Instagram is killing my start up | Hacker News Reader

Instagram is killing my start up

92 pointsOriolRoda78 comments

1 month ago our business was sound. We had an Instagram with over 37.000 people that was driving over 100.000USD/y revenues to our website.

Then we used a program to analyze our followers (https://www.instagramhelpertools.com/).

Before using this service we checked reviews and all looked good.

Our surprise was that after using this service Instagram blocked our account arguing that we were a bot.

We contacted them and followed their procedure to demonstrate we are human beings, nobody answered.

We tried for over a month, and finally they told us our account had been permanently deleted.

Instagram cancelled our account because they thought we were a bot, but paradoxically we could never talk with a human from their side to explain the situation.

End result: we have lost our main sales channel from one day to the other.

This is the power of the big guys.

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The tool you used appears to be a browser plug-in, meaning it operates by scraping the Instagram website from the client side. Instagram (and most sites) forbid scraping tools like this.

For future reference: Don’t use 3rd-party scraping tools on your social media accounts. They will generate thousands of API requests and trigger bot detection. You obviously didn’t intend for this to happen, but from the company’s perspective it’s equivalent to bot/scraper abuse.

There's a big difference between scraping and posting. Companies putting both into the "bot" category is intentionally conflating the two, so they can ban user-empowering behavior (reading with unauthorized software, i.e. scraping) with the excuse that they were targeting spam and similar.

Allowing third parties to collect user data without their knowledge is not "user empowering." Users agreed to Instagram having access to that data, not OP's company to collect it through instagram using a tool that collects who knows what and sends it who knows where.

Tech giants can spy all they want and sell that data to whoever they want, but letting others access data they can already see otherwise in a more convenient way would be intruding on privacy?

It's about consent. A user gives explicit consent for a company like Instagram to have access to data. They don't give it to random third parties to scrape.

And no, they can't sell it to whoever they want (or at least that's a reduction of how Facebook and Google use your data). They do monetize the data with their internal advertising platforms that they sell to people like OP, rather than letting anyone monetize the data without the knowledge or consent of their users.

So users "explicitly consent" (as signaled by continued use of Instagram) to all of Instagram/Facebook's data collection, as well as to letting random third parties read their posts, as long as those random third parties don't automate that reading?

That would be a step too far in privacy invasion? How convenient Facebook cares about privacy exactly when it's in their financial interest, and even more convenient all their users draw the exact same line.

Yes, if you remember, this is exactly the scandal that was Cambridge Analytica. The user also consents that their data is used in a certain way.

For example, if you scraped tinder profiles and published a map of all tinder users in a city most would agree that’s a privacy invasion.

We were checking how many followers had each of our own followers. This is available information in their profile. Only that going over 37,000 manually is not feasible

But why would you be allowed to store that data?

That's a good example actually. Instagram/FB don't let third parties have access to your posts more than you allow publicly, and don't let you use automated tools to scrape them. If you wanted to glean anything from those posts you need to buy the anonymized data from Facebook.

The only way to balance the desire of users to make some data public and prevent anyone from grabbing all of it forever is to ban people from using automated tools.

Right or wrong, that is how things stand today. Companies (websites) go to extraordinary lengths to please Google (SEO etc) and want Google to crawl/index their sites. But they will unleash their lawyers on some kid that scrapes data and builds something useful (remember how Craigslist went after someone who built a better/simpler interface few years ago?)

Plus users agreed to tech giants' terms of service (it is a different story that almost no-one reads them and have any understanding of them in the real sense) whereas users did not agree to OP using some tool to scrape their data.

Maybe this is not fair but it is how things are

I said Facebook and anyone partnered with them could use my data and that does not include Startup1 and their third party tool. OP probably should have investigated the third party tool and entered a contract where their scraping was legit and if they got burned the third party was at fault. Instead they just iced 100k a year without thinking through the risks. Hopefully that doesn't apply to the rest of the business ex subsisting on a single revenue stream.

> There's a big difference between scraping and posting.

We do not know what the 3rd party software does or how it does it.

> Then we used a program to analyze our followers

This suggests it does way more than post.

"Analyze" can be as simple as "cross-reference follower names with some other database". So nothing a user with read-only access to their company account couldn't manually do.

It could, but it also could be social graph analysis, and that would issue a request for each of the profiles.

Not surprising Facebook would take a hard stance on 3rd party scraping tools after the CA fallout.

Except CA wasn't third-party and wasn't scraping.

