If you think bots commenting on your posts were bad, try using other social media platforms with the hot hash tags. You don’t need a lot of experimentation to trigger some bots from responding on your posts.
For me #nft #nfts draws them into your tweets even if it has nothing to do with what you’re really sharing. These bot accounts just serve as automated noise to sell you something indirectly like “visibility” and promotions until the platform shuts their account down for mass reports.
Instagram has been my frequent app because of the low engagement required to be on trending for a few seconds before fading into oblivion. It’s also one of the best places to observe how harsh the algorithms are when it comes to treating user content.
Have you ever heard of curation accounts on Instagram being setup just to repost works from known niches (arts, travel photos, anime and etc.) for views? These accounts post at regular intervals and can generate a lot of views + follows based from organic discovery and how the algorithm treats active accounts.
While I don’t have the exact formula when it comes to convincing the bots to place your content on trending, the chances of you stuff being noticed is raised when you post regularly, generate emoji reactions and comments, increase follower count, and duration of people engaged with your content (videos). These same factors also apply to other social media sites of course but not every factor is ranked equally and the algorithms change based on what your network on the platform.
Anyway, curation accounts usually get more chances to be on trending and snowball their way to the top because all they need to do is grab some content from others users and repost (with due credit or not). It doesn’t matter if they can’t generate more engagement on that content, they have the advantage of having a large pool of content to pick and post with. It’s not like the average user would really concern themselves of who really owns the content or do extra legwork tracing the artist unknown.
So what happens is random people dropping their likes and raising the visibility of these curation accounts until they’ve grown enough following to be in a position to negotiate visibility for other content creators. At this point, anything they post will generate attention for “promotion”, artists would now be able to negotiate paid promotions for these accounts. The same accounts that built their reputation from using other’s content.
Now it doesn’t really matter whether they credit the author’s work at this point. Even if there was a request to takedown the content, there are still plenty of works to fish from. The fact that it only takes them a few seconds to minutes to post new content is the advantage here. The real owners take about hours to weeks just to finish their piece so it’s natural that the real artist (who don’t have a decent following) get the short end of the stick in the race.
The problem with how these algorithms are setup is that it makes the gap in content discovery for new content creators versus established creators even wider. If you have an established following, almost anything you post will generate automated likes and this is a positive feedback loop for those old users on the platform. Sounds like it’s no different from what we got on Hive right?
Not really. We got better a relatively better content discovery here for those authors willing to go the extra mile to promote themselves. There’s also the OG advantage with autovotes but the gap isn’t that wide when you talk about raising your chances for curation. If I had to compare the platform’s curation practices versus what we had from the old blockchain, I’d say even new users who have the skills can get noticed and if they do put extra effort on engaging they’d get more consistent social rewards for their time.
There’s no bot that automatically segregates your content off the trending page just for 0 comments on it. In other platforms, content made from a non-established user would be lucky to be on trending to at least a few minutes because the content would be competing against many established authors already posting by the hour. Here you still have a chance for manual curators to sift through your post and even raise your visibility when it’s on a relevant community.
A random comment section I passed when viewing what's on trending. I tend to scroll further down the timeline like I'm manually curating on Hive cause old habits. This is what a normal comment section on IG looks like for top content creators.
While I get the lack of comments can be seen as a turn off, it’s not so bad as having only a barrage of heart and smiley emojis on your post if the content doesn’t even stimulate a discussion. For platforms like twitter and Instagram, these aren’t ideal venues for discussion so dropping some emojis already counts as engagement. I mostly just drop likes on content I do fancy and maybe a few comments here and there. You know who else does that? Other average content consumers.
If you made it this far reading, thank you for your time.
