Ideally, this intersects our audiences and if someone appreciates my in depth analysis style, I'd pick up a follow from them. I started doing this as much as I could- to very varying success, but stopped forever once I encountered... well let's just get into it. I can stomach some rule bending. I can't subscribe to the "if you ain't cheating, you ain't trying motto; however, that comes from somewhere. I'll use the most efficient hashtags possible (I haven't even brought up my hashtag spreadsheet for every NFL team yet, have I?) in order for the algorithm to treat me well, and I'll give myself the best chance to succeed organically; however, when my moral compass gets queasy, I sometimes have to reconsider my practices. Having set the scenario, get this. After a couple dozen collabs, I was reaching further and further down my priority list in terms of accounts I "respect" (pretty much you earn my respect if you write good stuff, given my in-depth analysis and how rare that is on Instagram) and was collabing with someone who was... suboptimal in that aspect. This fellas content was very much brain-dead, lazy analysis, but being my 30th or whatever it was choice, I reached out to him to collaborate with me in hopes of gaining some of his audience through my good writing. After some initial small talk, he asked if I wanted to join a fantasy football group chat, to which I obliged. This was my Instagram fantasy football 9/11. I was added to this group chat and scrolled up to see some stuff I could never get on board with. This group chat with 20 or so Instagram fantasy football "analysts" (none of whom I ever had collabed with, because I took pride in who I associated with) contained no football discourse, rather was entirely filled with posts from people within the group and a message saying something like, "like and comment" or "gas this up", all while the posts they were sharing were absolute garbage. I mean hot garbanzo, some of the worst and most lazy analysis I'd ever read. Going to these objectively awful posts revealed comments from nearly everyone in the groupchat that were never more than a couple of emojis, and never, ever anything of substance... the exact opposite of my comment section that was more engaging in discourse relating to what I posted (albeit even if there were far less comments). Scrolling up in this awful excuse for a group chat revealed accounts saying something along the lines of, "follow me and I'll follow you on my other accounts" which is a huge statement when you really unpack it. Consider my arch nemesis on Instagram- and someone who happened to be in this groupchat, an account that used to be named, "fantasyfootballforyou" (FFFU). This is well documented stuff that sounds like it's out of a movie, so pay attention. He calls me out in this group chat one day saying, "@1thoughtfantasy, why aren't you commenting on the posts we are sending?" I could care less about anyone and everything in that group chat, and so I say something like, "because all the content sucks" (I mean seriously it was such bad content) and he says something like, "well at least I have more followers than you", so I took to his DMs to defend myself since I didn't want to make a scene in this group chat (which I left after this interaction with him I'm explaining) and since I was talking to him directly. On Instagram, it's a sign of elite status when you follow not many people, but have lots of followers yourself. Following 20 people and having 3000 followers is more impressive than following 2500 and having 5000 followers yourself. I had seen that FFFU had 2000 followers to my 1000, but I also noticed his follower count hadn't grown since I had been in this group chat, not at all. He would post an awful post, all his fake support from the group chat would roll in, and he would gain no followers. I looked at his follower list because something was fishy... TO B CONTINUED!