Hi, there, dear readers! I hope your week is going well so far. šš
It has been four whole months since I did any kind of social media/blogging update on this blog. In that four months, Iāve had a few āinterestingā experiences with social media, and thereās one in particular that I want to blog about today. I still donāt 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 donāt 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 somethingās missing from the post?
If youāre 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 Iām 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 youāre interested in my blog post about Later, you can view that here). The first time I noticed it, I was just like āmehā and didnāt 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 couldnāt comment on anyone elseās 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; āspeak to IG; they probably banned youā. 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 ā 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 ā I could post with captions, reply to everyone elseās 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 Instagramās support methods. If three reports to their āreportingā channel donāt even warrant a reply, I have zero faith that Instagram care at all about the smaller people using their platform. Iām sure it would be a different story if my name was George Lucas. šš So thatās my social media post for today. I donāt often post about social media, but every now and then, Iāll take stock of my growth on various platforms and blog about it here for anyone interested. If youāve got a similar tale to tell about the horrors of using social media, please let me know in the comments; Iād love to read them! šš
Until next time friends and bloggers!
2 replies on āSocial Media and Blogging Update #7 ā The One About Instagramā
Hi Julie, maybe the āissueā was some attempt by IG to stop the spread of āspamā and āmalwareā links (IG probably identified your bio with the URL as possibly a dangerous link and to prevent further spreading of the chain stopped captioning etc. [But you? Dangerous?š¤š¤£]}
Glad you got it sorted though, but it does show how we as users of this social media thing sometimes get left alone in the swamps of Dagobah trying to solve these issues ourselves.
Well I work in tech so I know how annoying it can be when you donāt get help with something. I am sure many customers feel that way about the company I work for too lol but I havenāt been in that situation myself for a really long time. So from that perspective I can understand customers and their frustration when you donāt get the help you need. The point about the link being dangerous or malicious is a good one but McAffee advisor deemed it safe to have in my bio so I doubt theyād remove it because of that. They could however do it for spam and that was mentioned several times in the posts I read ā Instagram come down HARD on anyone using bots or trying to spam if they find them which of course, I donāt do but there you go lol maybe I should hahah šš
You must log in to post a comment.