Back in March, Instagram Head Adam Mosseri found out that there is a new trick that many people are using on Instagram and several other social media platforms to increase their followers. They switch their Public accounts to Private. So, when people who were already their followers before the switch share some of their interesting posts on their own accounts, their friends and followers also see it and if they get intrigued too, they also end up following the same account from which the post had originally come.
This trick is termed as an artificial growth hack, and to counter it, Instagram has now added a new notification that will prompt you when you are about to share a private post. You will see an alert about the people on your list with whom you want to share that post. If some of them are not the followers of the originating account, they will not be able to see the post you share, and with Instagram’s notification, you will probably decide to not share the post eventually, as most of your audience will not be able to see it anyway!
Now, this is a smart counter-effective way through which Instagram is going to deal with false inflations and artificial audience growth generating hacks and tricks.
Adam Mosseri explains his stance by taking the example of meme pages. Many people love to follow these pages keep sharing memes in their posts too. But some people do not care for these pages or memes as such. With this new notification update, people who generally do not follow meme pages will not see shared memes from their friends anymore. This will keep them from viewing something that they originally do not want to because if they were interested in memes, they would have followed meme pages themselves.
So, this feature will work in both ways. It will prevent accounts and pages to take advantage of their settings for inauthentic engagement, and it will also spare people from viewing shared posts about things that they do not care for or do not wish to see but are bound because of their friends who keep posting and sharing that stuff.
It is an interesting approach, but at the end of the day, it will minimize user activity on the platform, and it will also negatively impact the accounts as their ‘growth’ will be blocked because of this new prompt. So, it does not make much sense at the moment.
Let us see how it serves its purpose right for Instagram and its users in the future.
Read next: Instagram is adding a new listing of ‘suggested posts’ at the end of the main feed
This trick is termed as an artificial growth hack, and to counter it, Instagram has now added a new notification that will prompt you when you are about to share a private post. You will see an alert about the people on your list with whom you want to share that post. If some of them are not the followers of the originating account, they will not be able to see the post you share, and with Instagram’s notification, you will probably decide to not share the post eventually, as most of your audience will not be able to see it anyway!
Now, this is a smart counter-effective way through which Instagram is going to deal with false inflations and artificial audience growth generating hacks and tricks.
Adam Mosseri explains his stance by taking the example of meme pages. Many people love to follow these pages keep sharing memes in their posts too. But some people do not care for these pages or memes as such. With this new notification update, people who generally do not follow meme pages will not see shared memes from their friends anymore. This will keep them from viewing something that they originally do not want to because if they were interested in memes, they would have followed meme pages themselves.
So, this feature will work in both ways. It will prevent accounts and pages to take advantage of their settings for inauthentic engagement, and it will also spare people from viewing shared posts about things that they do not care for or do not wish to see but are bound because of their friends who keep posting and sharing that stuff.
It is an interesting approach, but at the end of the day, it will minimize user activity on the platform, and it will also negatively impact the accounts as their ‘growth’ will be blocked because of this new prompt. So, it does not make much sense at the moment.
Let us see how it serves its purpose right for Instagram and its users in the future.
Read next: Instagram is adding a new listing of ‘suggested posts’ at the end of the main feed
