Instagram Makes a Dumb Move to Be More Like Facebook a Less Like Twitter
What is the future of Instagram? I’ve long enjoyed it as a visual-based social network. Like Twitter for pictures.
Earlier this year Facebook bought Instagram. I’ve always figured Facebook would eventually merge Instagram functionality into a new and improved Facebook mobile application. Instagram makes it easy to post decent looking photos, even from a subpar mobile phone. That’s a feature that would enhance Facebook.
Instead of taking a great feature from Instagram and adding it to Facebook, the opposite has happened. One of the worst features of Facebook has arrived at Instagram.
I have 10,814 followers and follow 16,894 other accounts. Here’s my profile:
My Instagram Profile (StevenLJohnson)
Today I tried to follow back a new followers and Instagram said: “ Error: You can’t follow anymore people”
Error: You can’t follow anymore people
Looking into it, I found out that Instagram now allow me to follow only 7,500 other accounts.
I like to comment on my followers pictures and enjoy the exchanges that happen when they comment on mine. With this new hard limit, it means I can’t follow back any of my newest followers.
Even worse, if I want to follow anyone else, I have to unfollow 9,395 accounts first. Do you have any idea how long it takes to unfollow 9,395 accounts?
This is dumb, Instagram.
Punishing loyal early adopters is a bad business move. I thought I’d be using Instagram for a long time come. Now, I doubt it.
Instagram has rendered my account unusable for social networking.
Hard limits are stupid limits. Twitter has a sensible follow/follower ratio that serves a similar purpose in a reasonable way.
Meanwhile, until Instagram comes to its senses… does anyone know of another mobile photo sharing social network I can try out?
Steven L. Johnson
And, another reason to be annoyed by Instagram today… they no longer place nice with Twitter: http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/instagram-says-sayonara-to-twitter_b32282
Hey Steven, that’s strange. I have 20k followers whilefollowing 66k and Instagram is still letting me follow people back. I do bump into a “rate limit exceeded” error if I try to follow back too many people too quickly, but even that only lasts a minute or two before I can start following again.
Thanks for the info Paul. From looking into it, it seems like Instagram made the policy change many months ago. I can’t figure out why my account just started getting the error message–maybe I did something to trigger a spam block??
I’ve also gotten that “rate limit exceeded” message many times… another arrival after the FB purchase.
That’s odd. But now that IG is owned by FB, I fully expect a whole slew of non-user-friendly changes to come as FB has shown its shareholders/revenue are a much higher priority than its users.