Right, and can still be the trigger for the visible fallout

A few years ago there was a ton of websites that did little more than copy Instagram photos and put their own ads around it. I suspect putting an end to those was the point.

I was working at an influencer marketing company just after the CA. They lost their API access and mostly it seemed like it was teh fallout from CA. But the CEO talked to the guy in charge of Instagram for Europe and he said the main issue Facebook has with it is that they're not part of the value chain. Basically, you're competing with us for marketing on our platform we're going to hinder your ability to do so. To me, how they lock people out of Insta is not about what CA did, it's about stopping competitors.

> Instagram (and most sites) forbid scraping tools like this.

It's important to note that LinkedIn got taken to court over blocking a company from scraping. They lost. They may won in appeal but considering the whole what is public is public approach from the courts I doubt they will have. The clause in tos saying you can't scrape isn't valid

Even if it isn’t valid, someone still has to take them to court for it. That’s often a high enough barrier to allow them to get away with bad behaviour without anyone doing anything.

No, they can just bypass any attempt to stop them. It just becomes a case of whack-a-mole which FB or any other site knows they can never win. They will threaten legal action first. That is how influencerdb got taken down, Facebook threatened them and influencerdb didn't have the heart to go to court.

As frustrating as this is 100% of problems I’ve encountered with Google or Facebook in my career have been solved with professional network connections into those companies. OP, I encourage you to examine your network and see if you are connected to FB in a useful way. If you have investors, use them. This is what they’re for.

The only other method I’ve seen work is to make noise in the media and hope someone at Facebook/Google notices. It’s a total crapshoot but sometimes it seems to come out OK.

I’m guessing that this post is an attempt at the latter.

Edit: Oh, and, stop trying to analyze your users without their consent! You’d be surprised how giving early adopters are when you show them a little trust.

Has anyone with plenty of contacts at FAANG companies ever thought to leverage those contacts into a business? As in... Can't get a response from Google/Facebook, etc? Tell us (the helpful folks at WeHaveSomeCloutWithFBAndGoog.com) about your problem, and we'll get in touch with someone who can (hopefully) provide a remedy!

We were just look who, among our followers had more followers on their own so we could contact them and suggest an affiliate model for them.

This information is available in their profile so we were not trying to sneak on anybody's data

It’s not safe to assume that putting information into a profile means that they want it be utilized in a programmatic search or be collected off-site for marketing use.

Users have a wide range of potential motivations for using IG. I know a good cross-section of startup founders and another cross-section of artists and the use-case and expectations for both groups is wildly different!

Further, many IG users are simply using it as the latest iteration of Facebook. Scraping personal information — even if it’s exposed in their profile — might feel like a violation of the relationship they expect to have with a vendor in IG.

This is just, like, my opinion, man.... and I don’t know if it can work for your business but if you find your way out of this mess I encourage you to look at it more from the perspective of users who engage heavily with you, not users who have the most leverage. A subset of your engaged users will also have a lot of leverage.

You want your evangelists to evangelize because they really believe in you. You can manage a relationship with a small number of good evangelists personally rather than through a soulless mass E-Mail (or whatever medium you might use).

A rev share (like you were trying to do) is great but you want to think about it like you’re supporting your key evangelists and reducing their friction in talking about what you’re working on.

Best of luck! I hope you sort things out.

jnovek, this is what we do. We create relationships, but this is not opposite with understanding who your audience is.

Probably our biggest mistake is that we are not familiar with these kind of tools and did not know the danger (we did check reviews of the service, of course but they were not helpful as you see).

Anyways, I appreciate your suggestions. We will indeed be more careful from now on.

Lesson is multiple channels and capture email addresses.

Good news is you could probably start again and attract the followers by advertising on Instagram. Given how much you were making I’d swallow pride and give it a go. But get their email addresses via an opt in form or something!

This we do.

> This is the power of the big guys.

This is the consequence of building a busines son someone else's property. This is the cost of not having a diverse source of new customers. IG could definitely responded better, but the outcome isn't their fault.

1. New HN account

2. What kind of real start-up was it that relied exclusively on IG to make sales?

3. Without real details, this looks suspiciously like a competitive social-media attack on InstagramHelperTools.

This is an interesting hypothesis.

My (more general) hypothesis was that OP is posting under pseudonym because their actual business is something that wouldn’t be considered particularly virtuous on HN.

Discrediting a competitor would certainly fit that idea.

(Although the idea of finding engagement only on one platform at first doesn’t seem far-fetched to me at all.)

I understand them staying anonymous, but turning around and explicitly naming the service they used did raise an eyebrow.

