user would never do such a thing!
This is a clear sign of a well-organized pattern that is an easy thing for an AI to recognize. The reason why many of us do this is that we don’t want to waste any time and we are impatient to see results. But that’s where the problem arises.
Fast results ≠ Long term success
My main argument here is that many of the new accounts are not affected by this new wave of follow-blocks. Why this happens is because their daily and hourly follow rates still vary. Most of these accounts that you guys don’t have any follow blocks on are still in the warming up phase and they change (read increase) the daily and hourly limits, which doesn’t show an absolute pattern. However, as this change is only in one direction (namely, only increasing) a different kind of pattern can be recognized.
My solution to combat this would be to set a highly wide range of follows that the accounts execute daily. I will myself test this approach with many of the new accounts that I have in warming up phase that were not hit with a follow block.
The numbers that I will use will be as crazy as 20 - 450 daily follows with an hourly range of 6 - 35 follows.
I will try different numbers on different accounts, but most of them will have a huge gap between the lowest and highest number of daily follows.
Keep in mind that this is a long-term experiment and it isn’t something that I want to get any VISIBLE results out of. I don’t want to gain more daily followers, I don’t want to grow the accounts faster. I just want to make them stable and long lasting, sacrifising the rapid growth in that process.
Also, the best thing about this is that I could see it working for child accounts as well. Again, it won’t grow them or your main account as efficiently as possible, but it can bring a long-term growth and stability to the accounts.
Take into account that all of this is only my hypothesis as I haven’t tested anything. I will know if this is true or not only after the next wave of follow blocks in the following months. If the accounts that have this wide gap of daily follows resist the follow block wave, I will know whether this is moving towards the right direction.
If anyone else tries this, we could compare the results in the future publicly on the forum, so the rest of the guys here know if they should implement this or not.
What are your opinions on this?
