Social Media and Blogging Update #7 – The One About Instagram

Hi, there, dear readers! I hope your week is going well so far. 😁😊

It has been four whole months since I did any kind of social media/blogging update on this blog. In that four months, I’ve had a few “interesting” experiences with social media, and there’s one in particular that I want to blog about today. I still don’t know how this happened almost a month later. Still, I thought it was important to share my experience so that anyone that comes across this issue knows how to resolve it relatively quickly without any interaction with Instagram (THE WORST possible business to deal with!) This all happened around July 12th (I don’t know exactly, but that is when I first noticed something was wrong with my posts). The post below is taken from my personal IG account. Does it look a little odd to you like something’s missing from the post?

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If you’re an avid IG user, you might notice straight away that there is no caption or comment on that post. Now, anyone who knows me knows that I am particularly social on IG, and I always caption my posts to inform my followers of what I’m posting and interact with anyone who wants to comment. I noticed this blank space after sending the post off using the social media app Later (if you’re interested in my blog post about Later, you can view that here). The first time I noticed it, I was just like “meh” and didn’t really think anything of it. The second and third time I posted images and the same thing happened, I became a little concerned. At this point, I thought there was a problem with Later. So I tested posting without Later, and it did the exact same thing. Further testing revealed that not only could I not caption any post I posted, but I also couldn’t comment on anyone else’s IG, nor could I reply to any comments people were leaving me! This suddenly became a thing, and I quickly went online in the hopes of finding help to resolve this weird glitch with Instagram.

Everyone that had come across this issue said to speak with Instagram and use their in-app support tool, which I did. After THREE messages to Instagram without a single reply in return, I started to panic a little, not going to lie. I definitely thought that I had broken some unseen rule of Instagram, and they were somehow banning me. I had zero ideas why this could be, and every website and forum I went to said the same unhelpful thing; “speak to IG; they probably banned you”. I finally found a Quora post where multiple people were affected with the same issue advising what they did to fix it. And I found that today. Some of these posts were dating back years – as far back as 2013! So this added to my frustration because none of those people was able to resolve it by getting Instagram to help them. IG actually had a support email address at one point, which they later removed.

I decided to try something random, which I honestly thought would NEVER work. This person fixed the same issue on their IG account by deleting the URL in their IG profile and saving their profile without a URL. I think I read somewhere that Instagram did a recent update, and I took no notice of that at the time. But I guess that update did something to certain people using links in their IG bios. As soon as I removed the URL in my bio, everything started working again – I could post with captions, reply to everyone else’s posts and to comments left on my posts once more.

But how RANDOMLY silly is that? I mean, I dunno how many attempts it took some of those people to find out that the URL was causing this stupid fault with Instagram, but I am so relieved to finally have it resolved. I am NOT, however, impressed with Instagram’s support methods. If three reports to their “reporting” channel don’t even warrant a reply, I have zero faith that Instagram care at all about the smaller people using their platform. I’m sure it would be a different story if my name was George Lucas. 😂😅 So that’s my social media post for today. I don’t often post about social media, but every now and then, I’ll take stock of my growth on various platforms and blog about it here for anyone interested. If you’ve got a similar tale to tell about the horrors of using social media, please let me know in the comments; I’d love to read them! 😀😄

Until next time friends and bloggers!

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