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Comment by iamben | Hacker News Reader

Devil's advocate after 10 seconds of thought. Is this _really_ a bad thing for the users? I mean, you don't have to follow accounts you don't enjoy following. Just black and yellow squares? Don't follow it. If you enjoy the content, does it matter if the account is run by bots? Even on the explore page, Instagram seems to do fairly well with showing you pictures of things you like - I see a ton of cats, burgers and watches. I don't really care if the accounts are run by bots... They're just pretty pictures. As for my feed, it's my friends or people I've chosen to follow. Whether they're posting themselves or via a cron job on a raspberry pi, I don't really care. If I did, I'd unfollow.

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The problem is also around people artificially liking and commenting on your own posts (if they are public). I had encountered this last year when I was running a photography project and I would have to deal with fake accounts posting on every image. Each would post one of the following messages: 'Nice! Check out my page!', 'Wow! Cool pic. Want to increase your followers, click the link in my profile.", "Very nice. Follow back".

I don't want that spam in my image comments (considering there would only be 1 or 2 comments from real people and 10+ of these). I had to go through and manually delete them, block the users (achieving nothing because there are so many of these spammers).

This is a serious UX problem that has turned me away from Instagram (which was the "best social media" platform before they destroyed the chronologic timeline). I don't care if people are using an API to post legitimate content (I would have loved the ability to post content to multiple sites at once (twitter, IG, ...)). I care when the API enables annoying spammers.

This is not so much a ux problem as an "marketeers gonna marketeer" problem. It happened before with blog comments, it happens now with "social" media, it'll happen with whatever comes next. If it's remotely exploitable for personal gain, there's going to be people exploiting it.

It's not about following bots, it's about participating in a mutual boosting scheme.

As the article states, visibility and 'fame' on Instagram is directly related to Like-count and follower numbers. And for many photographers that visibility leads to work.

So if they have to permit their account to be botted to give Likes to other accounts but receive similar benefit in return, they do so.

That didn't really answer the question. I think the user understood the article, just asking for clarification on why this negatively impacts the experience of users on the platform.

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