It’s been ages since we’ve chatted. And because of that it feels super weird to jump back in with my thoughts on the Instagram shadowban since that’s not what I normally chat about here. But, I’ve been seeing everyone freaking about it. Wondering if they’ve been shadow banned. Theorizing why engagement is down and how Instagram targets who to shadow ban and who not to shadow ban. I think I’ve figured it out! At least for myself. And instead of direct messaging each and every one of my good friends while everyone else sits confused, I thought I’d throw up this post and hope Google does me justice and shares it with you all.
Here’s the Test:
In a recent Instagram post, I did what I usually do. I put my caption and the most relevant hashtag. Then I did what any other Instagrammer does and buried the paragraph of other tags in a separate comment. You know, keeping the caption looking clean and pretty and such.
I tested my page on this ban checker site.
And as I started to theorize, this was the result.
The only hashtag that I showed up in was the one I used in the caption.
So I went in and removed that comment and edited the caption to include all those tags.
And here’s the result!
Immediately fixed!
I’ll keep playing with it a bit more. And like I said, I don’t normally explore these things nor write about them so please don’t think I’m trying to play expert. The proof is in the pudding! I had to share my findings 🙂
Try it for yourself and let me know in the comments if it worked for you. And if it did, spread the word!
Update 1: Tried it with another post- results still in line with theory!
Update 2: When testing other posts of mine, I liked around the site a bit more and found this on the site I me tiones above.
“A post on Facebook says moving hashtags from the comments to the caption removed the ban, is this right?
No one knows how the internal algorithm works (other than Instagram). Yes, it removed the ban on that post but there is no workaround for the general case. There is no “trick” to avoiding the ban or cheating this test”
So my theory isn’t that original but it’s okay. It just means there may be something to it more than just me being a conspiracy theorist 😉
