Mass Planner Shut Down by Instagram: The End of the Bot Era

Mass Planner Shut Down by Instagram: The End of the Bot Era

Bots have been used on social networks for as long as I can remember. They are a way of growing one’s community without much effort and getting more attention than by doing everything manually. However, it’s not organic, and thus social media companies have tried to shut them down for a while. Instagram recently launched a witch hunt and managed to get Instagress to close down. Yesterday, another big bot service, Mass Planner, was taken down. Is it the end of the bot era?

Mass Planner was certainly the most used service along with Instagress and seeing both of them being shut down by Instagram is a clear statement: the photo-sharing social networking company doesn’t want any automated interaction on their platform, only user activity. This is probably going to change things on the network now that the two biggest bot services are closed.

First, many likes and comments received in the past may have come from bots. So a slight drop in engagement could be noticed. But on the other hand, this will also make content more important than ever. Users will be forced to produce great content to get likes, comments, and shares instead of just relying on an app doing follow/unfollow, like, and comment actions for them.

With recent rumors of Instagram also trying to prevent users from relying on PODs to grow their engagement and visibility, one can wonder if the social network company is really trying to get more organic interaction on their platform or only push users to pay for sponsored posts.

Quentin Decaillet's picture

Quentin Décaillet is a photographer and retoucher based in Switzerland specializing in portrait and wedding photography.

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14 Comments

My Instagram account has one post, from several months ago. Comments on this post are 100% from bots. Likes are 90+% from bots. If this is any indication at all of how much bots previously affected Instagram, engagement will plummet if they really do kill the bots.

Time will tell.

I'm sure instagram understands the futility in tracking down every bot service out there. You can't slay a hydra. However these are great PR moves to make it look like they're on the ball.

getting rid of bots and pods would actually make me want to use Instagram

This is good news ... no GREAT news.

If you can click it, you can script it. Not difficult to have a script auto like certain hashtag groups, auto follow users, unfollow, etc. While two of the bigger services may have gone down, there's plenty more out there. And if you're savvy enough, you can run your own server script.

Good. I just wish IG wasn't also decimating my reach. Everything has dropped by ~30% in the last month.

So sad, people using a bot to follow and unfollow people just to get more followers. I see people liking stupid posts of an amateur in India just to get a follower. Why would anyone want an amateur like that living over there want to follow them? People are just walking around in circles

I haven't heard about IG shutting down pods but I guess it's believable. The only question is why? A pod is a group of instagram users that push each other to be ore active. It's 100% organic use and interaction.

BOTS are getting shut down left and right... I wouldnt risk using them right now. I started using a service called Relaxed Social (relaxedsocial.com) and they have been killing it? Has anyone else tried them?

I know that instanobel.com can provide such services. They find real followers with special algorithm and they can find people in any point you set like city, country and etc. Also, you can choose niche for searching. Great tool

I agree with others on here that Relaxed Social relaxedsocial.com has been a great alternative. I've used them for about 4 months and have seen great results.

I too like to promote my instagram, i use ingramer.com , it works good and no fakes

Instagram bot which works in 2019 www.instacaptain.com