We have more than one channel, but this one was one of the most importants.

I posted the name of the service we used so that other people don't suffer the same fate we did.

We are in the fitness business, so no interest in getting in any kind of marketing tool war.

Adding a HN bio also helped, thanks.

Please stop saying that "this happens when you rely on big-tech". This is one data-point, obviously incredibly unfortunate and I'm sorry to hear about yet another story amongst the many we probably never hear about in this community. Using one anectodal story to say "I told you so" to a stranger, is not very constructive.

Obviously it makes sense to use the platforms that Youtube, et. al. provides to build a business. We can surely point to several examples where it has payed off. We can also point to real efforts to reduce the risk exposure of relying on them.

Instead of saying "Don't use Youtube", what would you suggest to use instead, that has real reach and is suitable for a new business?

thanks a lot for the interest.

As I mentioned in the main post we had an Instagram that over the years we build up to 37,000 followers, with more than 200 post (all unique content from us). The handle was: @mammothhunters

Then we committed the mistake of using a service to check who was more influential among our users (this can be done manually, so no private info breached) that flagged us as a bot.

Instagram first blocked our account.

There's been no way to get in touch with them to recover the account.

Finally we got a "tip" from an insider that the account was permanently deleted (we never got this message through the official channels).

So we've lost 3 years of work.

We started a new account 1 week ago (@mammoth.hunters) we've managed to recover 2,500 followers but we are far far far from where we were.

The worse is that this was not only a show off channel. It was the main driver for one of our products that brings over 100k a year in revenues.

Anybody has a tip on how to recover the old account?

Thanks a lot!

My friend, you use a bot/scraper plugin and you wonder why they banned your account?

If a plugin offers you something that is beyond what Instagram offers you, and it seems too good to be true ... its because it is.

Lawyer up if you want a real response. Letters from lawyers do magical things. Sounds like you were making enough money to warrant at least an attempt.

I run a small photography business. A few years ago Facebook deleted a few fb events we had created with a few hundred attendees each. They never gave any reason for the deletion or any warning. Like you, we hit our heads against the support-brick-wall for a while. I estimated damages around £10k and filed a small claim against them.

I used the EU small claims procedure which allowed me to sue FB Ireland from the UK, where I live. You must sue FB Ireland, I tried suing fb uk first and that was a lengthy and stressful mistake. I'm not sure what you will be able to do from the US if that is where you are based.

Long story short they settled the matter out of court. I never got an explanation as to why the events were deleted.

File a small claim, anyone can do it, it'll get their attention and they will probably pay you damages rather than argue the what and the why of your case.

Can you give me advise on how to do it?

Sure! caveat: I am not a lawyer and this is not professional legal advice. I looked up your ig and it looks like you are based in Spain? If so you can use the EU small claims process just as I did. The claim will be capped at EUR 5,000 (not including expenses, you should include expenses such as your time to make the claim, this can be over the 5,000) So it's a small amount but may get their attention.

You should write a 'Letter Before Claim' to Facebook Ireland (IG terms The Instagram Service is one of the Facebook Products, provided to you by Facebook Ireland Limited. These Terms of Use therefore constitute an agreement between you and Facebook Ireland Limited.) This letter should outline your claim and include all evidence you have to support your claim. You can find out more here: https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/law-and-courts/legal-syste...

If they fail to respond in 14 days you will need to file your claim with the small claims court in Ireland, they are quite helpful and answer the phone and emails. You can find out more here: https://e-justice.europa.eu/content_small_claims-42-en.do

I feel like an appropriate title would be "I used a third-party service on Instagram and got banned"

Your whole business was on IG. Why would you use a tool to "analyze" your followers? To me, it seems like both you and IG are to blame. IG for acting like a monopoly; you for expecting other people's sympathy. You were already earning much more than most people and yet you got greedy. My data is my data not yours to collect. That is not how you respect your followers.

Just to be clear:

Our business does not rely solely on Instagram.

We have a website with over 5MM visits/year, a YouTube channel with over 30k followers and few millions visualizations.

However Instagram (and FB) are HUGE in the fitness and nutrition world.

We had post with several thousand likes and comments that we used as ads to drive traffic to our Free products.

We have spent more than 100,000$ in ads over the years.

So our Instagram account was like a big premium billboard.

All gone.

There's probably a business opportunity here. Same way a handful of companies control the email marketing business by selling spam bucket avoidance, there's probably companies out there that will pay to keep their social media presence healthy. Charge marketers a monthly fee to own the relationships with Insta/Twitter/Google. Reputation insurance.

