I rarely ever post pictures of myself on my Instagram. But on the rare occasions I do, I notice that the engagement I get is almost ten times higher than when I post about my art. This wasn't always the case. When I first started posting my art on Instagram in 2017, using hashtags would draw people who are actually interested in my art to my account.
The algorithm no longer works like this and hashtags don't work at all. The algorithm now boosts human faces over everything else, making it harder from small businesses or creators to use the platform to advertise. The only real way to gain visibility is spend money to bend the algorithm to your favour. And so, over the years, it has gotten harder for creative practitioners to really discover and engage with each other and with people interested in their work.
This experiments emerged because I was miffed about Maze not getting enough attention online. The irony is that work that has taken so much hard work barely gets noticed. Meanwhile, work that is almost instantaneous is rewarded by the algorithm. These photoshopped pictures of my face received more engagement than I normally do as you can see above.
This is true, not just of Instagram, but of the internet in general. I noticed this before when I worked as a journalist, where an article written after weeks of ground reporting barely made a mark, while silly TV shows reviews I wrote went viral.
