Also buried in the article is that likely most of his growth came from doing the follow/unfollow gimmick that people have been doing on Instagram for years. You can pay online services to bot that for your account for $x a month.

It's frustrating on the receiving end, you think someone is following you because of genuine interest for what you have to share, but in reality it's a bot that's trying to scam you into following it back, only to unfollow you soon after. One of the worst aspects of the application, especially now that millions of accounts are all doing that at the same time. The signal to noise ratio is horrible.