Someone should build a company i contact when something goes wrong! Like someone i call when one of the faang companies is blocking me who has many of friends at these companies who can get things done, like the monthly topic on hn when someone got blocked and only unblocked because they have a large fanbase.

What would those companies do for leverage against the platforms?

Paying a fee to such a company is one thing, but I'd imagine having them force you and everyone else in their portfolio into a boycott of the platform would be a tough sell, especially as long as said portfolio is still too small to have an effect.

What leverage do email companies have? They do it by having enough scale to maintain a more personal relationship with the email providers (goog, ms, apple, aol, vz, etc). And it's not like Insta banned this guy because of some nefarious plot. They want people like him on his platform and want to be able to remedy accidental bans. They just suck at moderating. An intermediary can help them and they'd be glad to deal with them. They don't need leverage, just credibility.

That sucks. As others have said, depending on a third party channel for sales is like putting most of your eggs on one basket.

What is not clear for me is, doesn't Instagram have a customer support tier for accounts that big? I'm just a personal user but I would imagine that an account with 1000s of followers can speak with a person if something goes wrong?

Scary

They don't

If you build a business on top of another business you have to ask yourself how you are specifically helping them profit.

Business relationships are supposed to be about mutual profit, so if you are simply using them to make money they’ll eventually cut you off.

If users are buying products through Instagram, then IG takes a cut, does it not? So you should have a business account of some kind that gives you access to customer support.

Not necessarily. you could use their ad network or just use your instagram account like anyone does posting images\stories

What's your business? Maybe someone at Facebook will show pity and clear up the situation for your business if you post the account name and link.

https://mhunters.com @mammothhunters (was the old account) fitness and nutrition

“The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21).

1. Try to build a business on top of a trans-national, for-profit conglomerate.

2. Do so without understanding the TOS, disclosed and, most dangerously, undisclosed.

3. ...

4. Profit? No, collapse.

The internet services as represented by FAANG (throw in Oracle, Microsoft as well as Paypal and Ebay) are conceptually based on silo-and-moat building. Even youtube stars are starting to realize this.

There's a reason why two trends are seeing a resurgence at the moment - the truly open internet and full-service-owned websites and platforms.

One should not, and cannot afford to, use transnational conglomerate controlled platforms for building a small business.

Cool. Great. Platform effect sucks.

...But what, exactly, is OP supposed to do about it? What leverage do they have in the world to change the way things are?

Realistically, when you’re building a startup, you use the tools you can get. Perhaps OP did not sufficient hedge across multiple engagement platforms but based on my experience, it’s very plausible that they tried multiple platforms and only found engagement on one.

The action they were taking was even to better understand their underlying demographic, presumably to approach they demographic from other marketing vectors because platform effect sucks.

Should OP simply ignore the opportunity because they haven’t been able to engage on another platform?

The problem with a monopoly is precisely that the monopoly’s users don’t have a choice.

> what, exactly, is OP supposed to do about it?

Don't do it twice.

> What leverage do they have in the world to change the way things are?

Provide platform agnostic services.

I'm no friend or supporter of the massive FAANG companies, but the parent company of Instagram helped popularize the phrase, "move fast and break things." I would never start a business based on another business that espoused that motto.

This response and the GP are so useless to OP.

I suspect that OP has already learned quite a bit about platform effect and will carry those lessons with them forever.

Further, posting this is certainly intended as both a warning to the wise and a call for help.

Saying variations of “platform effect is bad” is simply repeating (with substantially less authority) what OP is already telling us. It’s punditry.

Rather than repeating what we already know, do you have any ideas or advice on how OP can get out of their current pickle?

Apart from trying to get bunches of attention directed towards the issue, which in some cases may or may not make the corporations budge (cases like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26357033 which would result in bad PR for said companies), is there really anything to be done in the first place?

I think the person that you replied to seems to imply that there isn't, especially since what OP did may or may not be entirely allowed under the platform's ToS.

> The action they were taking was even to better understand their underlying demographic, presumably to approach they demographic from other marketing vectors because platform effect sucks.

If I follow an IG page, I sure don't want them to then go about collecting my data. And we don't know what data the OP was collecting.

That’s totally fair. I feel the same way. I also suspect it’s a widespread practice.

Perhaps if IG as an organization weren’t so opaque we would have better rules for using it as a customer engagement platform. Personally, I share personal information with companies and organizations once I feel like I can trust them enough to care for that information correctly. It would be neat if IG enabled that in an organized way.

