Comments on: Is Instagram censoring the iPhoneography hashtag?

By: Jeffrey

Jeffrey — Mon, 06 May 2013 01:55:29 +0000

Your headline is misleading… You don’t explain why

I was just glad I wasn’t the only one with this problem.

By: instaproblem

instaproblem — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 21:18:31 +0000

Everytime i upload a photo and put a caption my caption disappears. Even when i put hashtags. please help!

By: brokendreamz

brokendreamz — Tue, 25 Dec 2012 08:24:36 +0000

All hashtags are not working ! Including popular hastags . I tested them . As of today december 25 no hastags work . They will dissapear and not show up at all !

By: Instatrouble

Instatrouble — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 17:02:31 +0000

#shirtless doesn't work either. I know, douchbag, but well… It doesn't work

By: Sophia

Sophia — Sat, 13 Oct 2012 23:46:33 +0000

#boob doesn’t work either, plus dick doesn’t work… but dic does. And the most upsetting is #nipples or #nipple doesn’t work anymore.

By: mike

mike — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 06:04:23 +0000

they just recently censored #sunset also

By: Alice

Alice — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 14:53:18 +0000

I've noticed more and more hashtags are being censored. Most recently my beloved #teatime tag (where users share images of how they drink tea) now returns no results which is even more strange because I discovered that tag through the official instagram twitter account a while ago.

I suspect that there might be some kind of algorithm at use? I can't think of any other reason to make it more difficult to search for images of people's tea cups and pots. If #teapot is next to go I'll be very sad.

By: James Moore

James Moore — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 08:34:54 +0000

I’ve noticed of late that a tag I use #bleachbypass in relation to pics made using my app Bleach Bypass no longer yields any results (last few days)

New filter perhaps from IG?

By: Val

Val — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 06:16:52 +0000

Even the hashtag #Instagram isn’t working anymore. Wtf?!?!

By: Rich Tatum

Rich Tatum — Mon, 10 Sep 2012 17:29:13 +0000

I noticed this about a month ago, it seems like, and I searched everywhere for an answer, to no avail.

It just seemed to suddenly stop working, but I confess, I only noticed it because I was using InstaGallery, and the function that displays the hashtags attached to a photo clearly shows which tags work, and which don’t. I posted a notice about it in my gallery:

http://instagr.am/p/OmHkXNSzWY/

Note, also, that “#iPhone” “#photography” also returned zero results.

I wound up having to modify my default set of base tags because this and a couple other tags also were no longer available. It made no sense to me except, I reasoned, if spammers were taking advantage of the “iphoneography” spelling. I did note that the alternate spelling worked, but I didn’t want to use that.

I emailed IG, asked a question via Twitter, and posted a note via their customer service portal. No answer in any case.

Rich
BlogRodent

By: @MassimoFarina

@MassimoFarina — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 19:09:48 +0000

Hi folks, as co-founder of http://staticpixels.com I've had a lot of exposure to the Instagram API. Allow me to share a discussion thread that should shed some light on this issue.

In this thread you'll find a comment from Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram stating:

"We've stopped serving feeds (both in app and API) for some tags that were too generic and didn't provide enough end-user value; "iPhone" is one of them" https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!top…

I'm guessing that #iphoneography has now been added to this list of omitted tags.

Hope this helps.
Massimo

By: Gaston Graf

Gaston Graf — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 11:09:20 +0000

Marty, obviously some lame brain set this up because if you type "iphoneographie" instead of "iphoneography" Instagram comes up with 26228 photos. So I believe it's rather a mistake than an intended blocking. Or they are even too dumb to realize that the ending "y" in other languages often becomes "ie", like it is the case in French and German.
Send them back to school!

By: mragan

mragan — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 02:29:31 +0000

This is all very annoying, and I thank you for alerting me to it. But what is MOST annoying is that the people who run IG don't even care enough to answer your e-mails, answering your questions about "why".

By: Bart

Bart — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 22:15:58 +0000

Another heavily-protected trademark is "Olympics", yet there's a ton of related hashtags on Instagram.

By: Max Berkowitz

Max Berkowitz — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 21:49:45 +0000

I too noticed this a while back and decided to go through and add the #iphonography (-e) so as to allow my work/images to be searchable.

Someone clearly made a decision to negate the tag #iphoneography and I can’t figure out why.

By: keepsy

keepsy — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 21:33:23 +0000

Mine too. I've seen cases in the past where an extremely popular term disappears from their search index. But its very spotty and inconsistent. (e.g. #iphonesia pull 23M results). Having interacted with the team a few times, I venture that they are so busy scaling the service that they simply don't have time to hatch sinister spelling plots. More likely they shut down the term in their index for performance reasons because it was too expensive a query for their system.

I'm not certain people realize the incredible feat this small team has pulled off in scaling so quickly to meet demand. Compared to a service like Twitter that was beset by constant outages for years after launch, IG is rock solid. This is because they spend so much effort of scaling and performance.

By: megwolf

megwolf — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 21:08:33 +0000

Hmm, you're right, still some odd decision-making going on either way. Will be interested to see if you find out anything further.

By: Oniontears

Oniontears — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 21:03:19 +0000

I know that the hashtag stopped working right at the time when the Android app came out, well before FB purchase…

By: lifeinlofiblog

lifeinlofiblog — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 20:59:05 +0000

That was my first thought, and what I would have concluded had a search for "iphonography" without the "e" not turned up millions of images.

By: megwolf

megwolf — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 20:52:32 +0000

I would guess it's more a matter of being too generic than favoritism. '#Photography' and '#Instagram' also return no results, for example. Perhaps the alternate spelling sneaks through BECAUSE it's less popular?

By: flatlined

flatlined — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 20:12:59 +0000

This is some serious bullshit on IG's part. Might as well ditch IG and post photos directly to Tumblr. At least Tumblr isn't owned by Zuckerberg,

By: lifeinlofiblog

lifeinlofiblog — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 19:59:20 +0000

It doesn't. I did a Statigram search. No results.

=M=

By: @kentkangley

@kentkangley — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 19:57:37 +0000

It's posts like this that make me glad I got rid of Instagram months ago.

By: @oniontears

@oniontears — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 19:38:37 +0000

Thanks for posting this. Really there should be no problem using the hashtag, as before. Be interesting to hear the reasoning behind it. Seems like they are disrespecting the community that built it.

By: Miku

Miku — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 19:36:44 +0000

Have checked if the tag gets passed to other services through Instagram?