Instagram Private Account

Essay Begins

At least once a week, I get direct messages on Instagram from friends who share a post with me that has the following automatic notification:

“Post Unavailable. This post is hidden because the user has a private account. Follow their account to see it.”

An outsider looking at this may ask why a user would share a post that is hidden in the first place. The straightforward answer is that the “sharer” does not know the post would be hidden to the “sharee” as Instagram does not disclose that information until you share it.

This means the sharer can only guess before sharing. This is usually frustrating for the sharer and the "sharee" as none of them get the reaction or satisfaction they want.

Instagram tries to alleviate this issue before you share by letting you know the post is private and the people you’re sharing with “may” not be able to see the post. However, this is not enough as lots of people follow private accounts including mutual followers.

It’s hard to know which of picklesapleny’s followers are also my followers that I can share with as in the image below.

Sidebar

Before we get into the solution, I want to talk about a side point— the gamification of followers and following counts by meme accounts on Instagram.

Psychologically, it’s harder to unfollow an account than it is to follow. Meme accounts know this and in order to increase their follower count, they hide their content behind a private account. Anytime a meme is shared to a user not following the account, the user has two options, ignore or follow the account. If the user follows the private account just to see the message, there is a low chance they will unfollow due to the psychological cost of unfollowing.

Here the meme account grows its following, and since a huge following number is a metric of a good account to follow, more people are attracted to it and the cycle continues.