This is a short experience report, to potentially prevent anybody reading this from making the same mistakes I made.
Also, it's another example that speaks against centralized social media platforms in comparison to decentralized ones on a blockchain.

Everybody sucks. I can do that too 😜🖖

So like I said in my previous post, I'm getting to know the Instagram game and started experimenting.
I don't have a strict follower goal and I don't want to sell anything (yet). I just want to see what works and what doesn't on the platform.
My motivation is the fun I'm having in the process of taking photos, editing, writing captions, figuring out the right hashtags and so on.

Sometimes I look at other pages with pictures even worse than my amateur photography with tens if not hundreds of thousands of followers and decent engagement rates. Or "quote" pages that, on top of their generic, trivial and meaningless quotes or life advice, are full of orthography and grammar mistakes. Just low-quality content imho. Kinda like I felt when I first started to post on Steemit. "Why the hell are these people getting so many votes for that shitty content? I can do that too and probably even ten times better." 🤓

100 Followers per week 📈

What I think was part of my newfound "success":

• I started putting my own face out there, so people would see who they are following
• I made some easy to take, but quite professional-looking images (on top of my real improvement in photography)
• Interaction: I still don't do that nearly enough. But I started to not only follow people with similar interests and Instagram feeds, but like and comment their stuff, too. Just one genuine comment can do wonders! When I was only following people, hoping for them to follow me back, the success rate was much lower.

Where I fucked up 😇

Okay, maybe that's a little harsh. After all, I'm only "banned" for three days. Could be worse.

What happened?

I am using some analytics and automation tools that use my Instagram login.
Until now, everything worked fine, as long as I didn't overdo it. One app (named "Unfollow") for example shows me who doesn't follow me back and lets me unfollow them in bulk. 50 at a time every 30 minutes. All good.

But what I did then was too much, as it seems. At least that's the explanation I've come up with. In addition to automatically unfollowing through the phone app, I also used the Instagram app itself on my phone AND was logged in on the Instagram website on my PC's browser. Liking and commenting like crazy, while the unfollowing was in progress.
First warning signs were that, from time to time, I could only view content on Instagram but not like or follow. I don't exactly remember the error message, but after a simple logout and re-login, it worked fine again.
The next stage was a more specific error message. It told me that somebody was using my login credentials in an app or service to gain more likes and followers. I had to change my password to fix that. I think, they even warned me I was getting banned if it happened again. I didn't take it too seriously but was rather annoyed that Instagram prevents me from doing my "work".

Without much thinking, I changed the password and continued the process of unfollowing, liking and commenting. After entering the new password. On all devices, in all apps. 🙈😅 Do you see the problem?

Next thing I know is me getting this error message every time I try to like, comment, follow or post something. Stories still work though.
The screenshot is in German and basically says:

Action blocked
Your account is temporarily blocked for actions of this kind. You violated our community guidelines by giving your account information to a service to get more likes or followers. This block ends 2019-08-21. If you disagree, please contact us.

Of course, the button to contact them or report a problem did nothing. So I have to sit it out.

So...will I test my luck and try using 3rd party apps again after my block expires? I sure will! 😅😈🖖
But I will probably try not to overdo it, this time. It's just that these tools have become so convenient. What other option do we have to detect who is not following back?

It goes without saying that I would much rather prefer people just following me organically, without me interacting with their posts or following them. If my content was of high enough quality, maybe they would. Or maybe it is good enough and I just need a kickstarter, a catalyst. To get over a certain number of followers, so I get seen even in bigger hashtags so that my posts have the potential of going viral? Just my two cents.

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Any feedback is highly appreciated!
Let me know what you think...general thoughts, tips, tricks, questions, advice, funny comments, disses, bashes, whatever!

Thank you to everybody 😘.

Have fun and stay awesome! ❤️ 🖖

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