Out of curiosity (real and legitimate curiosity because you brought up the privacy concerns) if you found yourself in the situation I mentioned above — your only platform with successful engagement is Instagram and you want to expand off of the platform — how would you approach it? For example, I would probably try to speak plainly and openly with my IG audience about my problem and how it affects a service that they enjoy and request feedback.

I think it depends on the page content and the type of audience you have. For a meme/reels page, for example, I don't think the audience is willing to try another platform just because of you. There are already thousands of pages and it wouldn't matter if your page is gone.

But for a more serious page, like training/news/store, I would make it clear to my audience that they can have some richer content from the same creators on another platform/website. Stories don't work as most people mute them. Videos also don't work as people usually mute them. Put the link in the Bio and let them know where they can find you outside of IG.

I can tell you what we do: We use SM as a reach platform but then we create a direct relationship: email, telegram, FB groups. We've build a community of +150.000 people. They are not gone, however now it's harder for us to reach more people.

> One should not, and cannot afford to, use transnational conglomerate controlled platforms for building a small business.

I think slightly differently here. Building tools to leverage these platforms seems like a really easy way to generate some revenue. I think relying on that revenue is the problem. So many companies build just one revenue stream. When that revenue stream is interupted or destroyed the company is destroyed. The whole do one thing and do it well is the core issue, do one thing until you reach a certain point and start doing another thing, and repeat.

> So many companies build just one revenue stream. When that revenue stream is interupted or destroyed the company is destroyed.

It's not just small businesses. As discussed in a post today ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26385317 ) Google suffers from this too: they've got advertising revenues down to less than 90%, but this is still very risky. They have a "tech" premium; normally Wall Street investors are uncomfortable with lopsided revenue exposure.

It's not the only source of revenue, but one of the most important ones.

The thing is that if you want to reach people you need to go where people is.

Generally if more than 20-25% of your revenue comes from one customer, or one segment which you dominate (as with Google) it's a red flag for investors. Google still has the magic pixie dust (and revenue size and margin) to keep investors transfixed.

If the air comes out of the on-line advertising business Google faces an existential challenge (as did the newspapers due to the development of online advertising). They have scraped together less than 15% of revenue from a motley collection of marginal businesses (e.g. Nest) while lack the internal management signals to seriously engage anyone in improving things. For example, I assume that if Dianne Greene left Google Cloud it would simply wither. She has the experience and fortitude to actually make a serious go of it. I seriously doubt there's anyone else in the company who would -- it generally doesn't encourage such people.

An imbalance in revenue has an additional problem for investors, which is blinders. Rockefeller and the other owners of the Standard Oil Trust made significantly more money after the antitrust breakup than they had as a monopoly.

If you want to look back even further, radio when television emerged, and sucked up most of the advertising dollars.

Radio went from premium and premiere programming to disk-jockeys and news/talk.

Trying to recall source(s), though possibly Ithiel de Sola Pool.

> do one thing until you reach a certain point and start doing another thing

Ideally you do multiple things, but multitasking is hard and distracting. Back when I was a student and the woolly mammoth roamed the earth, I administered a small business website. The traffic was mostly google based. I dedicated significant efforts to build partnerships, brand awareness on small niche forums and websites, a link exchange catalog for same-niche-noncompete websites, leveraged several google-competing platforms, created a mailing list and a customer CRM.

When the latest google algo update all but removed the search traffic, the business did not observe any drop in sales, thanks to multiple points of outreach. When apps arrived, we created an RSS feed app that pinged customers with attractive offers, not repeated on the mailing lists.

Confusing tactics for strategy is a very Silicon Valley thing. Every service will betray you, unless you have rights to the source code, has served me well.

I don't know, it seems to me that if you are a paying customer of IG/FB (OP argues they've paid 1000s of $ in ads) you should at least be able to call somebody and get off with a slap on the wrist.

Especially when the "crime" is downloading an excel with your followers -- that IG should provide on the first place.

I hope more people abandon the monopolies and consider federated networks instead. In this case, Pixelfed.

I can't see alternatives like that catching on unless there was a platform to combine them with the existing, dominant platforms. And I can't imagine the existing platforms allowing their systems to be used by a 3rd party in that way.

AFAIK GDPR requires interoperability.

Fight. Fight like hell. Build your own way.

I was just reading about how some youtubers who are doing quite well (like Linus Sebastian) are starting their own platforms which will get their content first, and then only later give it to YouTube

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-55349255

Here is his new project: https://www.floatplane.com/discover

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