Well, I guess I'm forever lost as a user, since I'm banned for doing the very thing that they encourage... sharing my original content.

I disagree, though, that it's spam behavior. It's "well, it's time to set up my account" behavior.

I mean, it's not like they could provide for a human to review after they asked for me to take a selfie. A selfie that shows the same person as the one that has used the facebook account with the same email address and face for over a decade... No, that's definitely asking too much. Or perhaps informing the user of concerning behavior, because all that they did was point to "community standards", which said nothing about what I was doing.

Apologies... my snark is not directed at you. It's just the exasperation towards a system that makes actual human participation impossible, while assuring that bots are the only ones who can get something done and yet stay under the radar.

I wouldn't know. I only know what it's like to (1) set up an account of any type, which usually requires quite a bit of initial activity, followed later by (2) decreased ongoing maintenance.

But, whatever. They set up an automated system that weeded out a human while letting bots run rampant.

Maybe we need a page about "falsehoods programmers believe about human behavior", but they wouldn't read it. :/

What do you mean by my "existing account"? I didn't have an instagram account before today.

But, as a general rule, I keep all of my accounts separate. There's too many horror stories of a person getting locked out of one account, and then they can't do anything else.

Separate accounts are the only safe option.

I think my takeaway on this is just that Instagram isn't worth the hassle. I did lose the write-ups that I did for my pictures, though (which is why my upload pace was so slow).