I finally tried posting without hashtags for a week and the reach went up

Diana Schmidt · 2026-10-27T03:05:05.169786+00:00

I always figured hashtags were doing the heavy lifting on Instagram, so I kept stuffing 20 of them under every post like a nervous habit. Then a friend who runs a bakery account in Portland told me to cut them all for 7 days and just write a plain caption, and my reach went from around 400 to almost 1,100 on one post. Turns out the hashtags were pulling in random bot accounts that never engaged, which I guess tanks how the app ranks you. Has anyone else tried fewer tags and seen something similar, or did it backfire for you?

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I finally tried posting without hashtags for a week and the reach went up | Beat the Algorithm - Free To Speak