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chubot

Why did he redact the name of the account in red? He doesn't want people to know that it's fully automated?

I think he could have gotten some additional followers with this post.

I would like to see if the content is any good, in addition to being automated ...

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Here is the account: https://www.instagram.com/beautiful.newyorkcity/

EDIT: Just banned about an hour after I linked to it in this comment.

Thanks for the link. Looking at the pictures, I probably wouldn't follow it, and I spent last summer in NYC.

The algorithm seems to have a preference for HDR pictures of cityscapes? And then the captions are all very generic / spammy sounding.

It doesn't seem interesting. I don't have anything against following algorithmic content, but it should at least tell me something cool about the picture that I didn't know, etc.

I’m not interested either, but I’m not at all surprised that there are at least 30,000 people who are interested in faux-HDR photos of NYC.

You're assuming that all 30,000 followers are actual people rather than more bots or spam accounts.

8 days later, it’s unbanned again. I wonder why!

looks like instagram took down his account. So no more free food.

In TFA, he says that he created other accounts like this. So if his OPSEC is good enough, he's still getting that free food. This was arguably just a sacrifice to get some publicity. Indeed, I'm guessing that he's selling these bots. Or at least, offering consulting services.

It looks like the account has been removed now

Wow. Already banned.

Everyone does this, but IG never cares unless you somehow draw attention to yourself.

Wait, what? That literally just happened.

I suppose Instagram is reading this thread. :p

It's not too much of a stretch to imagine that several Instagram employees are regular HN readers.

Probably yeah. Lets see if they'll ban much bigger accounts doing the same thing, I'd guess not.

https://www.instagram.com/lmao/

Ironically, if he were to get real users (and begin to post real pics from the restaurants he visits), he may no longer be committing fraud.

Maybe it's more about not feeling like he's shilling the account, focusing on the methodology instead.

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